YOUR MOM'S THE ONLY DOCTOR IN THE STATE WHO DOES abortions,'' my fourth-grade classmate shouted as he bolted across the playground, leaving me, red-faced and furious, on the swings. Actually, the boy was wrong. My mother was, and is, the only doctor in Alaska who provides elective, second-trimester abortions. But as the daughter of a highly vocal, pro-choice obstetrician-gynecologist, I stood out as an outspoken, liberal little girl at my rural elementary school.
This dubious honor dragged me into numerous arguments with my schoolmates, though few were as abrupt and distressing as the incident with the runny-nosed boy. In fifth grade, I was still best friends with the daughter of my mother's sworn political enemy, a pro-life orthopedic surgeon. Although I rarely went to church, my Catholic friends and I swapped Christmas wish lists and Easter cookies. Politics and religion were not part of our everyday chatter. That all changed in 1992, when my mother, along with the local Coalition for Choice and 10 Jane Does, sued the local hospital for banning legal first- and second-trimester abortions. The lengthy lawsuit plunged the community into heated controversy, and during the next five years I found myself in a front-row seat at the raging abortion debate. This unusual position complicated my adolescent years. But it opened my eyes to the delicate balance between hate and understanding in society and taught a difficult lesson about religious and political tolerance.
The initial community reaction to the case was troubling. At school, many of my conservative friends became more distant. Comments occasionally floated toward me in the halls: ""Her mom kills babies. Isn't that so disgusting?!'' Local preachers from varying denominations condemned my mother from the pulpit. Picketers began protesting at the hospital across the street from my mom's clinic. In late '94, when the national papers carried stories about bombed abortion clinics and murdered doctors, they moved to the sidewalk outside the clinic. My mother no longer talked about managed care and AIDS; she talked about buying a bulletproof vest.
I don't think my family ever seriously believed that a fanatic with an automatic rifle lurked across the parking lot from my mom's office, but the horrific thought remained in my 12-year-old brain. Small bands of picketers showed up maybe once a week throughout the first winter after the lawsuit was filed. Whipped by the January wind, their crimson ears looked as if they wanted to detach and wait in the car for their owners. My dad made a point of taking a picture of every car, every license plate, every group of grim strangers holding hideous pictures of infant corpses. ""If a bomb ever went off,'' he told me recently, ""I could have just dropped off prime-suspect identification at the police station.''
Things began to turn around on Good Friday three years ago. When I showed up at my mother's office after school, she jubilantly announced that a close family friend had joined the picketers. My mom's best friend, a practicing Catholic, had gone to her church. After the service and before Stations of the Cross, the priest encouraged his flock to stage an anti-abortion demonstration. Instead, she went home, made up posters reading SUPPORT DR. SUSAN LEMAGIE and joined the picketers on the sidewalk across from my mother's office. The incongruity of the pro-choice signs bobbing among posters adorned with pictures of mutilated fetuses and ABORTION KILLS lent a bizarre quality to our situation. But more important, her gesture of friendship made me realize that her religious affiliation did not require her to condemn abortion.
It may have been our friend's acceptance of both her church and my mother, or it may have been the wild-eyed earnestness of the demonstrators outside the office, but during that complicated time at the height of the lawsuit, I became aware of a rare attribute in many of our adversaries. They really cared about what they were doing. I could see that the pamphlet-armed woman in our parking lot fighting for her religious beliefs had the same determination and courage that my mother had shown defending the rights of Alaskan women.
In November of 1997, an Alaska Supreme Court judge ruled that under the privacy clause of the state constitution, the quasi-public hospital had to permit abortions. The judge reasoned that ""surely "few things are more personal' than a woman's control of her body, including the choice of whether and when to have children.'' My family realized that the lawsuit had both political and social consequences. On a national political level, Alaska has joined a handful of states to define reproductive freedom as a fundamental right. Early this year an article in The Washington Post about the effects of Roe v. Wade mentioned the case as an important development in the protection of abortion rights.
Locally, the abortion debate shows no signs of abating. But people continue to shop at the same grocery store, attend the same schools and stand in line at the same movie theater. Our community is too small to serve as the stage of a political drama, its actors permanently divided by hate and intolerance. The only way we can escape lasting conflict and resentment is by calmly discussing the issues that divide us. With that realization, my mother has worked with conflict-resolution groups and organizations such as Common Ground for Life and Choice to help heal the wounds opened by the lawsuit.
In the last few years, I have reached an unspoken agreement with my pro-life friends. We talk passionately about everything--except abortion and political/religious issues. When we shift to those topics we tread carefully, wearing the grave masks of academics. The arrangement works. We even consult each other, in a detached manner, on the viewpoints of ""the opposing side.'' In a civics course last year, a close friend and I both chose abortion rights for our final projects. I felt something between a thrill and a giggle when she called after school one day and said, perfectly solemnly, ""Sarah, what is the legal definition of abortion?''
LEMAGIE, 16, LIVES IN PALMER, ALASKA.