Word: clinics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...curly hair back with a scarf. She wears a tiny teardrop ring to show that she is engaged, but her fiance is not making this trip. Stacy and her mother set out on the 45-minute subway ride from their home to the Eastern Women's Center clinic on Manhattan's East 60th Street. They do not speak to each other on the crowded train. That whole week, for that matter, they have spoken little about the abortion. "I figured she was upset or something and she didn't want to scare me," Stacy says later...
From the subway they walk three blocks to the concrete high-rise that houses the clinic. A woman is being accosted by two strangers as she enters the building. "Don't kill your baby. Please don't kill your baby," says one of them, Miles Button, 43, a burly Long Island cabinetmaker and father of five. The woman brushes past him. "It's not easy work," sighs his companion, Anne Gilmartin, 44. "We're hitting them at a bad time, grabbing them at the last moment." Another woman angrily asks Button why he is there...
...Stacy pushes open the door into the clinic building, Gilmartin presses some pamphlets into her hand. One, with color photographs of discarded fetuses, has big black words: HUMAN GARBAGE. "Did you know this is how big you were when you were only eleven weeks old?" the pamphlet asks. "From then on you breathed [fluid], swallowed, digested and urinated ... No new organs began functioning after that. You just grew more mature...
Stacy has seen the pamphlets before. "It didn't seem to bother some women who sat in the waiting room reading them," she says softly. On the other hand, the pamphlets are "very disturbing" to the clinic's patients, according to Director Barbara Methvin, 39, "but by the time the women come to us they've made up their minds...
...eighth-floor clinic's waiting room, Stacy can feel the tension. "Most of the women are just like me, scared," she says. There is a quiet murmur as the women-of all outlooks and incomes -huddle with their friends. A young man in blue jeans nervously opens a bag of coffee grounds and, thinking it is instant coffee, tries to brew a cup. His long-haired girlfriend sits motionless near by, her face blank. ABORTION CAN BE LONELY, reads a wall poster. From a loudspeaker comes the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. At intervals a small...