Stacy's Day at the Abortion Clinic

First she has to get by the right-to-life protesters

More than 1 million legal abortions now take place in the U.S. every year--six times as many as in 1970. The fight against this increase has also increased, ranging from congressional oratory to outbreaks of fire bombing in such cities as Omaha, Cleveland and Columbus. In most abortion clinics, though, there is only minor harassment as a steady procession of anxious women arrive to undergo what some doctors call "the procedure. "TIME Reporter-Researcher Barbara Dolan covered one woman's visit to a Manhattan clinic and filed this report:

Stacy feels nauseated when she wakes up that Saturday morning, but she knows she has to make the trip. The week before, she went to the clinic, but she ran away. "I was just sitting there thinking, 'Should I or shouldn't I?' " she recalls. "But I got scared looking at all those machines."

Now she is going again. "I said to myself, 'I got to go through with it.' But I kept wondering, 'Why me?' "

Stacy is 18, a high school senior in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Now she pulls on blue jeans, a sports shirt, and ties her 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 of her mother.

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. "To save a life," says Button, who spends his Saturdays outside one or another of the city's abortion clinics. Some-tunes there are scuffles. Several times the police have been called.

As 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."

In the 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 child cries out for his mother.

Each day more than 60 women pass through the clinic. Almost half are under 22, all but a third are single, more than a third are Catholics who come despite their church's adamant opposition to abortion. They wait, go for blood and urine tests, and wait some more. For most, the visit takes four to five hours, the abortion itself only two to three minutes. It costs about $150.

The staff of 41 is friendly, cheery, almost ebullient. Their mood helps to assuage the fears. So does the counseling service, which many clinics do not provide.

On her first trip to the clinic a nurse "started lecturing me on how much it costs to raise a baby," Stacy recalls. "She sounded just like a mother." This time there are no long discussions. Stacy is called in for "the procedure," during which "the tissue" will be removed. Most women choose to be put to sleep with an intravenous injection of Brevital. "They have your legs just like you're going to have a baby," says Stacy.

The abortion completed, Stacy is wheeled into the recovery room. After 15 minutes, she awakes feeling cramps. One woman in the recovery room is vomiting into a paper bag, while others are crying or moaning. Stacy wants to get out quickly: "I can't listen to that." To bring up her blood-sugar level, a staffer gives her a cup of ginger ale, some Lorna Boone cookies and a Tylenol painkiller. They make her feel nauseated again. But soon Stacy and her mother are back on the street. The fresh air revives her. "I feel light," she says, "so good."

Stacy does not want to marry and leave home, "not till I'm older like my mother." And she does not want to repeat this day's sad experience. "I won't get any more abortions," she says. But now that it is over, she and her mother are off to Alexander's department store for a shopping spree. They try to forget the day by buying new shoes and a raincoat.

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