After the Fire--a Chill : The Torching of Bakersfield’s Only Abortion Clinic Leaves City With Fewer Options, Greater Fears

Abortion is not a word you want to use lightly here.

“Termination of pregnancy” sounds so much more discreet. And by using the euphemism, you gain those essential extra seconds--while the listener digests your meaning--to arm yourself for battle.

Until 3:20 a.m. on Sept. 20, Bakersfield seemed like any other small city with a lively abortion debate--a friendly place where you didn’t have to watch your words, or your back.

But over the years, without most people noticing, the debate became an argument and then a war--its first shot fired on that fateful Monday when a figure emerged in the pre-dawn chill, poured gasoline along the perimeter of the only place in town that provided elective abortions, and burned it to the ground.

The $1.4 million fire at Family Planning Associates was so fierce it twisted steel beams into molten pretzels and demolished eight other businesses--all empty for the night--including one that provides home health care to the terminally ill. So far, no arrests have been made.

Today, three weeks after the fire, Bakersfield is silent on the subject and the issues that surround it--a clammed-up city, filled with people eager to discuss potential tragedies created by the blaze, but afraid of repercussions if they do. To the outsider, it seems to be a city at war with itself.

*

In hindsight, it is clear that Bakersfield was a hot spot waiting to ignite. Eight years ago the local newspaper, the Bakersfield Californian, began to chronicle anti-abortion events: small prayer vigils at churches, which grew into big prayer marches on city streets, which escalated into noisy demonstrations on major arteries, which expanded into targeting and picketing of private homes and businesses where occupants were thought to be involved in some aspect of providing elective abortions.

Nurses, doctors and clinic administrators had to face the pickets when they fetched the morning paper or left their offices for lunch. Embarrassing? Of course. What must the neighbors think? But this is America, they told one another, and we uphold free speech. Except for the few who complained of harassment to the city attorney, most seem to have borne the burden with good will.

In April, the letters and questionnaires started to arrive at certain obstetricians’ offices, inquiring whether the doctor performs abortions or refers patients to clinics that perform them.

Dr. Tracy Flanagan, 36, an ob/gyn physician then in private practice, received such a letter and was outraged at the implied intimidation and threat. She refused to answer, and received a second letter, which gave her a deadline and warned: “If we do not receive a response from you, we will consider this to be an indication that you perform abortions.”

It also said she would be “outed”--a tactic that involves publishing names of doctors who allegedly perform abortions and picketing at those doctors’ homes and offices. In a small city like this, with about 50 ob/gyns for a population of 200,000, such publicity could ruin a practice.

Flanagan, who has since left Bakersfield to become an assistant professor of obstetrics/gynecology at University of California, San Francisco, says she was frightened both for herself and her family. “Some colleagues said I shouldn’t answer. Others said I should take a public stand (to protest the letter-writers’ methods). But Dr. (David) Gunn had already been shot in Florida, and it was unclear to me just how far these people would go. So I sent a letter saying I did not perform abortions, which was correct at the time.

“You have to understand Bakersfield,” Flanagan said. “It’s a born-again-Christian kind of town in which there’s a lot of sympathy” for the anti-abortion movement.

What some in the community also say is that Bakersfield is small and cohesive enough so that if you’re not with the majority on any given issue, you could be considered against them. And if you’re against them, there’s nowhere to hide from the array of indignities to which you might be subjected in such a seemingly idyllic town with so much conflict roiling below its surface.

In fact, none of the physicians who performed abortions at the Family Planning Associates clinic even lived in Bakersfield, Flanagan said. They flew into town each day for their appointments, then flew out. Why was this necessary? “No local doctor could do that work and live in that town,” she said.

As a waitress in a midtown coffee shop explained: “Bakersfield doesn’t believe in abortion. I know women who have had abortions here who say it isn’t right for others to have them--but in their case it just had to be done.”

The undercurrent of conflict may have been evident, said Fire Marshal Larry Toler, in charge of investigating the arson. “But there was never any violence, no overt hostility to indicate something like this (fire) might happen. We didn’t have the slightest hint of what would come.”

*

Bakersfield’s rude awakening occurred the morning after the fire, when the city that thinks it doesn’t believe in abortion realized it was a city where abortion was no longer available.

Switchboards at Kern Medical Center, a county health facility, were flooded with calls from women searching for an alternative to the gutted clinic.

Counselors at the city’s 12 high schools were booked solid in closed-door meetings with teen girls--and in some cases, their boyfriends--who had planned to get secret abortions at the clinic.

Kern County, with Bakersfield at its heart, has the highest pregnancy rate for 10-to-14-year-olds in California, and the fourth-highest rate for all other teens--and it is rising. The Kern County health department reports there were were 16.2 live births per thousand teen-agers in 1991, up from 15.5 per thousand in 1991. The agency has no statistics on teen-age abortions.

The morning after the fire, 17 chairs in the waiting room at the Bakersfield Planned Parenthood were filled with “refugees” from the burned-out clinic, which had provided a wide range of women’s health services, including cancer screening and birth control.

No matter where they went, or to whom they spoke, women in Bakersfield who wanted to terminate a pregnancy were told it could not be done in town. The nearest places were Fresno, Ventura, or Los Angeles--each about two hours away by car.

No big deal, you might think. Just hop in your car and go. But you’d be wrong. As one school official, who requested anonymity, explained: “Bakersfield is in a time warp. For many, the outside world never penetrates. And for these people, Los Angeles seems as far away as Europe does to me or you. It’s inconceivable to them that they would be able to arrange such a trip for such a purpose.”

When calls didn’t taper off as expected at Kern Medical Center, officials placed an ad in the Bakersfield Californian, saying that the facility does not do elective abortions--i.e., abortions not considered medically necessary--under any circumstances for anyone.

A Kern Medical Center official, who did not want his name used, said the hospital performed elective abortions until 1989 (a year in which local abortion foes stepped up their protests).

“That year, the chairman of the ob/gyn department was replaced and the hospital policy was changed. Our faculty physicians decided abortion was against their moral values. The new chairman decided we would no longer do the procedure. He is a fertility specialist and it goes against his grain. Since 1989, we’ve been referring those cases to Family Planning Associates. In fact, almost every ob/gyn in town referred their elective abortion cases there. Until the fire it was no big deal.”

Since the fire, phones to Family Planning Associates have been hooked up to its Fresno branch. When reporters phone, they are told, “No one here will talk to the press. We are instructed to hang up.” And they do.

And, it seems, anyone in town who works for a health-care facility, from telephone operators to administrators and physicians, is afraid to speak on the record. The same goes for county health officials, school officials, and even people on the street who seem eager to discuss the fire and the issues surrounding it, but seem even more frightened of repercussions if their views become known.

The director of a community health-care facility that offers pregnancy testing, obstetrics and gynecological care but does not perform elective abortions, declined to talk to a reporter. Finally, after several calls, an associate of the director took the phone and said: “Who knows where the nuts are, and what they will do next? We do not want our clinic name even mentioned in a newspaper article that uses the word abortion. We don’t want trouble here.”

Thomas Jones, superintendent of the Kern High School District, politely declined to discuss abortion as it relates to pregnant teen-agers in his schools, because “We, as a school district, have no policy on that. It is an issue very deeply dividing our community.”

He agreed to permit interviews with school guidance counselors, provided that the names of the school and the counselor were not used, and that the identities were in no way recognizable.

The educators interviewed say they are afraid--for themselves and for the pregnant children whom they counsel, who already have problems enough. Those who choose abortion may be confronted with no access to transportation, no access to a phone from which they can make long-distance calls to clinics in other cities, perhaps no one to talk to about their plight--or all the above.

“We are an oil, farming and industrial community with a high transient population,” says one counselor. “We have a good many poor students, some of whom have abusive parents or parents on alcohol or drugs. Some students don’t even have a home to go to at night, and no one to help them make such a big decision about whether to have the baby or not--except for school counselors like us.

“We give them the name of three medical facilities in town, where they can get birth-control information and, hopefully, some good guidance on their options.”

“It sounds simple, if you don’t know the reality,” says another counselor. “But the truth is that kids who are accidentally pregnant and don’t feel ready for a baby are in a tragic position now that the clinic has burned down.

“Even if they learn where abortions are available, they may lack the ability to obtain one. Many students--freshmen and sophomores especially--don’t have licenses or cars or friends with cars. It is even difficult for them to get into town, let alone find someone to drive them to another city,” the counselor says.

“And what do they tell their parents if they disappear for a whole day? And where do they get the money for all this? Most of our kids would never tell their parents they’re pregnant, unless they decide to have the baby.

“Before Family Planning Associates burned, it was difficult enough for kids who decided on abortion to arrange it. But most managed somehow. Now, we fear there will be tragedies because they can’t get to Fresno, Ventura or Los Angeles--they haven’t the skills and capability to find a way--and we are frightened of what they will do to themselves.”

In Bakersfield, these educators say, it’s mostly the rich kids who swiftly and secretly get abortions. “They feel empowered, that they have control over their own lives; they want to graduate high school and go to college. They have friends or family members with a car and cash. They find a way.” Many poor kids don’t want abortions, the counselors say, either out of religious conviction, a desire to have something that really belongs to them, or a lack of belief in their own futures. And perhaps just as often, the counselors say, these teens don’t get abortions because they just can’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together before it’s too late.

Stephen Hanson, a physician assistant and manager of Bakersfield Planned Parenthood, is one of the few people in the city willing to talk for the record. His facility does not perform abortions, he emphasizes, but nonetheless has been subjected to threats, and round-the-clock security has been “beefed up since the fire.”

“The fire created a great crisis,” he says, because the burned-down clinic offered health services for low-income and often uninsured women who can’t get those services anywhere else.

“Along with cancer screening, birth control and other preventive health measures, FPA did tubal ligations and sterilizations, which we do not do,” Hanson says. “Now there’s a tremendous barrier of time and distance for these women. To people with a car, insurance, and cash, it doesn’t mean a thing. For a person who has none of those things, it is insurmountable.”

While Hanson spoke with a reporter, his waiting room was filled with giggling teen-age girls who had apparently car-pooled from various outlying areas so they could take their pregnancy tests together.

Of six girls in one group, only a 15-year-old was pregnant. She told a reporter she did not believe in abortion, that she would have the baby, and she hoped her parents would help her care for it. “Of course, they know nothing about it.” Her friends said they would not consider abortion if they’d turned up pregnant, either. “No one here thinks it’s right,” said one of them.

A 16-year-old girl who turned out to be pregnant saw only one option. She already has one child, she said, and could not care for another.

Will she consider abortion, though there’s no place to get one in town?

“Of course I will. If I can’t get one, I’ll try to do it myself.”