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.
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Even Taft admits that few women ever confront these truths, much less want to tackle them on the day of their abortion. “It’s the worst feeling in the world to see a woman back for another abortion after I’ve counseled her,” one counselor told me. “I’ll spend days after asking myself what I did wrong,”
Still, the work must go on. It’s a keenly contemporary labor, part comforter, part mourner, part undertaker. On one Saturday counselors console a fourteen-year-old while a nineteen-year-old howls in the next room. As patients rest in recovery, counselors push the wheeled aspirators into a small pathology lab. There the contents of each abortion are dumped into a colander and the excess blood rinsed away in a sink. The remains are placed in a dish on a light table; it’s a technician’s job to be sure the doctor emptied the uterus entirely. Poking at the bloody mass on the dish with gloved hands, the technician searches for a cord and sac; in a pregnancy over nine weeks, she checks for the presence of two feet and two hands. When she finds them, she holds the tiny fetal parts against a ruler to be sure that their size jibes with the sonogram measurements estimating the age of the pregnancy. That work done, the remains are disposed of as medical waste.
At Routh Street, you’ve got to believe.
The Sidewalk Counselors
Every Saturday morning picketers arrive at 4228 N. Central. They have been staking out the Routh Street clinic for three years. Among radical anti-abortionist, like those belonging to Operation Rescue, picketing as fallen out of favor—the latest thing in abortion protest is to block clinic entrances in hopes of being arrested. But this crowd is not interested in the latest trend.
Many of them are students from Christ for the Nations, an unaccredited Bible college in Oak Cliff. Abortion protesting—or sidewalk counseling, as the protesters prefer to call it—is a requirement for graduation there, part of the moral-issues-ministry program. The students are a serious lot. (“People act like you’re not here, like you’re some freak,” says a tall, extremely thin young man, shivering on an icy day. “We’re here, we’re representatives of life. We’re here to save!”) Their placards, sometimes lettered with magic markers or decorated with birthday cards, are more reminiscent of high school pep rallies than the most bitter battle in America today. The members of the Abortion Abolition Society are less amateurish. Their most vocal member is Winston Wilder, a burly, bearded man whose cold eyes are suffused with fury. Wilder’s wife, Jane, is a regular here too, a round, country-faced woman who often clutches a life-size pink-plastic eleven-week-old fetus. In the past she has carried a baby doll, dressed in infant’s underclothes, nailed to a cross.
The picketers spring into action when the patients begin to arrive, usually around eight-thirty. The Christ for the Nations group is fairly reticent, content to hand out pamphlets and sing hymns. Not so the members of the AAS, who pace the perimeter like anxious sentries. As patients enter the building, they start shouting, begging them not to kill their babies. The protestors have had few successes—AAS members speak often of a topless dancer who moved in with one member instead o going in for her fifth abortion—but most feel, like Jane Wilder, that any baby saved makes their work worthwhile.
Not all of the protestors are anti-abortion. Another regular is Kurt Albach, who drops his mother off at her job at the Routh Street clinic, then parks his car, sips his coffee, and waits to protect women who wander toward the protestors. After so many years of sidewalk duty, he harbors the same cold, intense hatred that seems an occupational hazard here. When Wilder begins talking to a stranger, Albach sidles up swiftly and mutters, “Tell her about all the times you called patients whores, Winston.” The two men may occupy opposite sides of the abortion spectrum, but their anger makes them indistinguishable. In fact, the crowd here has been at it so long that it’s sometimes hard to remember that they are hardened enemies instead of old friends. “God bless you, Kurt,” the Christ for the Nations kids tell him.
One missionary tells me of an anti-abortion video I can rent from religious stores. Narrated by Charlton Heston, it is called The Eclipse of Reason. Baby Jessica has made her way to the sidewalk too. “We freak out over a little girl in a well,” one Christ for the Nations picketer said, “but no one cares about all these babies dying here.” A sunny, hefty fellow named Dan Mosher attacks the sincerity of those who favor legal abortion: grinning smugly, he refreshes my memory on Roe v. Wade—reminding me that the woman who brought the suit had initially claimed she was raped, then recanted.
No feelings are spared here. One of the Routh Street counselors went to high school with Winston Wilder; seeing her head toward the clinic, he reminds her that her husband, MIA in Vietnam, would be ashamed to see her working there. One of the clinic’s security guards is a former employee of Wilder’s. (Both were investigated in the unsolved burning of a Mesquite abortion clinic in 1985.) Wilder shouts epithets at the man and accuses him of being a homosexual.
Just as the conversation on the sidewalk is drifting toward the everyday—Jane Wilder speaks happily of her new grandchild and says, “That’s what marriage is all about. Reproduction” —Lea Braun arrives. “Is that the doctor?” I ask Jane when I see him step out of a silver Porsche around ten-thirty. “You mean the butcher?” she asks me levelly. While Braun strides toward the clinic entrance, the Wilders and a few other members flank the driveway and scream, “Stop slaughtering the innocent!” They are on good behavior today. “Usually they say they’re gonna get my kids or my wife,” Braun tells me. “And they know my kids’ names.”
Taft’s is the only arrival that silences the protestors. “That’s the Queen Bee,” Dan Mosher tells me. Taft studies the picketers idly while moving inside with the purposeful stride of a schoolmarm in a town full of gunslingers. “An admitted lesbian,” Mosher says, once Taft is out of earshot.
The curtain comes down on this performance when all the patients have arrived. Albach is usually gone by ten-thirty, followed by the Christ for the Nations crowd and the Wilders. By noon the clinic belongs to the doctor and his patients, at least until next Saturday, when the fight starts up again, promptly at eight-thirty.
Free From Worry
On the wall of a Routh Street counselor’s office hangs a thank-you note. After her abortion, a woman wrote, “I felt grateful, joyful, whirlingly happy and free. Not free from a dreaded responsibility, for as a partner in a new business I must face and deal with financial and contractual burdens every day. What I felt free from was the worry and the terror…the nausea and constipation that had been plaguing me for weeks; free from the resentment and guilt I held toward a future child.” The woman goes on to say that after her abortion, she “was treated to the luxury of dinner out.” Then she went home and baked cookies. “Later, as we pulled the covers over us and I accepted a cuddling embrace, my love said, ‘It’s just the two of us,’ and I knew he was happy too.”
Tucked behind a sofa in a room nearby is a poster the clinic is holding in reserve. It shows a photograph of a nude woman, dead on the floor of a bleak, empty room. Her buttocks are to the camera in a lurid, police-blotter style; there is blood on the towels bunched between her legs. She has died from an illegal abortion.
Between the lives of these two women lie sixteen years of social change. Those who oppose legal abortions like to say that 90 percent of all abortions are for purposes of convenience, and I imagine that the author of the above letter is just the kind of person they have in mind. Her blitheness makes me angry; I wish her independence had meant so much to her that she could have been extra careful with her birth control. Still, I believe that the only thing worse than this woman having an abortion is that she be forced to bear a child—unloved and unwanted—against her will. I know too that abortion will always be with us and that if it is outlawed again, the author of the letter could easily become the woman in the picture. My time on the front lines left me certain of one thing, though: We have forgotten that there is a profound difference between preventing a pregnancy and ending one.
The fight over abortion is so emotional that it’s easy to forget a simple truth: in many cases it’s preventable. It’s also easy to forget that abortion is part of the larger problem of all unplanned pregnancies—a category that includes half of all pregnancies in the United States. But as long as our attention is focused on the abortion battle, no one has to confront the reason why there are so many abortions—1.5 million a year. This way, we can condone rampant sexuality in our culture while we neglect to send a corresponding message that men and women are responsible for their sexual behavior. This way, we don’t have to worry that drug companies aren’t developing more effective birth control methods (there are fewer methods on the market now than there were five years ago). This way, those who oppose legal abortions don’t have to confront their broader opposition to the modern world—to sex education, to birth control in any form, to values different from their own. It’s a final irony that the people who run clinics like Routh Street are among the few trying to stem the tide.
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