(6 of 7)
The idea of parental notification has a logic to it in communities where high school girls cannot receive aspirin from a school nurse without a parent's approval. But again, abortion rights advocates argue that a girl who does not want to tell her parents she is pregnant may have profound reasons for her silence, and no new law is likely to overcome that immediate fear.
Some extreme opponents of abortion would go well beyond waiting periods and notification laws. Though they refrain from pressing for such an outcome, they would impose criminal penalties, including prison time, for women who seek abortion -- not just for the doctors who perform them. But many pro-lifers, while they equate abortion with murder, are reluctant to treat women as killers, in part because throwing young women in jail would alienate too many Americans. Press them on the inconsistency, and they often reply that women who seek abortions are themselves victims of exploitation, economic desperation or misinformation.
No matter what penalties are imposed, past experience suggests that when women are sufficiently desperate, they will terminate their pregnancies by any means available. That is what worries abortion-rights advocates, as they recall the years just before Roe, when there may have been as many as 1.2 million illegal abortions annually in the U.S. States that keep abortion available in the future are likely to become magnets for women from nonabortion states. In the 2 1/2 years preceding Roe, nearly 350,000 women traveled for that reason to New York, which was at the time one of the few / states in which abortion was legal. Referral agencies popped up overnight to charge the out-of-staters as much as $100 for the names of abortion doctors. As prices climbed as high as $1,000, abortion became a hustler's game. "There were doctors who were literally becoming millionaires," says Dr. Irving Rust, the medical director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in the South Bronx. "Anytime you have a situation where supply and demand is the main dynamic, it brings out the worst."
PRO-CHOICE GROUPS ARE PREparing for the day when they will have to provide an abortion underground, with networks to help women get to states where abortion is available. Some are urging more radical solutions. Carol Downer, director of the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers, based in Los Angeles, travels widely to talk to women's groups about "menstrual extraction," a home-abortion procedure she co-developed in the early 1970s. A suction technique similar to the vacuum-aspiration process that is now the most common form of first-trimester abortion, it requires a 50-mL syringe attached to a flexible plastic tube, which withdraws the contents of the uterus and deposits them into a closed container.
The premise behind menstrual extraction is that a home abortion provided by concerned friends is better than one carried out in some surgical speakeasy. Downer insists that women without medical training can learn to perform menstrual extraction on other women safely. A cooperative doctor may still be needed to obtain the equipment, some of which can be purchased legally only by physicians or clinics. "It will take some thinking and determination and motivation to put ((the kit)) together," she says.