JUST BECAUSE ABORTION IS LEGAL in Illinois doesn’t mean that Sheela Paine can easily get one. At the age of 30, she already has five children. Last week she was in the 19th week of a pregnancy she couldn’t afford; her husband is unemployed and the family lives on welfare. She also couldn’t afford the reduced $425 price of a second-trimester abortion at the clinic near her home in East St. Louis. During her last pregnancy Paine tried to induce miscarriage by taking quinine pills. She ruled out a cheap illegal abortion because a girlfriend bled to death after getting one. “I know other girls who’ve done different things,” she says. “Jumped off the top of dressers or provoked their boyfriends to jump on them.” But the prospect of trying to support yet another child made her sick with worry. “My hair started coming out,” she says. After many anxious days, she finally got an abortion last week after she was able to borrow the money. Abortions are still legal in Texas too. But that doesn’t mean doctors can easily perform them. Four years ago, Dr. Curtis Boyd’s Dallas clinic came under siege for weeks by antiabortion demonstrators. One day one of the protesters began asking after Boyd’s children by name. “How’s Kyle?” the man would inquire. “Has he had any accidents?” Then came the handwritten death threat in his mailbox. Boyd moved his family out of town for a while, and on Christmas Eve his clinic was torched. Boyd is back in business today, but with a sharper sense of the odds against him. “You have a President of the United States who says abortion should be illegal,” he says. “You have religious leaders saying that doctors who perform this service should go to hell. You have antiabortion groups that harass medical staff. What professionals would continue to do a service that subjected them to this kind of abuse?” This is how matters stand now, in what may be the last days for a woman’s constitutionally protected right to abortion in America. The Supreme Court is widely expected to uphold the Pennsylvania law that would require a woman seeking an abortion to notify her husband and wait 24 hours after hearing a state-prepared presentation about adoption and child-support alternatives, among other things. By okaying the law, or most parts of it, the court would invite other states to introduce new restrictions of their own. Next year the nine Justices may entirely reverse Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that guaranteed abortion rights; states would then have the option of banning abortion outright. But for all the attention paid last week to the arguments before the Justices in Washington and the outcry of the demonstrators in Buffalo, that is not where the issue is really being decided. At this moment, abortion is not available in 83% of America’s counties, home to nearly a third of American women of childbearing age. For reasons of professional pride, or fear, or economic pressure, doctors have backed away from the procedure even where it remains available.
