A REMINDER: Abortion is still legal in the United States. And yet, 36 years after Roe v. Wade, a safe, legal abortion is harder and harder to obtain. Regulation and intimidation have sharply reduced the number of clinics, doctors, and hospitals willing to engage in the procedure, or medical schools to train the next generation of providers. Today, it is not possible to obtain a legal abortion in 87 percent of US counties.
It’s easy to feel smug about this living in Massachusetts. Surely in a reliably liberal state, with the finest medical facilities in the world, abortion is reliably available to women who need it?
Well, not exactly.
A recent survey by the Massachusetts chapter of NARAL, the abortion-rights group, found that five outpatient women’s health centers that once performed abortions have closed since 2002. There is now no provider on the Cape, for example.
But NARAL also turned up nervous providers begging not to be identified. Thirteen hospitals where NARAL believes the procedure is provided wouldn’t admit it to an anonymous woman seeking an abortion over the phone. “If we ferret them out and they ask us not even to put a dot on a map, you get a sense of the problem,’’ said Andrea Miller, NARAL’s Massachusetts executive director.
And if the advocates at NARAL can’t find facilities willing to say they will provide abortion, how easy can it be for an isolated, desperate woman?
In Brookline, one private health care facility’s attempt to move into new space on a commercial street is emblematic of the national trend. Women’s Health Services has been providing all sorts of sexual health services - from pap tests to fertility counseling to abortion - virtually without incident on Boylston Street in Brookline for 18 years. But a group of residents has sued to stop a zoning permit that would allow the health center to move to a former Hollywood Video store on Harvard Street.
The issue was not whether the building was zoned for medical use; that was never in doubt. And the Brookline zoning board approved a parking variance for the facility on July 16. Some in town say the issue is not even abortion rights per se, but only the disruption they fear will accompany the relocation.
Tom May, the attorney representing the nine plaintiffs, declined to speak about the pending suit. But according to the complaint, the abutters fear that abortion protesters - not the clinic itself - will be bad for business, terrifying for young children attending an elementary and preschool nearby, and damaging to property values.
“The signage displayed by the protesters and the nature of their chants and slogans will adversely affect the neighborhood and diminish the property and business values in the neighborhood but also adversely impact the health and emotional well being of the children,’’ the complaint reads.
Blocking the clinic’s move because of expected protests is a variant of the “heckler’s veto,’’ in which free speech or other rights can be suppressed simply by protesters threatening havoc.
It’s a devilishly complicated issue. No one wants to subject little children to a gauntlet of protesters waving pictures of bloody fetuses. And protesters do have a free-speech right to brandish their gruesome signs so long as they stay within prescribed buffer zones.
But if a constitutionally protected medical procedure can never be allowed anywhere near a school or business or church that might be disturbed by protesters, women’s health clinics will not be able to operate in communities where real people live at all. And that just means further barriers to access for women needing an abortion.
Listen to Dr. Laurent Della-Bovi, director of Women’s Health Services. “Women’s health is a part of health care in general,’’ she says. “We can’t marginalize or stigmatize these services. To say that reproductive health or sexual health isn’t a part of our overall commitment to health care would be a really terrible thing.’’
But of course, marginalizing and stigmatizing abortion is exactly the aim of the protesters. And if they bow to the heckler’s veto, the good liberals of Brookline will be helping that along.
Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
