Anti-Choice Days

An article in the Los Angeles Times about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts states that his wife "has been active in the anti-abortion movement, a fact that some on both sides of the issue take to mean that John Roberts also opposes abortion." Well, triple duh!

When Roberts was Deputy Solicitor General under the first President Bush, he argued before the Supreme Court that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned. "Roe was wrongly decided," he said, "and should be overruled."

Roberts also argued successfully before the Court in support of Operation Rescue's violent protesters at clinics, where they've tried to block women's access to health care services, with bombs and threats of murder.

The prospect of this medical procedure actually becoming illegal again dismays me, particularly because of what I learned during my experience as an underground abortion referral service all through the 60s.

For several months, a female detective's office had been investigating abortionists, because telephone answering services in New York were involved. But these physicians functioned in other cities, and that's where the arrests were made. She complained, "The boys in Philadelphia and Camden and Jersey City get all the credit."

She asked women questions such as, "Did the doctor make any advances toward you?" If nothing else, maybe they could nab him on the Mann Act, for crossing state lines. She asked an African exchange student, "The man who impregnated you-was he white, black or colored?" She asked the white woman who had befriended this exchange student, "Why did you have to help this girl? She's not an American citizen-and she's black."

She advised women to keep away from me because I had "strange Greenwich Village friends," and told a graduate student working on a thesis about abortion that to interview me would compromise the Columbia School of Journalism. She justified her work: "This is the law. We have to follow it. Abortion is an illegal act, and we have to punish people who commit it."

The irony of her mission was posed by one patient, who said, "Look, by catching those doctors, who are the best ones available, you're only

forcing girls to go underground, to less competent people. Your whole concern isn't to protect lives, but to force girls to find better means to destroy their lives by going to unqualified people." However, the only alternatives to abortion that she would consider were abstinence and adoption. "Birth control is out of the question," she insisted. "It offends morality and religion."

On the wall of her office was a crucifix. On her desk were three gospel cards carefully placed so that their messages could be easily read by women invited to her office because their names had been on the records of a doctor's answering service.

Then there were those women who ended up in a hospital, where police officers-automatically phoned by the hospital-told these patients that they wouldn't get any painkilling drugs unless they revealed the name of the abortionist whose incomplete or infection-causing procedure had landed them there.