Mercy Street(55)

Her eyes were red from crying. Claudia slid a box of tissues across the desk.

“Massachusetts law is very specific,” she said. “To get an abortion, you have to do it before twenty-four weeks.”

“Okay, but four days?” Ladan sank into the puffy yellow jacket they’d given her at the church, a type of garment she’d never had a use for, never known existed, until she came to Boston. “What difference does it make, four days?”

It was a reasonable question. Morally, the law made no sense. On Monday an AB would have been acceptable. On Thursday it was a crime.

“I’m sorry, but we have no choice in the matter. That’s the law.” Claudia had said these words before, and would say them again. It was the one part of her job she hated, the moment she dreaded most.

Ladan made a sound low in her throat, a moan ending in a sob. “So what am I going to do now?”

“We can talk about that,” Claudia said, feeling her heart. “But first I want to understand why you waited so long. Did you have second thoughts about having an abortion? Are you sure this is what you want?”

“No second thoughts,” Ladan said firmly. “No baby. I know from the beginning it’s not possible.”

She explained that she had a child already, six years old, born over there when she still had a husband. The boy was her heart and her life and yet he made everything harder. When you were just yourself you could live anywhere, sleep anywhere. You could work the worst kind of job cleaning floors at South Station; you could work all day and all night because what else did you have to do?

“One child already makes it harder,” she told Claudia. “Two is not possible.”

When Claudia asked about the man involved with the pregnancy, Ladan waved a hand dismissively. “Dee is his name. He’s just a kid.”

In fact he was her age exactly; he only seemed younger. “Born in America makes you younger,” Ladan said.

That morning, when the security guard asked him to empty his pockets, Dee had said, What for?

Dee was good with her boy, but that didn’t mean she was going to have a baby with him. Where did he work? Where did his money come from? He wasn’t putting on a uniform to go work at Burger King. Dee would end up in jail or dead like her husband, and then what would she have?

“You sound very sure,” Claudia said. “About the abortion. So why did you wait so long?”

“I didn’t wait!” Ladan cried, loud enough to be heard in the waiting room. “Three months ago I call for an appointment. They put my name on the list. They say they’ll call me back so I wait and wait, but they never call. I call again and they say okay, but I have to have counseling first. Then, for the abortion, I need to make another appointment.”

“Wait, what?” Claudia could make no sense of what she was hearing. “Who told you that?”

“The counselor. Katie was her name. The girl who answered the phone.” Ladan looked perplexed. “Did she make a mistake?”

No, Claudia thought. Please, not again.

SOME YEARS BACK, A NEW CLINIC HAD OPENED IN THE FENWAY, two miles west of Mercy Street. Claudia learned, later, that clinic was the wrong word, since no actual medicine was practiced there. Women’s Health Network was a crisis pregnancy center, run by an Oklahoma nonprofit called the Whole Family Initiative. It existed for one reason only: to trick women out of getting abortions. The place was a fraud.

The con was simple. When a woman called to make an appointment for an AB, she was connected to a friendly young “counselor,” recruited from a Christian college in the Midwest. An appointment was made, an ultrasound performed—the image enhanced to make the fetus look like a full-term infant, a plump and adorable Kewpie doll. After the ultrasound came a lengthy counseling session, an aggressive sales pitch by a Christian adoption agency. If the patient still wanted an AB, she was offered a second appointment, which would be canceled and rescheduled several times. By the time she figured out what was happening, it was usually too late to terminate. This was no accident. It had been the goal all along.

When the bogus clinic first opened, Claudia and Mary made a recon trip to check it out. Walking through the front door was a surreal experience. The Whole Family Initiative had gone to great lengths, and considerable expense, to replicate the peculiar atmosphere of their workplace: the same potted plants and comfy chairs, well-thumbed magazines on the same innocuous subjects: cooking, travel, decorating. (Everybody eats. Everybody likes sunsets. Everybody has a couch.) The sign out front was painted in the same colors, blue and sunny yellow. Even the typeface—a rounded sans serif—was identical.

To the untrained eye, the overall effect was convincing. To the trained eye, it was all wrong. The place had no metal detector, no cameras, not even a security guard. At a real clinic, such measures would be automatic. At a real clinic, the staff would be afraid.

The other difference was the toys. The reception area resembled a day-care center, or the waiting room of a pediatrician’s office. In one corner was a Fisher-Price workbench and a racetrack for tiny cars; in the opposite corner, a miniature kitchen with toy stove and sink. Toys for boys and toys for girls.

The ruse was breathtakingly elaborate—and from what Claudia could tell, it sometimes worked. The victims were usually poor, usually young. Some, like Ladan, were recent immigrants. The Hannah Ramseys of the world—rich White girls torn between Yale and Dartmouth—rarely fell for the con.