Asheville Pregnancy Support Services often gives baby gear to women who feel they can't afford to raise a child.
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Certainly not a crisis pregnancy center, she adds, and her voice takes on a tighter edge. Two days ago, she had a woman come into the clinic who was a wreck. She had seen an ad for a women's health center in Charlotte, which is two hours away, and called saying she wanted an abortion. "They said sure, we can help you," Lorrie says. "They told her she could even come in after hours so she wouldn't miss a day at work. She drove all the way to Charlotte." But when she got there, she realized her mistake. "They showed her pictures of aborted fetuses," Lorrie goes on. "She was a basket case when she got here. They had told her that if she had an abortion, she'd probably never be able to have a child." Now Lorrie is plainly furious. "These [pregnant] women are scared out of their minds," she says. "It doesn't change their minds--it just scares them. It's cruel and un-Christian to lie to patients."
Abortion providers, of course, have been accused of coercion as well, but Lorrie says the last thing she wants to do is perform an abortion on a woman who is confused or ambivalent or being pressured by her parents or boyfriend. If Lorrie senses second thoughts, even at the last minute, she says she refuses to proceed. "This happens at least once a month," Lorrie says. "I don't care if her parents are in the waiting room. It's her decision." In those cases, she points patients to public and private groups that can help with financial, social or emotional support in carrying the pregnancy to term. And she's constantly working to put herself out of business, counseling women about birth control and directing them to a new state program to help pay for it.
Yet Lorrie's primary job makes her a target. The pregnancy-center movement may promote "loving support," but there are still other activists fighting a holy war. She had to call in a fire-department haz-mat team after an envelope arrived claiming to contain anthrax. Her neighbors were sent a newsletter with her picture: "It said, 'This woman is a killer and she lives in your neighborhood,'" Lorrie recalls. Her nurse-midwife Bonnie Frontino discovered her picture on what looked like WANTED posters all around her neighborhood; sheriffs began patrolling the area of her house. "I was really angry, but I was scared also," Frontino says. "You never know who's going to see this and think it's their moral duty to kill us."
That was in the fall of 2002, and given the climate, it's hard to imagine the two sides of the abortion war having anything to say to each other. But Lorrie needed to do something and ended up calling Jeff Hutchinson, senior pastor of Trinity Presbyterian, a theologically conservative church that she knew the lead protester attended. "I said, 'I don't think you know what this member of your congregation is doing, but it's not Christian.'" Hutchinson and some church members agreed to meet Lorrie and her clinic colleagues at the Blue Moon café to have a conversation they thought might happen "only once in a blue moon."