WREN’S FATHER USED TO TELL her a story about how he’d been her hero from the moment she was born. She was in the hospital, and the nurses were doing whatever tests they had to do before a baby could be discharged. One of them was called the Guthrie test, which required the newborn’s foot to be pricked and several drops of blood to be dripped onto a diagnostic card. It was sent to the lab to test for PKU.

The nurse that day was inexperienced, and when she pricked Wren’s foot, the baby started to wail. It didn’t bleed enough, so she had to prick Wren a second time. She squeezed the baby’s foot, trying to manually extract blood. By now, Wren was howling.

Her father stood up and grabbed his daughter away from the nurse. He wrapped Wren in a blanket and announced that they were going home. The nurse said this wasn’t possible, that she had to finish the test by law.

I am the fucking law, her father said.

He still wasn’t allowed in that hospital.

—

HEROES, WREN KNEW, DID NOT always swoop in to rescue. They made questionable calls. They lived with doubts. They replayed and edited and imagined different outcomes. They killed, sometimes, to save.

Wren was wrapped in a space blanket, shivering, even though it was still hot outside. Her ribs hurt from where she had been tackled by a member of the SWAT team. Would the gunman actually have shot Wren? No one knew, because instead her father had scooped up his weapon and fired three shots into George Goddard.

On live television.

There had been a lot of activity—her father being pulled away by the SWAT team; paramedics loading the body into an ambulance, because a doctor had to pronounce the shooter dead.

The shooter.

Wren realized, with a little start, that title applied to both men.

She was sitting on the flatbed of a police truck when her father approached. His arm had gauze wrapped around it. Goddard’s wayward shot, the one meant for her, had struck him.

She had come to the clinic because she didn’t want to be a little girl anymore. But it wasn’t having sex that made you a woman. It was having to make decisions, sometimes terrible ones. Children were told what to do. Adults made up their own minds, even when the options tore them apart.

Her father followed her gaze to the Center. Bathed in the last throes of sunset, the orange walls looked like they were on fire. “What’s going to happen to it?” Wren asked.

“I don’t know.”

She found herself thinking about Dr. Ward and Izzy and Joy and Janine. About poor Vonita. About the nameless women who had been in the Center before Wren got there, and the women who would show up tomorrow for an appointment and trample over the police tape if they had to.

“Aunt Bex is waiting for us,” her father said. He held out his arms, as if Wren were still little, and swung her down from the flatbed. Wren saw him wince because of his injury.

When she was tiny, she used to play a game with him by tightening her arms and legs and straightening her backbone to be as rigid as possible. I’m making myself extra heavy, she would tell him, and he would laugh.

I’ll always be able to carry you.

The night sky rippled, blue stars rising and red ones fading. They were surrounded by life and death. They moved past the chain-link fence that ran along the perimeter of the Center. On it, the protesters had hung a long curl of butcher paper: IT’S A CHILD NOT A CHOICE. Wren had walked past the sign this morning, and remarkably, it was still intact.

A few feet past the Center, Wren stopped. “You all right?” her father asked.

“Just a second.”

Wren ran back to the fence. She ripped the banner off, crumpled a long piece, and threw it on the ground. What remained she speared on the top of the chain link to secure it.

CHOICE.

She surveyed her work. There, Wren thought.

Many years later, when Wren told this story, she didn’t remember amending the sign. She didn’t remember whether the fence outside the Center was plaster or metal, how small the closet had been, or if her aunt’s blood had spilled on tile or carpet. What she remembered was that, as she left with her father, it was the first time she held his hand, instead of the other way around.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The National Abortion Federation compiles statistics on violence committed by anti-abortion protesters in the United States and Canada. Since 1977, there have been 17 attempted murders, 383 death threats, 153 instances of assault and battery, 13 individuals wounded, 100 stink bombs, 373 breakins, 42 bombings, 173 arsons, 91 attempted bombings or arsons, 619 bomb threats, 1630 incidents of trespassing, 1264 incidents of vandalism, 655 anthrax threats, 3 kidnappings.

Eleven people have been killed as a result of violence targeted at abortion providers: four doctors, two clinic employees, a security guard, a police officer, a clinic escort, and two others.

Anti-abortion extremists are considered a domestic terrorist threat by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Yet violence is not the only threat to abortion clinics. In the past five years, politicians have passed more than 280 laws restricting access to abortion. In 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that would have required every abortion clinic to have a surgical suite, and doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital in case of complications. For many clinics, these requirements were cost prohibitive and would have forced them to close. Also, since many abortion doctors fly in to do their work, they aren’t able to get admitting privileges at local hospitals. It is worth noting that less than 0.3 percent of women who have an abortion require hospitalization due to complications. In fact colonoscopies, liposuction, vasectomies … and childbirth—all of which are performed outside of surgical suites—have higher risks of death.

In Indiana in 2016, Mike Pence signed a law to ban abortion based on fetal disability and required providers to give information about perinatal hospice—keeping the fetus in utero until it dies of natural causes. This same law required aborted fetuses to be cremated or given a formal burial even if the mother did not wish this to happen. The law was blocked by a judge in 2017.

In Alabama, a 2014 law required a minor to get a judicial waiver for abortion from a court, where a guardian ad litem would be provided as a lawyer for the fetus. In this same law, a parent or legal guardian had the right to appeal the bypass, delaying it until the girl was past the point where she could legally abort. A federal judge struck down this law in 2017.

In Arkansas, women must be informed that it is possible to reverse the effects of the medication abortion with progesterone. Similar bills have been introduced in Arizona, Colorado, California, Indiana, Idaho, North Carolina, and Georgia. Americans United for Life, a powerful lobbyist group, made abortion pill reversal part of its model legislation for 2017. However, there are no formal studies that support the claim that a medication abortion can, indeed, be reversed.

On March 19, 2018, after this book was submitted to the publisher, Governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi signed into law the Gestational Age Act, banning abortions in Mississippi after 15 weeks of pregnancy, making it the state with the earliest abortion ban in the U.S. He tweeted, “I am committed to making Mississippi the safest place in America for an unborn child.” The law makes exceptions for severe fetal abnormality, but not rape or incest. Doctors who perform abortions after 15 weeks must file reports explaining why, and if they violate the law their medical licenses will be endangered. The Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the “Pink House”—is the only abortion provider in Mississippi, and already cuts off abortions at sixteen weeks. There is no medical or scientific reason for the change.