The Abortionist’s Tale

It’s a Friday morning in May and all is relatively quiet on the pro-choice front. Charlotte Taft walks into her office at the Routh Street Women’s Clinic without once being called “dyke queen of the baby killers” by the pro-life protesters who normally plant themselves in her path. Day in, day out, for the twelve years that Taft has operated her by-women, for-women abortion clinic, the anti-abortion forces have been there to do their best to stop the seventy-five abortions performed at the clinic each week. “Let us help you love your child,” they shout to the young women who silently walk past them, eyes to the ground. “Babies murdered here,” scream their placards.

For more than a decade, Charlotte Taft has shouted back for the silent. Facing an angry, chanting chorus, she would sometimes combat the hatred by leading her employees in hymns or songs, their loud refrain of “God Bless America” drowning out the shouts from the picketers. Other days, she would let an icy “God bless you” suffice.

As Dallas’s “abortion lady” since the mid-Seventies, Taft has been a lone spokesperson, a constant lightning rod. When the anti-abortionists bombed clinics. Taft was ready, firing back feisty quotes at a moment’s notice. When the right to a safe and legal abortion was threatened, Taft mastered the publicity stunt, sarcastically waving an American flag to declare “a loss of freedom for women,” or holding up a plastic speculum, a gynecological examining device, while vowing that if necessary, she would teach women how to perform safe abortions on themselves.

But now. in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to throw the abortion battle back to the states, while many of her cohorts rev up for combat with the Texas Legislature, Charlotte Taft is battleworn. She is sick of what she has identified as her number one enemy: the secrecy that keeps women who want or who have had abortions in a shameful silence. She is disgusted with the dishonesty that she finds in the rhetoric of both pro-life and pro-choice advocates.

After twenty years of fighting fire with fire, Taft has decided that it just doesn’t work. She accuses herself and her movement of wasting too much precious time.

“We’ve spent a lot of lime blaming” Taft says of the pro-choice movement. “We have acted like a bunch of victims, saying, ’Well, we really would have made a difference, but we were so attacked. We had no choice but to fight the anti-abortion movement.’”

Taft knows that what she is saying may confuse her enemies and anger her allies. She knows that leaders of controversial causes don’t have the luxury of stepping back from the fray and asking basic questions. But for once in her life, she doesn’t care about the battle. She’s tired of spending valuable energy in a never-ending grudge match.

But you would never know it to look at her. In a word, Taft is energized. This morning she wears flowing white slacks, a sleek white bodysuit, a purple jacket, and pumps that a fashion writer would call “important.” Her eyes are bright as she speaks with a passion about her life’s work. Charlotte Taft has unclenched her fist, shaken for so many years at the pro-lifers of the world, so that she may pick up new tasks at hand.

“My job in life is to be a visionary,” Taft says. “Fighting the anti-abortion movement has meant that instead of figuring out what my work is here, I have let somebody else set up my agenda, and my agenda then became a reactionary one.”

In that, Taft says, there was no room for questions and there was no room for integrity. The pro-choice movement spent so much time fighting the latest pro-life accusation that it lost sight of what it is really all about: the health and welfare of the millions of women a year who find themselves in crisis and walk through the doors of an abortion clinic looking for answers.

“Abortion happens to be the medium of my work,” Taft says, “but the work is about women’s lives, about their whole lives, about everything they think about themselves. It’s about how men think about women. It’s about how families work together. And all of that is about the fabric of what does or does not enhance the life of the human species…”

Ideas flow. The vision of women as whole, healthy people grows and expands. Then the phone rings. In one fluid motion, she takes the call, hangs up, and continues to talk of her past two years of inner searching and how her views of her work as an abortion counselor have changed as a result. Her thoughts are no longer of the write-your-congressman, us-vs.-them variety.

It’s only recently that Taft has begun to talk about her newest version of the way the world should work, a way of living that as she approaches her fortieth birthday has empowered her as never before. And as her new ideas mature, they may even empower Dallas’s floundering pro-choice movement, a movement that Taft believes is sorely lacking in vision as it faces this country’s strongest and best organized pro-life army.

But her evolution has not come without great personal cost. In a sense, Taft’s life has been a series of signposts on the road to being what she sees as a whole, honest person-a person who, paradoxically, has made herself vulnerable in order to be strong.

While she talks, Taft is moving. She closes office doors and shoos workers outside and down the stairs to the parking lot. Finally, she explains the brief phone call: “A bomb scare. We haven’t had one of these for a while.”

The police have been called. When the bomb squad arrives, Taft goes with them from room to room. It’s a familiar routine that drags her bodily back into the fray. It’s visible proof that transcending the battleground of abortion will not be easy. She may choose not to fight, but the pro-lifers still see Charlotte Taft as public enemy number one.



IN APRIL OF LAST YEAR. CHAR-lotte Taft joined Dallasite Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade, and several hundred thousand pro-choice activists in a massive march on Washington. The purpose was twofold: it was the sixteenth anniversary of the Roe decision that legalized abortion, and the U.S. Supreme Court was about to rule on the constitutionality of a Missouri law restricting access to abortion.

Movie stars and politicians, men and women of the Sixties with babies in backpacks and teenage daughters, ail stood on the Mall and shouted for the cause. For some of the marchers, it was the first time they had ever taken such an organized political stand. Ironically, for Charlotte Taft it may have been one of the last.

“When I went to the march in Washington and the basic slogans were the same slogans I said twenty years ago. then I became worried,” Taft says. “I looked at where we were politically and wondered how we had gotten here. Then I finally saw how we are doing the same things over and over and hoping it would be different.”

The sprawling crowds helped to plant a disturbing idea in Taft’s mind: with a million potential voters a year choosing to have abortions, the political battle should long ago have been won. In effect, the women of America have voted with their bodies to make abortion legal.

“At the eleventh hour, right before abortion became illegal, if every clinic published their lists, there would be anguish. It would be horrible for about a week. And then everybody would get over it,” Taft says.

But instead, she says, the pro-choice movement has spent its time shouting slogans that mask the silence of women who have had abortions. “If we were sending women out of abortion clinics clear and strong, and we were participating in that process, we wouldn’t be talking about whether abortion was going to be legal or not,” Taft says.

Taft believes the pro-choice movement is not helping women tell the whole truth about the experience of abortion. That has made her question even something so basic as the idea of confidentiality. Every time clinics assure women of anonymity, she now believes, they reinforce the shame of all the women who have abortions but won’t admit it. Taft doesn’t claim to have all of the answers, but given the fact that the movement is still fighting the old fight, she says that she “knows we have not been doing our work.” So for the past year, Taft has been reex-amining her work, asking how she could change and improve the counseling offered at the Routh Street Women’s Clinic. She wants the clinic to take advantage of the healing opportunity it has when a woman walks through its doors. She wants women to know that they have many choices in their lives. That’s one reason why her clinic has begun a new donor insemination program. Called “Another Choice,” the program anticipates its first baby next summer.

Taft has searched for answers in many places-in the teachings of Zen, the poet Adrienne Rich, feminist author Sonia Johnson, in co-dependency recovery, in est-like educational seminars (Course in Miracles, Lifespring), and in her own past.

This is the third time in her life that Taft has found herself immersed in what seems like a brand-new fight for women’s rights. This time, the fight was also an inner struggle to grow out of long-established patterns that were limiting both her own progress as a person and the progress of the reproductive rights movement in Dallas as well.



ROUND ONE OF THE FIGHT FOR women’s rights began for Charlotte Taft during the summer of 1970, around the time that President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia. Then a student at Brown University, Taft had gone to stay with her boyfriend’s family for the summer. There in Champaign/Urbana, Illinois, she took a course called the Politics of Women’s Liberation.

“It was all over at that point,” Taft says now. “It was like throwing a duck in the water. Just months before that I had been telling people that I was not a joiner. I didn’t need the women’s movement. I was kind of an’s woman, and I definitely felt like women were not very interesting.”

That summer school course in Illinois marked a major shift in Taft’s life and her view of relationships and the world. During her first few years in college, Taft had spent most of her time in the boys’ dorm and a lot of it going to the grocery store and doing dishes.

’Ithought women were supposed to find an unhappy man and make him happy. That’s what I’d seen my mother do,” Taft says.

Taft’s mother now lives in the Virgin Islands. Her father lives in Maine. (“As far as they can get from one another,” she half-jokes.) The two separated when Taft was about five years old and divorced two years later, which made for a dual existence for Taft. Her wealthy grandparents provided amply for a privileged private education. But at home she ate her share of tuna fish, her mother having remarried a man who was short on salary but not on children.

Taft says that she was lost during her first years at college-until her discovery of the women’s movement brought total immersion. Taft devoured feminist literature and teachings with a hunger. Eventually she earned a master’s degree in feminist studies-a rare commodity-and in 1975, she brought her expertise to Dallas. Taft came here for a relationship with a woman that lasted about two years; she stayed, she says, because she felt she could make a difference. She had the knowledge that the women of Dallas were wanting, and she had a certain freedom to share that information because she was from somewhere else. Dallas wasn’t where her family lived.

“I feel so privileged because I got to live through the women’s movement twice,” Taft says. “First I lived through it in Providence in college and in Cambridge in the middle of the heyday. Then I moved to Dallas and it was like it had just been born, that wonderful blossoming of thought and women coming into their own and risking and experimenting.”

In those early days following the Roe v. Wade decision-as now-the reproductive rights movement in Dallas was fractious and in need of a good communicator. Some of the movement’s leaders chose to handle the Dallas establishment with gentle, white-gloved hands; others prodded with full force. Some mixed the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment with pro-choice sentiments, while others wanted to fight for each issue on separate ground. Taft became a prodder, and she was always several steps ahead, pulling the rest of the movement behind her and lumping all of the feminist issues together-except for gay rights. Back then, Taft kept her sexual preference a secret from the public, By Dallas standards, she was already a radical-and an effective one, a master of the sound bite and the newsworthy quote with punch. She wasn’t yet ready to risk blurring the issues.

Taft’s long career as a lightning rod began shortly after she arrived in Dallas, when she went down to the old City Hall to speak on desegregation for the local National Organization of Women (NOW) chapter.

“I hadn’t even joined the chapter.” Taft remembers, “but I was here and unemployed and could be free that day, so I did it. I had never done anything like that before, never spoken before any kind of political body.”

That night, Taft was on the television news. While she was at City Hall, some of the City Council members had asked her questions and the television reporters found her answers newsworthy. It was a heady experience for the twenty-five-year-old Taft, one that was apprehensively shared by veterans of the Dallas women’s movement who were witnessing the birth of a powerful new spokesperson.

Dallas producer/journalist Susan Caudill, who covered education in those days for the Channel 13 show “Newsroom,” remembers that Taft dealt well in those early days with the educational problems surrounding the abortion issue.

“’There were fact problems,” Caudill says. “People didn’t understand even the basics of the issue. I remember a particular debate between Charlotte and [Dallas Morning News columnist] Bill Murchison where she had to explain to him what an IUD did. Abortion is an incredibly difficult issue that people don’t want to hear about, but Charlotte appeals to people with intelligence and compassion. She speaks with heat, but also civility, and she is also very funny.”

Though she is anything but tunnel-visioned in her approach to human rights issues, Taft soon became known as the spokesperson for the pro-choice movement in Dallas. And the press has tended to pigeonhole her ever since, though her friends say Taft’s interests and talents are extremely varied. Dallas attorney Kathryn Cain, who describes Taft as “a good Democrat,” says, “you can have a conversation with Charlotte without talking about choice.” She’s also an artist, a writer, a photographer, and an actress. Taft describes herself as “a communicator.”

“My ideas are a little, I don’t know if I’d say out front, but going down a different road,” Taft says. “I always used to say to NOW that we are doing things that scare you this year that you’ll thank us for next year. What was scary? Even talking about women getting credit. Even talking about people getting equal pay. people here saw as taking a job away from a man.”

Dallas has always been a little bit afraid of Charlotte Taft, says Virginia Whitehill, who as a longtime advocate for reproductive freedom was Dallas’s “abortion lady” when Taft was still a teenager in Connecticut.

“Charlotte is a person for whom the feminist movement is like a religious center,” Whitehill says. “She reminds me of [Planned Parenthood founder] Margaret Sanger in that she is so driven, but Charlotte is at her best doing her own thing. She’s so smart and jumpy and ’let’s just do it.’”

So while Taft was out there just doing it, the establishment feminists in Dallas were watching with one eye covered-but not without admiration, Whitehill says. Dallas Women’s Foundation executive director Pat Sabin agrees. “Charlotte is crazy and reckless and committed and wonderful and unique,” she gushes.

Women’s Center founder Maura McNiel is another Dallas leader who is awestruck by Taft, placing her in a special category all her own. “Charlotte is very ahead of people.” McNiel says. “I think she could do almost anything.”

But one thing Taft couldn’t do was fight the fight for a third time. When she got back to Dallas last year from the pro-choice rally in Washington, her new ideas were beginning to take shape. And though later that month the Supreme Court expanded the power of states to limit abortions, Taft did not rally the troops for another barrage of letters or another round of marches. As far as she’s concerned, this time around there is no “other side.”

That is the essence of the change in Charlotte Taft. She believes that by focusing on the negative-on fighting the other side- the pro-choice movement has sacrificed its own vision and, ironically, painted itself into an ideological corner.

“If the vision of the pro-choice movement is that every woman gets to have an abortion, then we are in deep trouble. Women don’t want to have abortions. And I don’t want women to have to have abortions.”

Taft laughs at the accusations that she is pro-abortion because she benefits financially from them.

“I make about $34,000 a year,” she says. “People here make good salaries. But no one gets rich.”

That’s because the $270 price of an abortion at the Routh Street clinic is artificially low. At a hospital, an abortion alone can cost between $500 and $800. not including pregnancy testing or drugs. A sonogram, also included in the abortion service at Routh Street, can cost as much as $150 at a hospital or doctor’s office.

But arguments like this only deter Taft from her real work. She faults herself and the movement for getting sidetracked again and again into defending themselves and for failing to identify a vision that people en masse would want to support.

“Would you want to join on to ’every woman gets to have an abortion?’ Right. Come with me to fight for this negative. Now I’m not saying that abortion is negative. Abortion is like a tool along the way of a woman being a human being-one of the tools-there are lots of them. But because it’s one of the tools that’s so attacked, that’s where we’ve gone and spent our focus.”



RECENTLY ANOTHER REPORTER called Charlotte Taft for an inter- view. He was doing a profile on Bill Price, president of the anti-abortion organization called Texans United for Life, and he wanted Taft to comment on Price as an adversary. No doubt the reporter expected fireworks. After all, the tireless, tenacious Price has been Taft’s harshest critic since he became active in the pro-life movement in the early Eighties. And it was Price who in 1985 tried to “level the playing field,” as he puts it, by exposing Taft as a lesbian on a Channel 8 talk show. He didn’t exactly drag her out of the closet kicking and screaming. But Taft, even in 1984, still was not ready to mix lesbian issues with pro-choice issues.

Price, who believed then and believes now that Taft’s homosexuality discredits her with mainstream Dallas, had known for some time that Taft was a lesbian and was saving the information for an opportune time. Then, during the taping of the “Ed Busch Show,” Price saw his moment. The debate was not going well for Price that day, so he pulled out his secret weapon.

The weeks that followed the show were a frightening time for Taft. She had always been afraid that it might hurt her work or the clinic if the public knew she was a lesbian. ’I thought, depending on how people hear this, it could be a scandal. . .you know, this woman heading the abortion clinic, she’s trying to get girls. That was what he was going for. Even Price acknowledged that his intention was to destroy me as a human being, because he thought if he could, he could destroy what I believed in,”

But Taft was pleasantly surprised by an outpouring of support after the show aired. The people who counted to her, clinic backers and other pro-choice advocates, came forward to say they were proud to have her as a spokesperson. It was yet another paradox in her life-her persecutor had helped her move to a new stage of openness.

“It was a gift that Bill Price gave me,” Taft says now. “There is very little else now that they can attack. What else can they say about me? So, in a sense, he made me invulnerable to that kind of hatred.”

One of two nasty letters Taft did receive after the show aired read simply, “If you are a lesbian. I am praying for you. If not, I apologize.” The other one said she should be skewered and roasted on a spit.

Though Taft is used to such hatred being hurled her way, her companion Shelley Oram is still shocked by the violent threats and is very protective of Taft, reminding her to stay in her car until the garage door closes behind her. Oram says that Taft rarely lets the threats get to her, shrugging off the bomb threats, the shouting picketers, the callers who threaten her life, the pro-lifers who scrawl graffiti on her home or office.

“I don’t understand it,” Oram says. “The regular protesters are the most hateful. And she just walks through them looking straight ahead. She is one of the most tender people I’ve ever met.”

Taft’s has been a quiet anger. When she first began to question herself and her work, Taft addressed her anger in a calendar of her writing, photography, and drawing that she created for her friends: “Anger.. ./My fear of you is furious./I’m better about it now…/ Taking the risk-/Letting it out-/But still,/ Sometimes, /After all the letting go,/Alone in my car/I scream.”

To this day, Price believes he destroyed Taft by “exposing her to the mainstream for what she is.” After all, he says, he saw her crying after the taping of the Ed Busch show. Taft, however, says it wasn’t the surprise accusation that brought the tears that day, but the continued violence of the pro-life movement. One of Taft’s friends sat in the audience that day next to a group of Seventh Day Adventist students. The friend overheard one of the students say, “Well, she kills babies; maybe we should go kill her.”

“So I went to the teacher,” Taft says, “and I said, ’I need to talk to you about this.’ And he just whisked the students out, and no one would even tell me their names. The idea that these kids were comfortable saying something like that was so frightening to me, and that the adults who were supposed to be supervising them had no interest in talking to them or making sure that they weren’t confused about their own righteousness.”

Taft has spent many years arguing with the Bill Prices of the world. But she knows now that the fight is infinite. If she wanted to, she could spend the rest of her life throwing facts back at accusations and misinformation hurled her way. Another turning point came when she called the reporter back on the Price story. It was time for another salvo, another point-counterpoint. But this time, Taft realized she didn’t want to talk about Bill Price anymore.

“I have not refused to do an interview in fourteen years,” Taft says. “But I don’t want to spend one more minute of my life talking about Bill Price, because I have already spent way too long on Bill Price.”

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS PATIENTS see when they walk into the Routh Street Women’s Clinic is a sign that reads, “We reserve the right to withhold services if we deem appropriate.” That simple, concise message gets to the core of what has changed at the clinic as a result of Charlotte Taft’s soul-searching.

Taft believes that around 10 percent of the 4,000 women who have abortions in her clinic each year don’t even need a counselor, They are clear about their decision to have an abortion and have already sorted through their emotions on their own. Around 80 percent, she says, need the guidance and support of a counselor to help them talk out their decision and work through some of their feelings before the procedure. It’s the remaining 10 percent, Taft believes, who have some major degree of conflict and who risk emotional scarring by abortion.

Taft believes that too many supporters of abortion want to ignore those women who are traumatized by the abortion question. To do so is to live a lie, Taft says, a lie that has crippled the pro-choice movement. It is those women, that 10 percent, that the Routh Street clinic often sends home-without an abortion-and with “homework” to help them sort through their feelings so that they can take responsibility for their own decision, whatever it may be. Of course, some of these patients simply get their $270 back and goto another clinic. They may not be ready to answer tough questions like, “Is abortion murder?” and “Which would you regret more in a year, having a baby, or having the abortion?”

“After all, abortion is about taking life,” Taft says. “We can’t pretend that it is nothing.”

Many pro-choice activists will bristle at Taft’s statement that a fetus is indeed a “life.” Give the anti-abortion forces that much and they’ll scream murder all the louder, they’ll say. But Taft is once again being honest. On the door to her office, she posts a quotation that elaborates on her point: “Abortion violates the taboo that men have set down that they alone have the right to set values by which we can decide when life can be taken.” For women to assert that it is moral to have an abortion, Taft believes, is “an ultimate usurpation of the male claims to supreme ethical authority.”

When a woman has an abortion, she must ask and answer questions that no one really wants to answer, Taft says, but going through the difficult process can make a difference. And after the abortion, the woman doesn’t have to be “fine, just fine,” Taft says. She has made one of the hardest decisions she will ever make. It’s not surprising that emotional pain might linger.

Taft compares the way our society deals with abortion to the way we once dealt with divorce, by hushing it up and attaching shame to both the choice and the chooser. Divorce can bring pain. But nobody argues that it should therefore be outlawed,

“What I mean by that is, do you know anybody who has been divorced? Were they fine, just fine? Did they go through a process? Did they need a lot of support? Did they feel like a failure? Do you want to make divorce illegal?” Taft asks.

Taft, having come clean in her own life, believes that harboring certain kinds of secrets is dangerous. She says that when she’s making speeches, she sometimes gets a feeling in the pit of her stomach: she’s afraid of what these people might think if they knew she was a lesbian.

“So 1 tell them,” Taft says. “I just blurt it out.”

For Taft, this is living accountably, getting rid of the shame that comes along with secrecy. Now she wants to bring that accountability to the pro-choice movement, by doing honest work patient by patient.

Some 10.000 women walk through the doors of the Routh Street Women’s Clinic each year. Four thousand of them get an abortion. Charlotte Taft wants all of those women to know that their lives are full of choice. Abortion is just one of them. Not , getting pregnant is another. And having a baby is another.

Two years ago, Taft got a phone call from a social worker. He was trying to help an indigent girl who had just had her baby at Parkland hospital. The young teenager was being discharged that day and had no place to go except back into a situation where the social worker suspected she was being sex- ; ually abused. There was little choice for this girl and her infant, and shelter space in town was full, so he turned to the Routh Street Women’s Clinic. An abortion clinic certainly didn’t have ready resources to deal with this problem, but Taft wanted to help. Somewhat reluctantly, she says, she referred the social worker to the White Rose Women’s Center- the anti-abortion group that very visibly occupies an office immediately next to her clinic. These are the people who hang posters of hugely magnified fetuses along the path to the abortion clinic. These are the people who pray that each woman climbing the clinic stairs will change her decision before she reaches the door and decide to have her baby. Surely the White Rose would help this young girl and her baby, Taft thought.

But when the social worker called, the White Rose had offered no solutions to the girl. He called Taft back after they turned him down. “1 said, ’Are you kidding me?’” Taft says. “And the girl ended up going home with our doctor’s nurse and spending a couple of nights.

“You can only do so much,” Taft says. “You just can”t take care of all the women with all of the children they can’t afford. It isn’t possible. So we help people weigh what they want to give to a child. And it’s not my job to tell them how much they want to give.

“Abortion doesn’t make their marriage notabusive or give them more money. It doesgive them a different kind of space. Andthat’s why the way we do the work canchange things.”