At 1 a.m., two college freshmen in Downstate Illinois climb into a borrowed car and drive through a downpour into the night.
Kim, a pale young woman with wide brown eyes, curls up in the front seat and sleeps as her boyfriend, Jeff, drives south on Interstate Highway 55, switching radio stations to stay awake on the three-hour trip.
Their destination is the Hope Clinic for Women in Granite City, Ill., just outside St. Louis, where Kim, more than 21 weeks` pregnant, will get an abortion.
They arrive early and for four hours sleep in the car with the engine running. Jeff drinks coffee to stay awake so they won`t oversleep and miss the appointment.
”We didn`t have enough money for two nights at a hotel,” explains Kim, recounting details of the experience later.
The pregnancy stunned the young couple. Kim had been taking birth control pills and, as happens to a rare number of women, continued to get her period even after she conceived. By the time a home pregnancy test confirmed her predicament, she was far along.
In early March, Kim, who grew up in suburban Chicago, went to a Chicago abortion clinic with $300 she had borrowed from two girlfriends. But the clinic refused to perform the abortion because doctors there said Kim was 15 weeks into the pregnancy, one week past the clinic`s limit.
So Kim made an appointment at the Hope Clinic-the only one in the state that performs abortions up to 24 weeks. It draws women from a 10-state area.
It was firebombed in 1982, and the owner, a physician, was kidnapped along with his wife for eight days that same year.
The next morning, Kim and Jeff, who have asked for the privacy of pseudonyms, approach the main entrance to the clinic, which is two metal doors with a peephole. Inside, a door to the waiting area is made of bulletproof glass.
This morning, one month after her first abortion appointment, Kim`s sonogram shows she is 21 1/2 weeks` pregnant, about two weeks later than she had been told by the Chicago clinic.
A late abortion is more complicated and will cost the couple $895, far more than the average $250 fee for an abortion in the first three months. Jeff pays $150 cash and charges $600 on his new credit card, which he obtained for this purpose. He has two weeks to pay the balance.
A secretary calls Kim inside. In the procedure room, a doctor inserts a dilapan, a slender, synthetic device about 2 inches long, into her cervix. It will remain there for a day, gradually dilating her cervix until it is wide enough to remove the fetus.
After Kim leaves the clinic in the early afternoon, the cramps become painful. She and Jeff stop at a pharmacy, where they buy $12 worth of medications-one for cramping, one for nausea and an antibiotic. For the next 24 hours, they have $7 for food and gas.
They drive to a nearby motel and wait. Kim sleeps, Jeff watches CNN. In the dim room, he fixes a bowl of cream of chicken soup in the hot pot they packed. It will be his only meal until he returns to school late the next afternoon.
Kim awakens and eats their other can of soup-Hearty Chicken. Still beset by painful cramps, she takes a bath for an hour, until the water turns cold.
The next morning, they return to the clinic, where Kim is escorted by an aide to a changing room. She removes her clothes from the waist down and is wrapped in a white sheet. She takes a seat alongside other women waiting for their abortions. To keep her feet warm, she keeps on her socks and a pair of white pointy-toed tennis shoes.
Two women receive their abortions before Kim is brought into what clinic workers call the ”procedure room.” It is plain except for a painting of a seaside landscape hanging on the ceiling, just above the examining table on which Kim lies.
The abortion goes quickly. The doctor removes the dilapan and uses a vacuum aspirator and forceps to extract the fetus and fluids. Kim closes her eyes, cries from the cramping and squeezes the nurse`s hand. It is over in 20 minutes.
In the recovery room afterward, some women around her are vomiting from the drugs. Kim lies in the overstuffed recliner, breathes slowly, then vomits. Back in the motel, Kim sleeps off the medication as Jeff packs the car.
When she wakes up, she lies on her side.
”I thought I`d feel kind of dirty afterward, but I feel kind of relieved,” she says.
”I don`t have any regrets. I don`t think abortion is wrong. I just can`t believe how many girls go through with it. I think it`s OK.”
”I don`t,” Jeff says.
– – –
From a sidewalk on Cass Avenue in suburban Westmont, Dorothy Snediker watches two young women climb the steps to the Concord West Medical Center.
Over the din of morning traffic, Snediker calls out, ”Please, can I talk to you?”
One of the two women pulls open the glass door. She glances Snediker`s way and pauses.
”I care about you,” says Snediker, 56, a homemaker from Wheaton. She carries a sign bearing an enlarged photograph of a fetus. On the reverse side, which the women would only see if they walk down the driveway to speak to Snediker, is a photo of what she says is a fetus that was mangled during an abortion.
”The only thing they care about is your money,” she shouts.
The women turn away and enter the clinic.
Snediker is not discouraged. She believes that abortion is the killing of a human child and cannot imagine giving up the battle against it.
”I`ve been here for six months at a time and not had a one-on-one chance to talk,” Snediker said. ”But we need to be here. We are trying to be a little bit of light in a dark world.”
– – –
Lynn, 20, did not know she was pregnant until her mother took her to the doctor to find out why she was having stomach pains.
”She yelled at me all the way home,” Lynn says. ”She wanted me out of the house.”
At a stoplight, Lynn got out of the car and slammed the door. She called a girlfriend and didn`t go home for two weeks.
When she did, her mother asked Lynn to consult a crisis pregnancy center. There, a counselor mentioned a maternity home. A month ago, Lynn moved into the Christian Family Ministries Lamb`s Fold, a maternity home in Joliet.
Doris Atkinson, who runs the home with her husband, Ron, says that one night in 1976 she dreamed that she should teach her children how to get out of the house in case of a fire. She did.
A few months later, she returned home to find firefighters outside, her house in ashes and her children next door, safely with neighbors.
”I knew God had saved my children,” she says, tears welling in her eyes.
Since then, Atkinson has dedicated her life to saving unborn children.
Dozens of pictures and knickknacks in the shape of lambs fill the 100-year-old house, bought and rehabilitated largely with donations by members of the Elwood, Ill., church she and her husband founded six years ago. On the wall, a plaque reads, ”A baby is God`s opinion that the world should go on.” Lamb`s Fold is one of many maternity homes run by abortion opponents across the country. To dissuade women from having abortions, the homes offer pregnant women free lodging and food until their babies are born.
Lynn had already had two abortions. The last time, she was three months`
pregnant and had to undergo the grueling two-day second-trimester procedure.
The experience was particularly agonizing because Lynn had planned to have the baby. But her boyfriend`s mother told her she should have an abortion because she was not good enough for her son.
Afterward, Lynn felt so depressed that she couldn`t get out of bed.
”I didn`t like getting up in the morning,” she says. ”I didn`t like going home and going to sleep. I didn`t like being around my mom. I didn`t like being around kids. I just hated being anywhere.”
When she found out she was pregnant this time, she briefly considered an abortion.
”I kept putting if off,” she says. ”I kept making excuses. It wasn`t me that wanted to do it. It was everyone else who wanted me to do it.”
She is embarrassed to be here. She fights with her mother. She cried on and off for half a day recently, and says she isn`t sure why.
”I`m ashamed of what I did,” she says. ”I feel bad. But I`m dealing with it.”
