“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.
The fake clinic stayed open for nearly a year, until the Whole Family Initiative quietly folded; its founder, caught in a sexting scandal, had resigned in disgrace. The building in the Fenway sat empty for months, until it reopened as an Aveda hair salon. Claudia hadn’t thought about the fake clinic in years. Now, apparently, another crisis pregnancy center had opened its doors.
LADAN WAS SKEPTICAL.
“But that’s crazy!” she said when Claudia had finished explaining. “Why do they want to trick people like that?”
“Religion, mostly. They think God is on their side.”
Ladan said that she was familiar with that argument. Everything she’d ever been forced to do was because God said so.
Claudia was impressed by her equanimity. Considering that she was pregnant and hadn’t eaten in twelve hours and had been conned into having a baby she didn’t want, her composure was remarkable. If she slapped me, Claudia thought, I would understand.
Ladan leaned forward and laid her head on Claudia’s desk. “I’m so hungry,” she moaned. Her hair was twisted into tiny braids, each thinner than a pencil and glistening with hair oil that smelled like oranges.
Claudia reached into the desk drawer and handed her a granola bar.
“I feel so stupid,” Ladan said, chewing. “I should have known it was taking too long.”
“You’re not stupid. None of this is your fault.” Claudia handed her a second granola bar. She’d demolished the first one in three bites.
“The counselor was so nice,” Ladan said. “Katie was her name. She even gave me her cell phone number. She said I could call her anytime.”
“Do you still have that number?”
Ladan took a phone from her pocket, poked and swiped at the screen. As she read off the digits, Claudia wrote them on her desk calendar, an annual gift from their sales rep at Quincy Adams Medical Supply.
“So what am I going to do now?” Ladan asked.
It was the only question that mattered.
Claudia explained that in some states, the law was different. In Virginia, abortion was legal up to twenty-five weeks.
“Okay, then. I’m going to Virginia.” Ladan got to her feet, gingerly stretching her lower back, as though preparing to lift something heavy.
“Where is Virginia?” she said.
CLAUDIA SPENT HER LUNCH HOUR ON THE PHONE. IT TOOK SOME doing, a few heated exchanges with receptionists, but she managed to secure a last-minute appointment at the Wellwoman Clinic in Alexandria, Virginia. The AB would cost two thousand dollars, more than three times what Mercy Street charged. Ladan would pay half. A Massachusetts charity, the Reproductive Choice Action Network, would cover the difference, plus a round-trip bus ticket to Alexandria.
These arrangements in place, Claudia made two more phone calls. The first was to Ladan. The second was to the number she’d written on the desk calendar. She had no clear idea what she was going to say to the fake counselor at the fake clinic. Mainly she needed information. At the very least, she needed a name.
The line rang twice before voice mail picked up. A young female voice, full of sunshine: Hi there! You have reached Katie at Women’s Choice Boston. I can’t take your call right now, but leave me a message! I’ll call you back the first chance I get. Have an awesome day!
Claudia was tempted to leave a message. The urge was nearly overpowering. Katie, this is Ladan. Guess what? I’m still pregnant. Please advise.
In the end she hung up without speaking, having gotten what she needed. She had a name.
“Women’s Choice,” a name intended to confuse. The clinic on Mercy Street was called Women’s Options. A few miles to the west, in Brookline, was the Choice Center for Women’s Health. Across the river, in Cambridge, was the Women’s Center for Reproductive Choice.
Claudia booted up the hulking desktop computer, rarely used. A Google search for “Women’s Choice Boston” took her to a slickly designed website:
WOMEN’S CHOICE
Free pregnancy testing
State-of-the-art ultrasound
Options counseling