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So it's no surprise that many clinics must go far afield to find a doctor who is willing and able to perform abortions. The Allentown Women's Center in Pennsylvania can offer them in large part because one day each week Dr. Amy Cousins makes the 120-mile drive from New York City. On two other days she treks 200 miles north to provide the same service in Binghamton, N.Y., where the antiabortion group Operation Rescue has its headquarters. "I can't get anybody to cover for me," she says. "So I don't go on vacation."
As older physicians retire, the medical profession is also losing its institutional memory of the days before Roe. A generation raised in the era of safe and legal abortion is less likely to produce doctors ready to go to the barricades at the first sign of women being forced to undergo illegal -- and dangerous -- abortions. "I have personally taken care of women with red rubber catheters hanging out of their uterus and a temperature of 107 degrees," says Dr. David Grimes, 45, of the University of Southern California School of Medicine. "Once a physician has watched that happening, he or she will never be willing to watch the laws go back."
THE RISING BARRIERS
But what if the laws do "go back"? If Roe is eventually overturned, the first result is likely to be a wide-scale confused impression that the loss of the constitutional right means abortion will instantly become illegal in every state. "Women will see the big headlines, and some are going to lose the message," says Dr. Michael Burnhill, professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. "They are going to be confused as to whether they can get an abortion at all."
In some places they won't be able to. naral predicts that 13 states will ban abortion outright, though typically with exceptions for the so-called hard cases: when the life of the mother is at risk, the fetus is seriously deformed or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest. Other states are likely to be satisfied with a raft of new restrictions, such as 24-hour waiting periods and laws requiring clinics to be equipped as hospitals, which would drive up prices. Parental notification laws, already in place in 18 states, will be even more widely adopted, posing problems for many girls under 18, who at present account for 11% of all abortions.
Such obstacles are hardly insurmountable. But they are likely to make it take longer for women to afford and arrange an abortion, which makes the procedure more dangerous. They also have the effect of sending a message. To abortion opponents, the message is that abortion on demand is immoral, and so should be illegal. But abortion-rights advocates see a different subtext. Instituting a waiting period suggests that women seeking abortions do so blithely and without reflection -- a notion belied by the experience of women who have endured the private, wrenching process of deciding to terminate a pregnancy. Experts calculate that 93% of married women who have abortions talk to their husbands about it. The others may have good reason not to. "If husband notification is upheld," says Jean Hunt, head of the Elizabeth Blackwell Health Center for Women in Philadelphia, "it will be almost impossible to provide services for women who live in fear of their husbands."