Judy Jacobs, a nurse at Planned Parenthood`s Midwest Medical Center, 1201 N. Clark St., prepares the recovery room for the day`s patients. It is a bright, open space with blue lounge chairs, with a Japanese screen off to the side, ready to wrap around a chair to provide privacy.
Jacobs counts off bottles of antibiotics under her breath. Few women are so anguished that they need privacy, she says, but many are weepy.
”All the emotion they`ve been holding for weeks comes out,” she says.
”I get questions in the recovery room,” she says. ” `How far along was I?` They`ll want to know what the fetus looked like. There`s girls who want to see their ultrasound. They just look at it and say, `OK.` ”
Some want to see more. Lorie Spear, a counselor and the clinic coordinator, says that on extremely rare occasions, a woman will ask to see what the clinic calls the ”products of conception.”
”One woman was very comfortable with her decision, but she was going through this mourning period,” Spear says. ”She was handed the POC container, and she had a little private time with it.”
Another woman brought a vial of holy water and had a medical assistant sprinkle it over the fetus. ”She believed it had a soul already,” Spear says. ”She wanted to pray that it would go to a happier place.”
Some women ask clinic staffers what will happen to the fetus. They are told that the fetus and placenta are sent to a pathology laboratory, where they are examined to make sure no tissue has been left inside that could cause an infection. Then the lab incinerates the material.
Jacobs recalls her second day of work at the clinic, when she was asked to observe an abortion.
”It was so easy and quiet,” she says. ”Then the medical assistant called me over. She showed me the products of conception. The woman was 13 weeks` (pregnant). And there was a little foot.
”I freaked. I ran out of the room. I threw up. I sat there, shivering, for a while. Even those of us that are pro-choice-it was hard.”
Both Jacobs and Spear have had abortions and say they have no regrets. They say the experiences intensified their determination to make sure that other women can have safe abortions.
”You get women here talking about, `I`m going to drink cleaning fluid,`
`I`m going to fall down the stairs,` `I`m going to hit myself in the stomach`-things they would do if they can`t get the money for an abortion,”
Spear says.
”We see so many women who have gone to bogus clinics,” she says, referring to counseling centers run by anti-abortion activists. ”They see these horrible films. They`re thinking they might die.
”And they still come here. They still say, `I have to have an abortion.` ”
– – –
When Ann Belanger opens her eyes at the end of a silent prayer, she sees that the abortion clinic across the street is still standing.
Her prayer has not been answered.
Belanger, a 38-year-old Chicago nurse with a rosary coiled loosely in the palm of her hand, closes her eyes and keeps praying.
In front of Family Planning Associates Medical Group, 659 W. Washington Blvd., the battle lines are drawn. Ten ”sidewalk counselors” call out to women to urge them to turn back. A dozen volunteer ”clinic escorts” shield women as they near the clinic doors.
A woman, her eyes downcast, makes her way to the clinic door, holding the back of her boyfriend`s belt and shuffling along at the center of the moving mass of people.
”Don`t kill your baby, don`t kill your baby,” pleads activist Tim Murphy.
”You don`t have to listen to these people if you don`t want to,” clinic escort Laura Zupko tells her.
As the woman enters the clinic, the matching faces of twin sisters Joyce and Janice Keen, 24, of Riverside, form bookends of worry.
”We feel a sadness for the woman,” says Joyce, a sidewalk counselor for four years. ”Once a woman goes through those doors, it pierces your heart. It`s like a sword.”
”The evil is tangible,” says Janice, leaning against the building near the spot where a priest will later spray holy water in an exorcism.
”We want the baby to know that somebody was here,” says Julie Connelly, 33, who helped organize the prayer vigil. ”A lot of times, that is the only love the child will know in this world.”
More Top Picks Best Synology Nas
– – –
Donna Collins has run out of time.
When the 27-year-old woman takes off her green-and-yellow parka, it is clear why. Her swollen belly appears even to a layman to indicate a pregnancy advanced beyond the 14-week maximum for which Planned Parenthood will perform an abortion.
She says she first learned she was pregnant on Feb. 5, and she spent the next month trying to get an appointment for an abortion through the HMO that is her Medicaid health-care provider.
Although the state does not pay for abortions for Medicaid recipients, the HMO says it uses private monies to provide the service.
But after she got an appointment, the HMO switched its referrals to another abortion clinic. She spent about two weeks in bureaucratic limbo before she got a referral to the new clinic, Planned Parenthood.
A week earlier, Collins had begun bleeding. She was admitted to a hospital, where she was told that her placenta was disintegrating and her baby could be stillborn or retarded. She asked for an abortion.
”But the doctor wouldn`t take it because I was at a Catholic hospital,” she says. ”I said, `You can call an ambulance like this` ”-she snaps her fingers with their gold-painted nails-” `and send me somewhere else.` But he said he couldn`t do that.”
So now she is in a counseling room at Planned Parenthood, counting the weeks in her mind.
”I love kids. Don`t get me wrong,” she says. ”I already have seven.”
Her children are 12, 10, 9, 6, 5, 3 and 1. In her three-bedroom apartment in the Stateway Gardens public housing development, the two girls share one room; the four boys share three twin beds in another room, the two youngest sleeping together; the baby sleeps in her room.
”I just knew I didn`t want to have another baby to be on public aid and suffer from one check to another for a pair of shoes,” she says.
She says she gets angry when she sees anti-abortion protesters.
”That baby`s not going to cry all night on you,” she says. ”When you be home asleep, I`m gonna be walking the floors with that baby saying, `Mama, my head hurt.` ”
A doctor`s examination brings the bad news: She appears to be 16 to 18 weeks` pregnant and cannot get an abortion here, the only clinic where her HMO pays.
Collins sits in a counseling room, crying.
”At this point, there are still some places you can go,” says counselor Heather Hastings. ”It is pretty expensive, but there are places that do provide loans. Do you have any friends or family you can borrow from?”
Collins shakes her head. ”There`s no use my saying I can get that kind of money, because I can`t,” she says. ”You`re talking $300, $400.”
”I`m talking a lot more than that,” Hastings says.
Several days later, Collins says she has given up, and will have an eighth child.
”There`s no way I can raise $600,” she says. ”I figure I`ll take one day at a time.”
– – –
The Loop Crisis Pregnancy Center, 104 S. Michigan Ave., looks vaguely like a doctor`s office or even an abortion clinic. Its waiting room has comfortable couches and magazines and a reception office behind a glass window partition.
A pamphlet on a hanging rack has a picture of a concerned-looking woman on the cover and is called ”Making an Informed Decision About Your Pregnancy.”
But soon the differences become apparent. The magazine is called ”Focus on the Family,” and an assortment of plastic models of fetuses at various stages of development sit casually on a table. A volunteer is telling a telephone caller that the center is not a medical facility, but offers information on abortion.
”Would you like to come in and talk about it?” the receptionist asks. The caller hangs up.
This center is one of about 2,000 across the country where abortion opponents try to persuade women not to have abortions.
Their advertisements on buses and trains and in the Yellow Pages offer free pregnancy tests and abortion information. It takes a careful reader to discern that they do not actually offer abortion services.
They count among their victories Jean McFarland. McFarland, 28, went to The Women`s Center in Evergreen Park when she discovered she was pregnant by a boyfriend. She was separated from her husband and struggling through college. McFarland says the counselor helped relieve her guilt over an abortion she had seven years earlier.
”She helped me . . . by helping me to say goodbye to the baby,” she says.
McFarland sits in a Bridgeport restaurant with her boyfriend. Their daughter, Mya, sits at the table playing with a balloon the waitress has given her, yelping excitedly.
Mya will turn a year old in a month. Already there are two birthday parties planned, one for family and one for friends.
McFarland now works part-time as a receptionist for an auto dealership and goes to school two days a week, studying to be an X-ray technician.
”There are times I want to give up and quit,” said McFarland, who lives with her parents in Country Club Hills. She says she still calls her counselor regularly, sometimes in the middle of the night.
”Maybe if I went to someone who was strongly for abortion, I would have had it,” she says, eating breakfast next to Mya. ”But I thank God for her. I wouldn`t take her away for everything in the world. When she wakes up in the morning with that smile, I know, as hard as it gets, I did the right thing.” – – –
Crisis pregnancy centers would count Maria, a 17-year-old girl who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, among their failures.
Maria rests in the recovery room at Planned Parenthood. A week earlier, she and her 17-year-old boyfriend went to another clinic downtown for an abortion.
They encountered protesters outside.
”They told us the doctor is racist toward Hispanics and blacks,” says Maria, who is Hispanic. ”They told us he doesn`t use enough anesthesia. They said that a lot of girls come out hemorrhaging, that a lot of girls have died.”
She was afraid to go in. The protesters advised her to go to Aid for Women, at 8 S. Michigan Ave., which they told her was an abortion clinic.
”They said, `They`ll probably perform it there,` ” she says.
More Top Picks Smart Bulb
But Aid for Women is a crisis pregnancy center. ”They told us, `Please try to keep the child,` ” Maria says. ”We were like, `OK. Right. Bye.` We realized this wasn`t an abortion clinic. We left.”
– – –
Joanne, a pseudonym for a 28-year-old Champaign woman, was expecting her divorce from her second marriage to become final on the day she was expecting her period. She got the divorce. She did not get her period.
”I`m on the pill. It was just human error, stupidity. I was out of town. I didn`t have my prescription transferred.”
Joanne has a good job as an estimator with a printing company. She also has a 5-year-old daughter from her first marriage.
She drove up to Chicago for the abortion because her mother lives only a few blocks from this clinic. She says she is getting an abortion because after years of struggle, her life is finally getting easier.
”I just got a big promotion. I can see some smooth sailing now,” she says.
Inside the procedure room, Joanne lies with her feet in stirrups. Leola Westbrook, a De Paul University student who volunteers to accompany patients during abortions, leans over and puts her hand on her shoulder.
”I`m going to examine you,” says Dr. Ashok Buddhadev. ”You`ll feel a little pressure, OK?”
Joanne grips Westbrook`s hand. Westbrook keeps up a distracting murmur.
”Did you vote in the primary?” she asks softly, touching Joanne`s hair. ”No,” Joanne says. ”Isn`t that awful?” She attempts a laugh.
Buddhadev inserts a dilator, an instrument that enlarges the cervix slightly. He inserts a plastic tube into her cervix and attaches it to another tube from the vacuum aspirator machine. The nurse turns it on; the machine buzzes.
”Oh!” Joanne cries out softly as the contents of her uterus are pulled through the tube. Westbrook touches Joanne`s eyes with a tissue. Neither woman loosens her grip on the other`s hand.
”OK,” the doctor says. ”It`s all over.”