Crossing the Line

On a Saturday morning in October, Hope Clinic draws a crowd of 100 protesters, some with signs depicting fetuses, others with Catholic rosaries—and all shouting and chanting outside the purple-trimmed building where abortions are performed in Granite City, Ill.

The protests are jarring to incoming patients. But they do little, if anything, to affect Allison Hile, the clinic's director of information and education. "I am so proud of what we do," says Hile, who has been counseling patients for 28 years. Hile has, after all, seen much worse at her clinic. She remembers the wreckage the day after it was bombed in 1982—the blast destroyed a third of the facility's physical plant. And she remembers when a pro-life extremist kidnapped one of the clinic's doctors that same year, holding him and his wife blindfolded for eight days. For over a decade now Hile has endured the presence of pro-life activist Angela Michael, who lives in an RV parked outside the clinic. Under the guise of being a Hope Clinic employee, Michael leads women into her trailer (billed as offering "A Window to the Womb") for ultrasounds and a chance to talk them out having an abortion. (Hile says she can find no record of Michael being a registered nurse in Missouri or Illinois.) After all that, a group of noisy protesters seems relatively benign.

But soon Hile and the rest of the staff at Hope Clinic may have more than shouts and signs to contend with. The clinic sits on the state line between Illinois and Missouri. And while it's just a 10-minute drive over the Mississippi River from Granite City to St. Louis, the ideological distance between the cities is far greater when it comes to abortion law. On the Missouri side of the river, lawmakers take a dim view of abortion rights. The pro-choice group NARAL gives the state an F in its rankings, while Illinois gets a C+. "Illinois law is in every aspect and way better than Missouri," says Pamela Sumners, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri. "That's a pretty big river separating us."

While Hope Clinic may be governed by Illinois's more lenient laws, a large percentage of its patients come from Missouri for family planning and abortion services. So this summer, when the Missouri state legislature passed House Bill 1055, a law that Gov. Matt Blunt has called "one of the strongest pieces of pro-life legislation in Missouri's history," Hope Clinic began preparing for the possible ripple effects. As Hile explains it, should the new law pass constitutional muster—a decision that could be made within the next two months—it would likely leave the entire state of Missouri with one abortion clinic, at least for a time. And that could create an unmanageable influx of patients for Hope. "We'd be overwhelmed if we had to see not only the women who come to us now but many others," says Hile.

The Missouri bill is not an outright ban on abortion but rather a regulation that financially squeezes practitioners who perform the procedure to the point where many will no longer be able to function. The bill reclassifies any facility that performs five or more abortions each month as a surgical outpatient center, meaning it must comply with a number of specifications for things like hallway widths and ceiling heights.

Pro-life groups hail the legislation as a way to protect women's health—by ensuring that facilities are prepared to handle abortions, which are, after all, surgical procedures. "Women who seek abortions deserve to have the same level of surgical care," says Pam Fichter, president of Missouri Right to Life. "To not give them that same basic level of care would be a great disservice to women who are seeking abortions." The bill's sponsor, state Rep. Therese Sander, describes the regulation as an attempt to provide "the best possible service to women in crisis pregnancy no matter which way they choose go, whether life or abortion."