The New York Magazine article, "The New Underground Railroad", looks at Haven Coalition, a group of volunteers that provide overnight stays for women who come to the city for late abortions.
The volunteers' devotion to choice is evidently limited to the decision to abort, as "some Havenites insist that their guests eat 'healthy' food -- fresh fish, for instance, or vegetarian -- even if they ask for Big Macs and Ding Dongs."
And why are these women coming to New York for late abortions in the first place? Conventional prochoice wisdom is that it takes the women that long to get the money together, though it seems to me that if they're motivated enough to scrape together $2000 by 24 weeks, they could have scraped together $300 or $400 by 12 weeks.
The article also muses that "chasing an ever-burgeoning fee isn't the only thing that delays abortions. As [one volunteer] puts it, there's often 'some combination of denial and disorganization and general flakiness' going on as well. Some women have breakthrough bleeding, assume they're having periods, and fail to realize they're pregnant until after the first trimester. Other women delay seeking an abortion because they're holding out hope that a relationship is going to work."
And the volunteers often have to bite their tongues to keep from falling into the only sin they seem to believe in: that of judging their guests.
The first woman Levine ever hosted was here having a late-term abortion because she had simply "put off" dealing with her pregnancy until it was almost too late. The delay certainly didn't seem to be for financial reasons: "She had a late-model pickup truck that was better than my car," remembers [her hostess], "and I wondered, Why am I the one paying for dinner?"
[The hostess] rolled out the red carpet anyway. "I had to tell myself, "Every abortion is the choice of the woman having the abortion. "
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