THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 3, 1995 TAG: 9501030089
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Marc Tibbs
LENGTH: Medium: 67 lines
A gunman put this town on its ear and into the national spotlight Saturday.
But the man didn't have to declare open season on the Hillcrest Clinic to remind us that abortion remains one of the most volatile issues of our time.
The questions haven't changed:
Does life begin at conception or after the first trimester?
Should men and parents have a say?
Can the government hold sway over a woman's reproductive rights?
But the questions no longer seem to matter. Abortion is no longer an intellectual debate. No longer a medical or ethical issue. Burning questions have been replaced with a political one-upmanship and of late, outright terrorism.
I didn't need a salvo on Hillcrest to remind me of the horrors of abortion. I once fancied myself a ``pro-lifer.'' That was five years ago. That was before I met Ida Faye Gant.
Ida Faye was the broker of an illegal abortion that ended the life of her 22-year-old best friend just two years before the Supreme Court ruling on Roe vs. Wade.
She told me her tale for a newspaper story, but it convinced me that making abortion illegal doesn't always save lives.
It can make matters worse.
Abortions were illegal in most states in 1971, and Ida Faye's friend Christine Sowell was six weeks pregnant, estranged from her husband, and living at home with her parents and her three small children. This was her lover's baby.
If ever a woman wanted to end her pregnancy, Christine surely did.
She knew Ida Faye had once aborted a pregnancy.
``To me, she seemed like she was desperate,'' Ida Faye told me. ``She didn't want to take another baby into her parents' house. She said another baby would kill them.''
Turns out, the aborted baby killed Christine. She died of hemorrhagic shock six days after the makeshift procedure was done in a Cleveland, Ohio, apartment.
Ida Faye is still haunted by Christine's death, and her own illegal abortion from a year earlier. That procedure left her bedridden for six weeks, bleeding profusely, and emotionally scarred.
She told me that story at great risk to her own reputation. She still lives in the same town where Christine's children grew up.
Ida Faye's story illustrates the extent to which some women will go to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Long before Roe vs. Wade, women were risking their own lives to terminate pregnancies.
In many ways, abortion has become like a modern-day Civil War - dividing mother against daughter; father against son; and sometimes friend against friend.
And that's not likely to change because men like Paul Hill and the gunman at Hillcrest - who police say is John C. Salvi III - decide to take matters into their own hands.
I'm still no fan of abortion - legal or otherwise. It's a tough decision for any woman to make. Some make it far too easily, but terrorizing abortion clinics cannot be the act of anyone who professes to be ``pro-life.''
This guy at Hillcrest has fired no salvo - just a few more stray rounds in a war raging out of control. by CNB