Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Abortion Street
At a nondescript office building in Dallas, two sides wage endless war over an unresolvable question.
(Page 3 of 4)
“No,” Isabel said. “I can’t leave my daughter alone.”
The counselor upped the ante again. The White Rose would send her to a home in Arkansas. “No charge,” she pleaded. “The airfare’s free, the doctor’s free—you can take your daughter with you, and your new baby will be adopted right away.” The home was beautiful, she said, with high white columns on the front porch.
“I can’t leave town for that long,” Isabel said, raising her voice.
“Then move in with me,” the counselor begged. “You can stay with me until you get some money.” Trembling, she added, “My parents died at an early age. I was put in a foster home. I’ve had to struggle with my life,” she cried. “But unwanted children can find good homes.”
With the room closing in, Isabel held firm. “Am I going to get to see the doctor today or not? I’ve made my decision.”
Finally, the woman confessed that the White Rose didn’t do abortions. Suggesting that abortion clinics aren’t medically safe, she promised to help Isabel arrange one at a hospital. Desperate, Isabel agreed to come back soon to make the arrangements. On her way out, disaster struck. She ran into a neighbor of her mother’s, a White Rose volunteer. Acknowledging that she had had a pregnancy test and nothing more, Isabel fled.
From a nearby phone booth, she called Routh Street, whose signs she recognized on her way out of the White Rose. She had an abortion that day. Lying on a table, Isabel remembered a high school friend who had had three abortions. “It’s not so bad,” the friend had told her of the procedure, “It kind of feels like f—ing.” On the table, Isabel thought, “This feels nothing like f—ing.” She wanted to ask to see the remains to say good-bye but had lost her nerve. Instead, when it was over, she whispered good-bye under her breath and added, “God forgive me.” Then Isabel went home and told her husband, “I’m going to hell now.”
As Isabel was trying to put her life together a few days later, the phone rang. “Congratulation,” her mother said. “You’re going to hear a little more pitter-patter through the house.” The neighbor had called to tell her that Isabel had been in the clinic for a pregnancy test and she was sorry she hadn’t been able to counsel her. She said she didn’t want to be starting trouble, but she knew Isabel’s mother would want to know.
“I don’t know, Mom” was all Isabel could say. “Something doesn’t feel right.” Finally, after her mother called several more times, Wallace told her that a doctor had found fibroid tumors—a Routh Street clinic doctor had indeed discovered them after Isabel had complications following her abortion. She had had to have a D&C, short for “dilation and curettage,” a procedure in which the uterus is vacuumed and scraped clean. “So if I was pregnant, I lost it,” Isabel said.
“Oh,” her mother said softly.
“She knew,” Isabel says of her mother. “She knew.”
The Power of Faith
The Routh Street women’s clinic is owned by Lea Braun and a lawyer, but the person whose resolve has shaped the place is Charlotte Taft. The director of the clinic, Taft, 38, is a tall woman with blond curls and a face that manages, like her disposition, to be doleful and animated at once. She is such a confident and articulate advocate—”Americans favor abortion,” she gibes, “only in the case of rape, incest, and their own personal circumstances”—that it is easy to lose sight of one glaring similarity she shares with the opposition: an absolute, unrelenting commitment to her cause.
Like her counterparts in the anti-abortion community, Taft always has a book to recommend or a fact to cite (abortion was legal in the United States until the 1830’s; the Bible makes no mention of abortion at all, indicating that it was accepted practice). Sometimes she views the threat to legal abortion as a personal failure; other times she is outraged by the lack of public support. “If a red dot appeared on the forehead of women who’ve had abortions,” Taft says, “the right-to-life people would have to wear red dots.” So dismayed is Taft by the lack of concern for women’s rights that she once considered refusing abortions to all patients who had voted for Ronald Reagan. Then she realized she would be out of business if she did.
Even as a young girl, Taft’s life was clouded by abortion. She came of age when abortion was illegal and a leading cause of maternal death. Taft donated a small inheritance from her grandfather to pay for a neighbor’s “therapeutic” abortion—one approved by a hospital board. Later she learned of her mother’s self-induced abortion with a knitting needle. “As a child, I was outraged,” she recalls. “I knew nobody should be able to tell a woman what to do.”
As an adult, Taft has paid a price for her advocacy. Her homosexuality was revealed on a television talk show by Dallas right-to-life president Bill Price. Her garage was burned and her phone lines cut. Protestors regularly call her a murderer. She gets hate mail on her birthday (“Another year for Charlotte Taft/another poem for you I draft/another year of feticide insane/another 4,000 down the drain”).
Still, the Routh Street clinic is fueled not just by Taft’s unshakable belief that women who do not want children should not be forced to have them, but also by her vision of women as “moral agents.” “I want to inspire women to think about the way the world should be,” Taft says. This is an ideal born in the trenches, under fire. Where the rest of us may associate abortion with death, Taft and her counselors see abortion as an opportunity for life, for the woman to begin again.
Like abortion foes, Taft believes the decision to opt for an abortion is a serious one. Extensive counseling is the rule here. “My concern is that the woman make a choice she can live with,” said one counselor, preaching the Routh Street gospel, “because it is something that she’ll live with for the rest of her life.” Routh Street doctors do not use general anesthesia, partly because it is unnecessary for early abortions and also because Taft believes women should take responsibility for their actions. If a counselor determines that a woman does not really want the abortion or that she will suffer severe psychological damage as a result, the clinic will send her away, with the name of an adoption agency if it is requested. The clinic turns away 5 to 10 percent of its patients per week, though some of those receive abortions later, after more counseling. No one leaves the clinic without a prescription for birth control, and a look at the literature there shows Taft’s determination to take on topics long abandoned by most families and schools. Along with If You’re Not Ready to Have a Baby…Say No to Sex—Or Yes to Birth Control, there is Your Daughter Wants to Talk and My Parents Would Kill me: On Abortion, Especially for Teens.
There can be no doubters at Routh Street. Somehow it’s no surprise that many of the counselors have had abortions themselves (“It’s helped me to process a lot of information to work here,” one said); others, like the counselor who told a press conference of the child she gave up for adoption, clearly wish they had. The semantic somersaults created by abortion politics are the norm here. When I used the term “pro abortion,” I was gently corrected. (“We say ‘pro choice,’” a counselor told me, supplying the politically correct alternative, “because no one is really pro abortion”) Reflecting the national trend, the majority of Routh Street’s abortions are performed in the first trimester, but no one here agonizes over the when-is-a-fetus-a-baby question. “Scientifically, there is really no dispute over whether or not the embryo or fetus is life,” the pamphlet How Can I Decide? states. “It is life. The moral question is whether it is of the same kind and significance as the human life of those already born.” That the outside world views abortion-clinic workers with everything from mild distaste to outright disgust only stiffens their resolve.
Counselors are less concerned with the outside world than with the vast, secret spectrum that makes up our private lives. “No one wants to look behind the circumstances that bring women into abortion clinics,” Taft says. Routh Street’s counselors do, in fact, see women who became pregnant from rape and incest, poverty-stricken women for whom life presented no good choices, women who for innumerable reasons never learned to see themselves as anything but victims—who insist that abortion is murder, for instance, but demand one because otherwise they might lose their husbands, lovers, or jobs. Anyone who spends even the briefest time at the clinic will come to grasp Taft’s belief that abortion is a symptom of greater problems in women’s lives. Sometimes contraception fails, but sometimes women get stuck in relationships that are going nowhere; abortion, like pregnancy, becomes a way to force a relationship forward, sometimes to a test, sometimes to its end.
My Library
