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THE PREDICAMENT OF WOMEN trying to get abortions is harder to distill into a single wrenching image. There are 1.6 million abortions carried out in the U.S. each year, representing almost a fourth of all pregnancies. It is estimated that more than 46% of American women will have had one by the time they are 45. But while there are about 2,500 places around the country that provide abortions -- down from a high of 2,908 ten years ago -- they are mostly clustered around cities, leaving broad areas of the country unserved. A single clinic serves 24 counties in northern Minnesota. Just one doctor provides abortions in South Dakota.
For a glimpse of the future, look at Mississippi. Three of the state's four clinics are clustered around the capital and largest city, Jackson. But their survival is threatened by a new law that would require clinics to have advance transfer agreements with hospitals to care for patients who may suffer complications -- a provision designed to capitalize on the resistance among many hospitals to associate themselves with anything as controversial as abortion.
A law requiring a 24-hour waiting period will go into effect if the Supreme Court upholds that provision in the Pennsylvania law. Though it sounds benign enough, it can confound poor women who already have to travel long distances to find a clinic, only to discover they must also scrape together the price of overnight accommodations. Often by the time they get the money together, they have advanced into the second trimester, when the cost is higher. (Only 12 states -- Mississippi is not one of them -- routinely provide Medicaid financing for abortion.) Nancy Rogers owns one of the clinics near Jackson. Two years ago, when she went to the capital to argue against the bill before a state legislator, she got a sense of what she was up against. "His exact words were, 'I have no sympathy for anyone who cannot afford a motel room.' "
There's one other clinic in Mississippi, but lately it has not been open for business. When Dr. Joseph Booker first moved to the coastal town of Gulfport to set up a gynecology practice in 1988, local officials granted him every permit he needed to start business. But when he purchased a small commercial building last year and made plans to relocate his Gulf Coast Women's Clinic, he got a different reception. In January, when he applied for a permit for interior reconstruction, Harrison County code administrator Ben Clark told Booker he had learned that abortion was part of Booker's practice. The permit was denied.
Soon after, the Harrison County board of supervisors passed an ordinance prohibiting the operation of an abortion clinic within 500 ft. of a church, school, kindergarten or funeral home. There are two churches close by Booker's building. Four of the five hospitals in the Gulfport-Biloxi region have denied Booker admitting rights that would guarantee his patients a bed in the event of complications. For good measure, the local power company has refused to provide electricity to his unfinished clinic until he secures the building permit he cannot get.