Choice under seige

The right to safe, legal abortions is fading away

In Birmingham, Alabama, last week, a bomb tore through a health clinic that provides abortions, killing a police officer and maiming a nurse so badly that she required 10 hours of surgery. It is a new escalation -- the first death in a clinic bombing since Roe v. Wade -- but it evoked a familiar scene: confused patients, alarmed nurses, and bystanders running wildly from smoke or gunshots, their terrified faces captured by a tourist's shaky hand-held video camera

We shudder, but we don't really worry.

Many see the ongoing violence as the last refuge of a desperate anti-choice movement; with abortion rights essentially secure, the thinking goes, the crusaders have grown increasingly frustrated and radical. But this impression couldn't be more wrong. The militant minority, hell-bent on turning back the clock, is waging a war of attrition -- and winning.

When the Roe v. Wade decision was issued 25 years ago, it was an affirmation of a simple principle: in a free country, every citizen has the right to control his or her own body. The US government has no place making medical decisions for its people. The time when women would risk death in a back alley was definitively behind us, or so it seemed.

By 1992, though, a more conservative Supreme Court had granted the government more power to interfere. In the years since, dozens of states have passed restrictive laws -- banning some procedures, imposing waiting periods, requiring parental notification, and so forth. Even more such laws, which take apart Roe piece by tiny piece, are being considered by state legislatures across the country.

Now, out on the political hustings, Republican Steve Forbes is saying that potential Supreme Court nominees' stands on Roe v. Wade should constitute the "litmus test" for determining their fitness.

Outside the halls of government, the militant anti-abortion movement has won an even greater victory: it has created a climate of fear.

Just last year, according to the National Abortion Federation, there were 166 cases of "violence and disruption." That includes 62 cases of stalking. Eight arson attacks. Six bombings. One attempted murder. Since 1977, there have been 37 clinic bombings and 150 cases of arson. Only four years ago, John Salvi gunned down two people in Brookline.

The years of violence and intimidation are taking their toll -- and not just on prospective patients. Fewer and fewer doctors are willing to perform the abortion procedure, and, as the New York Times recently revealed, many of tomorrow's doctors aren't even learning how to do it. According to a recent study cited by the Times, only 33 percent of ob-gyns were willing to perform abortions in 1995, down from 43 percent in 1983. Another study showed that only 12 percent of ob-gyn residency programs even teach the procedure.

Thus, with the nation standing quietly by, the medical establishment has been buckling. In 84 percent of the country's counties, there is now no one who can perform an abortion.

Hardest hit are women in rural areas and those who do not have the money to travel far. But as abortion providers grow more scarce, more people -- and more urban areas -- will be affected.

Polls show that some 60 percent of Americans support a woman's constitutional right to choose. And the vast majority of Americans, pro-choice or otherwise, abhor the kind of violence that shook Birmingham. Yet the militants know that the majority is complacent. And in a complacent nation, every act of violence brings them closer to their goal.

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