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LISA PRIEST
HEALTH CARE REPORTER
Monday, March 5, 2001

FREDERICTON -- She never parks at the abortion clinic and she tries to keep secret what she does because doctors in her line of work face harassment, threatening letters and sometimes violent attacks.

"You don't want to be complacent about it but at the same time, you don't want to live in fear," said the physician, dressed in traditional green scrubs.

"I know doctors who wear bullet-proof vests, but I'm not one of them."

The Morgentaler Clinic has seen "murder" painted on its sidewalk and put up with harassing calls and threatening letters. But mostly it's spent years searching for a New Brunswick doctor.

Until a year ago, doctors were flown in from Quebec and Toronto.

It's no wonder this private clinic, a discreet looking building of yellow brick and glass, has had such a hard time finding a doctor. In addition to the constant worries of harassment and violence, its abortions have never been paid for by the province.

Federal Health Minister Allan Rock issued a verbal warning to New Brunswick in January that its long-standing policy of not funding private-clinic abortions violates the Canada Health Act, thrusting the clinic into the national spotlight.

But provincial Health and Wellness Minister Dennis Furlong said that abortions are available in the three hospitals and that no federal laws are being violated.

In an interview, he said New Brunswick "needs a clarification of Canadian public policy, not an enforcement of the vagueness of the Canada Health Act."

New Brunswick is the last province refusing to pay for any private-clinic abortions.

In Quebec, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, the province covers part of the cost of private-clinic abortions.

At New Brunswick's only private abortion clinic, women pay $475 to $725 for the procedure, 500 to 600 of which are done each year. The province's three hospitals do the same number combined.

Residents of this small, conservative city boast of high church attendance and having a great place to raise kids. They're not keen to talk about abortion.

Nowhere is this seen more starkly than downtown, where the clinic and the New Brunswick Right to Life and Crisis Pregnancy Centre sit so close together that there's barely room to slip a piece of paper between the two buildings.

Peter Ryan, executive director of the centre, has two snapshots of a baby boy with the word "Saved!" next to them taped to his wall.

Mr. Ryan, a father of seven girls, has greeted men and women on the sidewalk outside to tell them there are other choices besides abortion.

"We do this in a respectful way. We don't stop anybody or block anybody and we just offer them another possibility," said Mr. Ryan.

Most of the time, "they keep their head down and keep going. Once in a while they look up, and there's a little bit of an exchange. . . . I've had situations where I think I've had an influence."

But others have not been respectful, and that has precipitated the need for escorts.

"They wait for them to come out after the procedure and call them murderers," said Lianne McTavish, an assistant professor of history at the University of New Brunswick, who volunteers as an escort. "Some of these women are afraid."

It's partly for this reason that the New Brunswick doctor who commutes three or four days a month to perform abortions, said that there should be a buffer zone, like those in Toronto and Vancouver.

"Women get hassled way too much," said the doctor, who spoke on the condition she not be identified. "Women are going to access abortions, they always have. We just want to provide them with safe health care."

Safety has also become an issue for doctors.

Never was the magnitude of risk so clear as when British Columbia gynecologist Gary Romalis was stabbed in the back last summer by a man believed to be an anti-abortion fanatic. It was the second attack on the physician and in both instances, the assailant escaped.

Though Dr. Romalis has told colleagues he will continue to perform abortions, he declined to be interviewed "for family and personal security reasons."

While it's never been medically safer for women to have abortions, it's "become much more risky for doctors to perform them because of the violence," Dr. Henry Morgentaler said from Toronto.

Dr. Marshall Dahl, president of the B.C. Medical Association, said doctors want the message out that they won't be intimidated, but he acknowledges, "it's hard to tell what the truth is."

No Canadian body tracks violence nationally but the Washington-based National Abortion Federation does so for its members, which include hospitals and clinics in seven Canadian provinces.

Hate mail and harassing calls reached a peak in 1997 with 2,829 incidents. Last year there were 1,011 such incidents.

Marilyn Wilson, executive director of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League, predicts there will be a "sort of open season for violence" against abortion doctors because of developments in the United States.

One of those developments was the appointment of anti-abortion Senator John Ashcroft as Attorney-General.

The fear, Ms. Wilson said, is that violence against abortion providers will go unchecked in the United States, and she points out that "it's all orchestrated North-America-wide, there are no boundaries. Most of the violence and instigation of violence comes from the United States and flows across the border."

Ms. Wilson describes it as a "really, really deteriorating situation for women. . . . It's getting worse because the hospital situation is getting worse."

One 25-year-old woman complained that a person who answered the telephone at the Saint John Regional Hospital said she would only be eligible for an abortion only if she was 14, on social assistance, had been raped or was ill.

Hospital spokeswoman Patricia Crowdis said those comments, if made by one of its staff, are against policy and hospital officials would look into the matter. The hospital's policy, she said, is the same as the province's: The procedure has to be approved by two doctors and done in a hospital by a specialist.

In Fredericton, a city of 47,000, there is still a stigma to abortion.

One woman who pulled into the Morgentaler Clinic parking lot was mortified to see the father of a childhood schoolmate, picket in hand, marching along the sidewalk. She pulled a baseball cap over her head and quickly made her way into the building.

"I ducked, but I shouldn't have had to do that," the 31-year-old said. "It's a necessary medical procedure."

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