Chapter 17

The issuance of Roe in 1973 had been a great comfort to Curtis Boyd; the same police car that had once quickened his heart now protected him and the clinics he ran in Texas and New Mexico. But abortion had also separated the doctor from his friends and family, his practice and home. And 1974 found Boyd, thirty-seven and single, living alone in a Dallas hotel.

Work was just a few blocks away, a small wooden building on Fairmount Street that had previously housed an architecture firm. Boyd’s clinic had four procedure rooms. They were always filled. Post-Roe, in 1973, the number of legal abortions in America had jumped 27 percent, to 744,600. Boyd had performed roughly 1 percent of them.

As the number of legal abortions rose, the number of illegal ones fell, from an estimated 130,000 in 1972 to 17,000 in 1975. The number of deaths resulting from illegal abortions fell, too, over that same period, from thirty-nine to four. It was, noted the author Leslie Reagan, “an improvement in maternal mortality that ranks with the invention of antisepsis and antibiotics.”

Boyd was amazed. As he later told the press, Roe had “disappeared” the fevers and bleedings and perforations he had witnessed during his medical training. But the stigma of abortion remained even after its legalization. Indeed, Boyd saw that many of his patients did not submit his bill to insurance for fear of suffering the scrutiny of a parent or spouse. He saw that a trickle of protestors began to block the entrance to his clinic, sitting and singing Christian songs until the police carried them away. And he saw that the state board of medical examiners was monitoring him, trying to trip him up on details, insisting, for example, that he add “M.D.” to the plastic lettering of his name outside his clinic.

Compliance, though, did nothing to ingratiate Boyd to the medical community. He tried desperately to destigmatize his work, turning his clinic into a nonprofit, complete with a board of local clergy and doctors. But the Dallas doctors kept away. “They thought, oh—he’s an abortionist,” says Boyd. “They didn’t want to associate with me.”

The pro-choice, however, embraced him. Boyd had made abortion obtainable even before the law had. Now that his work was legal, the doctor was invited here and there to help plumb the implications of Roe, of not only millions of abortions but the consequences of those abortions—the marriages they preserved or made avoidable, the genetic abnormalities such as Down syndrome that they reduced in disproportionate number. Among the activists and lawyers Boyd met were Weddington and Coffee, who joined him one evening at the Dallas home of abortion reformer Virginia Whitehill.

At every stop, Boyd was clear: abortion, as he saw it, was not the mere termination of pregnancy. It was a means to self-determination, fulfillment. He had never forgotten his high school crush, Virginia, who had been made to deliver an unwanted child and shamed for conceiving it. The experience, says Boyd, had changed Virginia; he had seen her once with her child, and she was “hard and closed.” It had changed Boyd, too. And he offered his patients counseling, each woman encouraged to discuss her feelings and thoughts so as to find, says Boyd, “a greater serenity.”

Boyd’s assistant, Reggie Cox, helped him instill that serenity. At his clinic in Santa Fe, she spoke, she says, “in low gentle tones,” offering patients instruction and explanation and massage, too, careful to rub a hand, a forehead. Patients were helped, and in 1974, Boyd hired a woman named Glenna Halvorson to do the same at his clinic in Dallas.

Halvorson was ten years his junior, an eldest child born in 1947 to an atheist and an agnostic in Modesto, California. “My friends and their mothers,” recalls Halvorson, “always wanted to save my soul.”

Free of religion, Halvorson had found sustenance in school: she earned a BA in literature and was pursuing a doctorate in developmental psychology. She was drawn to complex issues. (She’d worked as a counselor for both schizophrenics and the subjects of a Dallas desegregation project.) She took now to abortion, devising a regimen of questions to help guide a patient toward clarity and a plan of action. Was the pregnancy a secret? Did the patient wish to start a family? Might an abortion rupture her relationship with God?

Boyd was pleased. Halvorson was a very good counselor. She was also recently divorced and beautiful, lithe and fair with green eyes and long blond hair. The doctor asked Halvorson to assist him with the home birth of a friend in a house in the woods. The two were soon a couple, bound by their work.

That work, however, continued to isolate Boyd from other doctors, abortion a scarlet letter A. When he sought to join the board of a Catholic hospital in Santa Fe, it hesitated to approve him. And though Roe had relieved him of the great fear that a dead patient might lead to the loss of his license and to prison, carrying that fear for years had left him, he says, “emotionally exhausted.”

Boyd needed a change. Having trained doctors to run both his clinics, he left Texas for New Mexico in late 1974, retreating with Halvorson to Santa Fe and then to an adobe cottage in the hippie commune of Truchas. There, on a wooded ridge high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the couple raised vegetables and Arabian horses. The doctor delivered babies, too, presiding over the home births of new friends. Says Boyd: “I was trying to get centered again.”

The ranks of abortion providers, meantime, were growing; four years after Roe, the number of hospitals and clinics and private doctors performing abortions had increased by a thousand, to 2,526. And in 1977, a new organization of providers, the National Abortion Federation, invited Boyd to join its board. He accepted.

Boyd was overjoyed. Here at last was legitimacy, validation, community. And in 1978, after Boyd and Halvorson married on a mesa in Truchas, they said goodbye to their twenty acres of vegetables and horses and moved into a high-rise in Dallas. They were ready to return to work.

Boyd was delighted to be back in the procedure room. Restored by his exile, he remained at age forty expert at his craft—patient through dilation, skilled with a curette, able to evacuate a fetus through ever smaller cavities.

Still, Boyd knew his limits. The instruments needed to abort a fetus change as the fetus grows. And though Roe permitted abortions through twenty-four weeks, Boyd performed none past sixteen. “Just because it’s legal,” says Boyd, “doesn’t mean there’s a doctor who knows how to do it.”

Still, five years after Roe, Boyd now wished to go further.

Boyd knew that to move past sixteen weeks would increase the risk of complications. But he now had hospital admitting privileges in both Texas and New Mexico. They enabled Boyd, he says, to “take a little more risk.” Slowly, he pushed deeper into pregnancy, aborting larger and larger fetuses with larger and larger forceps and dilators. “It was just a matter of skill development,” says Boyd. By 1980, he had reached twenty weeks. He wished to go further still.

More than a century before, doctors in Scotland had used a genus of seaweed called laminaria as a dilating agent. The seaweed expanded as it absorbed water, and the doctors found that if they inserted into the vagina dried sticks of it packed in wet sponge, the sticks expanded and the cervix dilated.

Boyd was initially skeptical of laminaria’s usefulness. But medical professionals in Japan had used it in recent years to great effect. And after a gynecologist he knew named Mildred Hanson returned from Japan with sticks of it and instructed Boyd on technique, he marveled. The seaweed, a brown algae, opened a cervix more safely and easily than any manual dilator. Within a year, Boyd was using it to abort fetuses up to twenty-four weeks. He had reached viability.

Boyd worked ten hours a day, five days a week. With repetition came refinement, the lessening of pain and time. Boyd shaved minutes off the procedure that had come to be called “dilation and evacuation”—second-trimester abortions dropping from thirty minutes to fifteen, first-trimesters to ten.

Boyd had long taught the procedure to the doctors who worked for him, instructing them on how to use forceps “to disarticulate the fetus,” he says, “to take it out in parts” before a curette and vacuum then emptied the uterus of any fetal remains. Now, he began to teach it through the National Abortion Federation, running NAF workshops that drew hundreds. At every turn, Boyd also communicated the radical notion that abortion was something positive, an assertion of self. And yet, having finally reached viability, his thoughts turned from the pregnant woman to the unborn. “I began to identify more with the fetus,” says Boyd. “It’s a living human organism from conception and it has the potential to become a person.”

Boyd was unsure when that potential was realized. Still, he remained certain that if ever a woman—in the thirty or so years during which she could conceive—found herself carrying a fetus she did not wish to birth, it would be his duty, his privilege, to abort that pregnancy.

His wife, Glenna, was no less committed to providing abortions. She worked beside her husband, their days crowded with patients, their clinics performing some thirty abortions per day, some eight thousand per year. Nearly all were routine. Just one in five were second-trimester, one in one thousand beset by complications.

In 1980, that one in one thousand was named Vanessa Preston. Preston was twenty-two, a minister’s wife who had a young child and was not ready for another. She was in her second trimester and came to Boyd for a dilation and extraction, the procedure the pro-life would rebrand “partial-birth abortion.” Boyd had begun the abortion when amniotic fluid entered Preston’s bloodstream and lungs. She had a seizure and went into cardiac arrest. Boyd resuscitated her. But her heart stopped again. And the doctor, having safely seen through more than fifty thousand abortions, had to tell a husband that his wife was dead. “It was a horrible experience,” recalls Boyd. “I kept thinking, I have these magic hands. Magic only takes you so far.”

A medical examiner exonerated Boyd. But pro-lifers didn’t, heckling him daily, calling him “murderer” as he walked to and from his clinic.

LATER THAT YEAR, Ronald Reagan was elected president. He quickly let down the pro-life movement when a human life amendment died in the Senate and he said little. Still, throughout his presidency, Reagan remained vigorously pro-life—nominating William Rehnquist, who had dissented in Roe, to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, and withholding federal funds from family planning concerns, both at home and abroad, that performed or espoused abortion.

Boyd worried that such policies would raise the cost of abortion; the Hyde amendment already banned Medicaid dollars from offsetting it. Wanting to remain affordable, the doctor kept his fee low—$150 per procedure. Demand was great; Reagan was still in his first term when Boyd opened a third clinic, three procedure rooms in Albuquerque. Boyd was earning some $150,000 a year.

Back in the seventies, Boyd had begun to use his dollars to influence elected officials—a thousand dollars here or there getting him face time with senators and attorneys general. He would then share with them polls indicating that their constituencies were pro-choice.

Now, a decade after Roe, Boyd was among the larger private abortion providers in the country, and he increased his lobbying, meeting annually with a hundred or so politicians sympathetic to his cause. His pitch, he says, was simple: “I’ll campaign for you or I’ll campaign against you. Whatever does you the most good.”

Boyd, however, kept his politics out of his clinics, and instructed his fifty-plus employees to do the same. Says Boyd: “The service has to speak for itself.”

That service was the legal and affordable termination of unwanted pregnancy. Boyd and his wife wished it to be comfortable, too, and sought new ways to relieve their patients of pain: visualization, hypnosis, nitrous oxide. The pro-life were unmoved. Glenna wrote in her dissertation of the harassment she and Boyd endured. They were called killers, said to be poor practitioners motivated by money. She titled her dissertation “Surviving a Holy War.”

The front lines of that war were abortion clinics. The election of Reagan had inspired the foot soldiers who stood in protest outside them, and a growing number now gathered daily on Fairmount Street to yell into bullhorns and hand out leaflets and block Boyd’s door and sometimes burst through it.

There was little to deter such protests; obstructing clinics was a misdemeanor, not a felony. Reagan looked the other way, even sending a letter of blessing to the Florida church of a woman whose daughter participated in an attack on several clinics. In his second term, such attacks increased in number and violence—windows broken, fires set, bombs thrown.

Doctors were chastened; a 1985 poll revealed that while eight of ten obstetricians and gynecologists were pro-choice, just one in three performed abortions. And so, even as the number of abortions in America did not diminish under Reagan, the annual total steady at 1.58 million, the number of abortion providers did. The sum total of hospitals, clinics and private doctors providing abortions fell by 11 percent, to 2,582. The decline would continue well past Reagan’s presidency.

Boyd was a target. He received a handwritten death threat, a protestor asked if an accident had befallen his son Kyle, and a Molotov cocktail filled the lab of his Dallas clinic with smoke. But the doctor was undeterred and protected his staff, outfitting his clinics with cameras and motion detectors and automatic locks and bulletproof glass and buzzers and intercoms and police-alert buttons. He hired security guards, too. Even so, on Christmas Eve in 1988, an arsonist torched his Dallas clinic. The damage totaled $100,000.

OVER THE COURSE OF FIFTEEN YEARS, Boyd had come to recognize many of his protestors. Some of them came to him for abortions, which he provided.

That a woman would protest abortion and yet seek one herself was no surprise to Boyd. Men had secretly brought their girlfriends, daughters and wives to him for as long as he’d been in practice. A predicament could take hold of anyone. Abortion was far too commonplace to be had only by those who supported it; by 1989, nearly 24 million abortions had been performed in the U.S. since Roe. Two Canadian studies would report that 34 percent of women who had one favored “abortion restrictions,” while 43 percent “voiced anti-choice attitudes.” And analysis of data from a Guttmacher Institute survey of patients would find that 4.1% of women who had abortions believed abortion should be illegal “in all or most cases.”

Boyd understood that contradiction. The doctor did not shy away from the unalterable fact that abortion was the intentional killing of prenatal life. And he saw clearly that, a generation after Roe, the stigma enveloping abortion had grown so strong that even those who devoted their lives to providing it were not immune; his aide Reggie Cox retired now, in 1989, having never told her family of the nineteen years she had worked alongside him.

AMERICAN LAW IS mindful of the degree to which abortion and, more generally, sex, is stigmatized. Though the law stipulates that a defendant (and the public) have a right to know who has filed suit, a 1961 case involving sex prompted the Supreme Court, for the first time, to grant a plaintiff pseudonymity. A decade later, it was sex again that prompted the Court to allow Norma to be called Jane Roe.

It was thus little surprise that even Roe’s lawyer had not revealed that she herself had had an abortion. Asked in 1986 if she’d had one, Weddington had responded that the question was “irrelevant.”

In a sense, she was right. The lawyer no more owed an explanation as to why she had fought to legalize abortion than any woman owed an explanation as to why she had one. And yet, of course, the question of whether Weddington had had an abortion was entirely relevant. For experience forms conviction; Weddington would later confide that in the momentary hush before she argued Roe in the Supreme Court, she had thought back to her abortion. And when, in a few years, she would finally write of her abortion publicly, she did so, she said, “to explain . . . why I had spent this much time on this issue.”

And therein lies the paradox of legal abortion. It rests upon a right to privacy. And so, though it is common—at 1992 abortion rates, one in every 2.3 women in America would at some point have one—nearly all of the women who do keep it secret, which enables half of the country to castigate the procedure as something cruel and unfamiliar.

If there is an antidote to secrecy, it is revelation. As Justice Blackmun noted in his preamble to Roe, exposure — to a story, a person, “the raw edges of human existence”—can change a mind. The psychologist Gordon Allport demonstrated this with his “contact theory,” which argues that interaction with a minority group diminishes prejudice. As Herman Melville wrote: “see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them.”

The pro-choice had thus pursued a strategy of exposure; dating back to pre-Roe “speak-outs” and the 1972 debut issue of Ms. magazine, there were women who went public with their abortions. And when abortion returned now to the Supreme Court in the case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 2,887 women recalled their abortions in an enormous amicus brief, each stepping forward, as poet Adrienne Rich once beseeched, “to take responsibility for the voicing of her experience.”

In the months preceding Webster, no woman had voiced her experience as loudly as Norma McCorvey. The former plaintiff was everywhere—on podiums and TV. Norma wished the world to know that she was Jane Roe. And, having carried a pregnancy that helped others to end theirs, she went looking, this same spring of 1989, for the child she had birthed—a baby turned teenager who was oblivious to who she was.