Four years before that, in 1972, approximately 100,000 women from around the country traveled to New York City to get an abortion — about half traveled more than 500 miles, and some came from as far away as Arizona, Idaho and Nevada. Most went to large facilities with multiple operating rooms. Ms. Hoffman’s clinic was small at the outset; the cost of the procedure there was $77, and it was covered by HIP, the health insurer, which Ms. Hoffman said had thought about opening its own facility but did not want to rattle board members who had connections to the clergy or big labor unions.
The State of Roe v. Wade
Card 1 of 4What is Roe v. Wade? Roe v. Wade is a landmark Supreme court decision that legalized abortion across the United States. The 7-2 ruling was announced on Jan. 22, 1973. Justice Harry A. Blackmun, a modest Midwestern Republican and a defender of the right to abortion, wrote the majority opinion.


What was the case about? The ruling struck down laws in many states that had barred abortion, declaring that they could not ban the procedure before the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb. That point, known as fetal viability, was around 28 weeks when Roe was decided. Today, most experts estimate it to be about 23 or 24 weeks.


What else did the case do? Roe v. Wade created a framework to govern abortion regulation based on the trimesters of pregnancy. In the first trimester, it allowed almost no regulations. In the second, it allowed regulations to protect women’s health. In the third, it allowed states to ban abortions so long as exceptions were made to protect the life and health of the mother. In 1992, the court tossed that framework, while affirming Roe’s essential holding.




As access to abortion spread in the aftermath of Roe, the need for women to get on a plane or drive for six hours to see the doctors who could help them greatly diminished. Only recently has the need resurfaced. Now in her 70s, Ms. Hoffman is seeing more and more women arriving to the facility in Queens from outside New York — from Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Ohio — as abortion laws have become increasingly prohibitive, as facilities have closed down, and as doctors who performed the procedures retired and were not always easily replaced.
A reversal of Roe would end abortion in 13 states immediately or very quickly; 14 more could restrict the procedure to 22 weeks or earlier, though many of those might also ban it completely. This would put more women in the position of traveling to terminate their pregnancies, presenting challenges to the infrastructure in place to help them, Ms. Hoffman predicted.
Over the past several decades, a network — an “overground railroad,” as she put it — has developed to accommodate women who must venture far from home to end their pregnancies. Choices, for example, works closely with the Haven Coalition, founded in 2001 by a counselor at an abortion clinic in New York. One day the counselor asked an out-of-town patient where she was staying, and the patient said that she was sleeping in her car because she could not afford a hotel.
The coalition formed as a nonprofit, soliciting volunteers to pick women up from their procedures, house them in guest rooms and on sofas and offer food and comfort. Since then, funds have been created to help women cover attendant expenses. “There’s a very supportive network in place, but it will be strained,” Ms. Hoffman said. “People — women, men of conscience — will have to look in the mirror and say ‘What can I do?’ and then do something.”
In 1989, Ms. Hoffman recalled, she stood outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, brandishing coat hangers along with hundreds of other protesters to challenge Cardinal John O’Connor’s support of Operation Rescue, an aggressive anti-abortion group. The same afternoon that we spoke, seven-foot-tall fences were being installed around the Supreme Court anticipating demonstrations.
“I’m reliving my youth,’’ Ms. Hoffman said. “My feeling is that we minimized the strength of the opposition.”

Source: New York Times

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