Mercy Street(8)

By week twenty-three, names had been chosen, cribs purchased, baby showers planned.

Minors were easier. First Claudia saw the girl alone. Then she met with the parent or legal guardian, who signed the consent form. To get an AB in Massachusetts before age eighteen, you needed a parent’s permission, unless you happened to be married. In the eyes of the Commonwealth, having a husband made you an adult.

The consent form had to be signed in person. This made things difficult if the parent was missing or incarcerated or deployed overseas, unable to jet back from Afghanistan to sign a piece of paper. In other cases, parents were available, but—for one reason or another—the girl refused to tell them she was pregnant. For these patients, Massachusetts law provided an additional, equally shitty option: a judicial bypass, an order signed by a judge.

For one reason or another. For some girls, home was a dangerous place.

Getting a JB wasn’t easy. Not every teenager had the sangfroid to stand before a judge—who was nearly always old, White, and male—and beg for permission to do as she wished with her one and only life. And yet, faced with the prospect of confiding in their own parents, a surprising number would rather tell it to a judge.

JBs were usually sixteen or seventeen. That isn’t to say that younger girls didn’t get pregnant, just that they were unlikely to pull themselves together to appear before a judge.

With some judges, the interview was a formality. Others asked probing questions: the girl’s career and educational goals, her reasons for terminating, whether she’d been pregnant before, what form of birth control she planned to use in the future. Really, they could ask whatever they wanted, and none of your fucking business was never an acceptable answer.

Important note: younger girls did get pregnant. Depending on where and how and with whom she lived, a thirteen-year-old girl in America had, by Claudia’s estimate, a medium to high chance of being messed with.

With the JBs she restrained herself. She resisted the urge to mother them, to scold and lecture: Stay in school. Protect yourself. Choose the future over the present. Leave nothing to chance. It was the only way—if you were born female, and especially if you were poor—to own your own life.

Claudia said none of these things. Instead she found them attorneys (at no cost to the patient—the lawyers were paid by the Commonwealth). Once a court date was set, she arranged transportation to the courthouse, a note from Dr. Gurvitch to explain the girl’s absence from school. Then she prepped the patient for her interview with the judge.

Sometimes the patient resisted. A few years back, she’d prepped a JB whose career goal was to play in the WNBA. Claudia wasn’t sure that would fly with the judge, so she suggested talking about other things—the patient’s part-time job at Lady Foot Locker, the possibility of community college. But Ana F.—a gorgeous Dominican girl from Dorchester, lanky as a supermodel—wouldn’t have it. She sat impassively in Claudia’s office, her long arms folded across her chest.

No way, man. I’m gonna play ball.

I DON’T KNOW HOW YOU CAN WORK HERE.

It was not, in Claudia’s view, an extraordinary way to make a living. On the phone and in person, she took care of patients—as many women did, as her own mother had done. The patients—pregnant or not, in crisis or not—needed information. They needed pregnancy tests, birth control pills, STD panels. They needed Depo shots, IUDs, antibiotics, pelvic exams.

She took care of patients. The rest—the angry protestors, the threats and insults—didn’t touch her. Each morning she rode the train to work. On Mercy Street she pushed her way through the crowd.





2


By the time she left work it was fully dark, the early dusk of deep winter. Traffic crept along the Methadone Mile, a grim stretch of Mass Ave studded with clinics. Panhandlers camped out at a busy intersection, holding handmade signs:

WOUNDED VETERAN

SOBER AND STRUGGLING

ANYTHING HELPS

Claudia picked her way along the icy sidewalk, into a stiff wind. When her phone rang in her pocket, she knew without looking that it was Stuart calling. She pictured him idling on the expressway in his silver Audi, part of the huffing bolus of German sedans creeping north to Andover.

“Distract me,” he said.

Stuart was a collector of distractions. His phone was loaded with podcasts, videos, e-books, and sudoku. Claudia was simply another type of content he could access, her voice amplified by the excellent Bluetooth speaker on his steering wheel. When he wasn’t consuming entertainment, he sculled the Charles and ran a biotech start-up and wrote numbingly detailed reviews of high-end audio equipment, which he posted to online forums read by other awkward men. In ten months of dating they had discovered no common interests beyond sex and dinner, a common condition among couples who’d met online.

Claudia told him about her day, the Ash Wednesday protestors. Stuart described a promising meeting with a venture capitalist. The unrelatedness of these topics made transitions impossible, so they simply took turns talking. It didn’t matter. This was just a courtesy call, to confirm their intention to continue sleeping together. Glittering repartee wasn’t the point.

The terms of their relationship were dictated by traffic. A weeknight date meant sitting in nerve-shattering gridlock, so their in-person contact was limited to alternating weekends, when Stuart’s ex-wife had the kids. Twice a month they grilled steaks at his house in the suburbs and had sex several times, a two-week supply. Claudia excelled at this type of dating. Like a city gardener who grows tiny tomatoes in clay pots, she had realistic expectations. There was a natural limit on how big such plants could grow.