As he expected, his grandmama started to cry. I lost my baby and my grandbaby, she said after a long moment. Maybe now some other woman won’t.
In fact the only objection his grandmama had had to his career was that Louie might be killed by an anti-abortion activist. Louie knew that his name had been published on a website, along with other doctors who performed abortions, with information about where he lived and worked. He had known George Tiller, a doctor who’d been murdered while he was at church. Dr. Tiller had been wearing a protective vest at the time, but the gunman had shot him in the head.
Louie refused to put on a vest. The way he saw it, the minute he did, they had won. And yet, every morning he had to run the gauntlet of protesters. He would sit in his car for an extra minute, taking a deep breath, steeling himself for the vitriol and the love bombers—We’re praying for you, Dr. Ward. Have a blessed day! He would think of George Tiller and David Gunn and John Britton and Barnett Slepian, all killed by activists who were not satisfied to simply stand in a line and hurl insults.
Louie would count to ten, say an Our Father, and then in one smooth movement, gather his briefcase and exit the car. He’d hit the power lock while he was walking, face forward, eyes on the ground, refusing to engage.
Mostly.
There was one anti, a middle-aged white man, who repeatedly called out, “Sinful Negro baby killer!” Louie had ignored him, until one day he yelled, “Do I have to call you a nigger to get a rise out of you?”
That—well. That stopped Louie dead in his tracks.
“What part of me is most upsetting to you?” Louie asked calmly. “The fact that I am African American? Or the fact that I perform abortions?”
“The abortions,” the man said.
“Then what does my race have to do with anything?”
The protestor shrugged. “It doesn’t. I just throw that in.”
Louie almost had to admire the man’s scorched earth tactics.
There was only one reason he got out of his car every damn morning: the women he treated, who had to walk through that same gauntlet. How could he be any less brave than they were?
The antis wanted the women who chose abortions to feel isolated, the only people in the universe who had ever made such a selfish decision. What Louie wanted, for every woman who walked through the doors of the Center, was to make her understand she was not alone, and never would be. The most ardent antis didn’t realize how many women they knew who’d had an abortion. Wipe away the stigma and all you were left with was your neighbor, your teacher, your grocery clerk, your landlady.
He imagined what it felt like for them—to have made a decision that came at a colossal emotional and financial cost—and then to have that decision called into question. Not to mention the implication that they were not capable of managing their own healthcare. Where were the protesters at cancer centers, for example, urging chemotherapy patients to steer clear of the risks of toxins? Women were capable of taking aspirin if they had a headache, and the intrinsic risk of aspirin was far greater than that of any of the abortion medications that currently existed. If a woman chose a medication abortion, why did the mifepristone have to be taken in front of a doctor, as if she were an inpatient in a psychiatric ward who couldn’t be relied on to swallow a pill?
Louie believed that those white men with their signs and slogans were not really there for the unborn, but there for the women who carried them. They couldn’t control women’s sexual independence. To them, this was the next best thing.
Louie shifted and cried out as pain stabbed through his leg. The tourniquet had slowed the bleeding, until the shooter had—in a fit of pique—kicked him hard in the spot where the bullet had entered.
It was hell being a physician but being too injured to treat the others who’d been hurt. That had fallen to the other medical professional trapped here—the nurse, Izzy. He hadn’t worked with her before, but that wasn’t unprecedented. Vonita, the clinic owner, employed a rotating parade of healthcare professionals brave or stupid enough to show up every day in spite of the threats.
Had employed. Past tense.
He closed his eyes, fighting the feelings that rose in him.
She hadn’t been the only casualty. Izzy had tried—desperately and fruitlessly—to save the life of Olive, the older woman. This was true collateral damage: clearly a woman in her late sixties wasn’t at the clinic to terminate a pregnancy, but she had still been on the receiving end of the shooter’s rage. Izzy now drew a cotton drape over the body. At Louie’s moan of pain she turned to check the binding around his thigh. “I’m all right,” he said, trying to get her to stop fussing, when to his surprise she did. She bolted a few feet to the left and threw up in a trash can.
One of the other women—his last patient, Joy (formerly fifteen weeks along and now, Louie thought with satisfaction, un-pregnant) handed Izzy a tissue from a box on a table in the waiting room. The shooter looked at Izzy in disgust, but didn’t speak. He was too busy tending to his own injury. Izzy wiped her mouth and then returned her attention to Louie’s thigh. “I’m that bad off, huh?” he said wryly.
She looked up at him, her cheeks flushed. “No, sir. I don’t think he caused any major damage when he kicked you. Any additional major damage,” she amended.
Louie looked down at her hands, pressing gently around the wound. It hurt like hell. “How far along are you?” he asked.
He waited until she looked up at him. “How did you know?”
Louie raised an eyebrow.
“Twelve weeks,” Izzy said.
He watched her hand steal to her abdomen, her palm a shield.
“You’re gonna get out of here,” he promised. “You and your partner are going to have a beautiful bouncing baby.”
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
Louie thought of all the times he’d administered what he called “verbicaine”—just chatting to ease the women who were so tense about what was going to happen. He would ask if a woman made her grits sweet or savory. If she’d listened to Beyoncé’s latest album. What sorority she belonged to. He prided himself on being able to get any woman relaxed, while he calmly and professionally performed the procedure. What he heard most often from his patients was “You mean you’re already finished?”
But his reassurance had not worked on Izzy.
Izzy didn’t believe him when he said she was going to get out of here.
Because, frankly, neither did he.
—
JOY HAD TOLD ONLY ONE person about her pregnancy—her best friend, a waitress at the Departure Lounge, a martini bar in the Jackson airport. Rosie had been the one who stood beside her in the ladies’ room, counting down a timer on her phone, while they watched the little plus sign appear on the stick. “What are you going to do?” Rosie had asked, and Joy hadn’t answered.
A week later, she made an appointment at the Center. That same day she told Rosie she had miscarried. The way Joy figured, this was just one minor inaccuracy, a small erroneous footnote. The outcome would be the same.
Even though she knew Rosie would have driven her for her procedure, Joy wanted and needed to do it alone. She had been stupid enough to get herself into this mess; she would be smart enough to get herself out.