Life in a House of Whispers

One notices first how quiet it is. Patients whisper among themselves, and the voices of the staff are muted.

A security guard, solemn and silent, scans the room like a soldier in a foxhole, searching for signs of an enemy.

A small boy, sensing the apprehension, nestles tightly against his father and glances expectantly around the waiting room.

The uneasiness comes with the territory. This is an abortion clinic, and out there among the shadows of their own creation are those who would do harm to the people inside.

It isn’t an idle fear. In the past two years, five people have been killed and six people wounded in attacks on similar clinics elsewhere in the United States. The most recent was two weeks ago in Brookline, Mass.

Zealots with guns, fed by the anti-abortion rhetoric of religious fanatics, have made murder their business in ironic defense of that “beautiful choice”--life--they self-righteously espouse.

And so medical clinics have become fortresses, with guards and electronically operated doors and barred windows and closed-circuit cameras and the whispered understanding that danger lurks outside the door.

*

I went to the clinic wondering how its staff was holding up after the attacks in Brookline, but no one would talk to me. Anxiety, if not downright fear, is a palpable presence among its employees.

To risk an interview would be to risk being isolated in the cross hairs of a madman’s gun sight. Never mind that I would protect their identity. Talking was simply out of the question.

So pervasive is the concern for safety that I had to promise in the first place that I wouldn’t take pictures and wouldn’t reveal the exact location of the clinic, one of 11 in Los Angeles County operated by Planned Parenthood.

I can only say it sits in an urban bunker on a quiet side street next to an administrative center for Planned Parenthood, whose clinical director, Ana Diaz, showed me around.

To even visit the clinic as a journalist took more effort than I ever expected. I began with Marcela Howell, executive director of the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League South.

She finally obtained permission by working through Suellen Wood, executive director of Planned Parenthood L.A., Diaz and Josie Corning, Planned Parenthood’s director of public affairs.

I had less trouble getting into Buckingham Palace.

To call them abortion clinics, while a term of convenience, is a misnomer. Abortion constitutes a small percentage of their medical regimen. Of 40,000 patients who visited the 11 clinics last year, only 4,000 were there for abortions.

The rest were there for everything from counseling to prenatal care. Most were poor people with no place else to go. The clinic was a center where help was available, sometimes the only help in town.

*

My visit, a quick walk-through, wasn’t especially productive in terms of exploring the feelings of those who work there. The fear that silenced them left me, pen in hand, without a word to write.

But silence itself is a metaphor for the world we live in, where the face of protest is deep with hatred, and where special laws have to be enacted to deal with those who scream “Jesus!” but whose actions deny what he stood for.

Ironies abound in a society that rejects abortion and tolerates guns, that abhors contraception and glorifies violence, that screams in the streets and whispers in the clinics.

“They’re especially afraid because staff workers, not doctors, were killed in Brookline,” Diaz said as we left the clinic. “They’re too frightened to talk. I understand that. I went through a depression, a mourning over it. I was heartbroken.”

A proposed ordinance introduced in the Los Angeles City Council by Ruth Galanter would add yet another layer of law against violence at the clinics, like a bulletproof shield erected before their front doors.

Is this what we have finally become, a people forced into silence behind guards and barricades of law by fanatics who prod the gun-wavers forward? Where are the voices of restraint in the shouts of protest?

I wish the necessity for abortion didn’t exist. I am uneasy with the morality of those who use it as a means of contraception. But I dislike as much the hatred engendered by those who oppose it.

And we all ought to be troubled by the fear that mutes even one of us to whispers.