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Since the electronic security alarm has been rendered useless, the site has been vandalized four times in recent months. For now Booker is referring women seeking abortions to Jackson, 160 miles north. But he remains determined to revive his practice in Gulfport. "Nobody's going to tell me how to practice medicine or scare me out of practicing it," he says. His lawyer, John Jones, is challenging the 500-ft. ordinance in court but knows it won't be easy. "Every time we jump through a hoop," he says, "they create another hoop."
TARGETING DOCTORS
Discouraging the doctors who provide abortion has become one of the characteristic tactics of the most militant antiabortion groups. In Buffalo, the same Rev. Robert Schenck who pushed a fetus in front of abortion-rights demonstrators last week has promised to stand outside restaurants frequented * by doctors from abortion clinics, holding banners announcing that abortionists eat here. Other leaders are threatening to picket the schools attended by the doctors' children.
Death threats, obstruction and broken windows have taken their toll, but the medical profession has tiptoed away from abortion for less dramatic reasons as well. Though physician surveys show that a large majority of gynecologists and obstetricians are pro-choice, many doctors are inclined to see abortion as routine work that's poorly paid by their standards. Partly from a desire to keep abortion within reach of poor women, Planned Parenthood, which operates 900 clinics around the country, has succeeded in keeping prices low at their facilities. That in turn has put competitive pressure on everyone else, keeping the average price for a first-trimester abortion at just $251, not much of an increase over the $196 price of twenty years ago. At a Planned Parenthood clinic in New York City, a physician earns up to $125,000 annually for a four-day week, perhaps half what he or she might make in private practice.
Hospitals have also been withdrawing from the abortion business. In the years after Roe was handed down, more than half of all abortions were performed in hospitals. By 1988, 86% were done in neighborhood clinics and an additional 4% in the offices of individual doctors. Some hospitals shy away from the procedure because of opposition from potential donors or members of their governing boards. At the same time, because abortion is a relatively simple procedure that doesn't require general anesthesia or the costly equipment of a hospital operating room, groups like Planned Parenthood encouraged the move to clinics as a way to keep abortion cheap and accessible.
But clinics tend to be small outposts that offer easy targets for the sit- ins, arson and bombings that a large, well-guarded hospital is better suited to resist. And as the work has fallen largely to clinic doctors who specialize in abortion, it has dropped off the list of skills that a woman's regular physician can be expected to have. A new study by Dr. H. Trent Mackay of the University of California at Davis shows that last year just 12% of the nation's obstetrics-gynecology residency programs made training in first- trimester abortions a routine part of their program. Only 7% did so in the case of second-trimester abortion training. Compare that with 1985, when nearly a fourth of all such programs routinely taught abortion procedure for ( both trimesters.