60 hours, 50 abortions: A California doctor's monthly commute to a Texas clinic
DALLAS - The protesters are already positioned when she pulls up in her rental car. One lurches at women approaching the clinic, rosary beads dangling from her outstretched palm. Another hands patients tiny fetus dolls that match their skin color.
The doctor tries to ignore them. There are demonstrators at every abortion clinic and they're all the same, she thinks: a nuisance. In Northern California, where she lives, a man yells, "Don't take the blood money," as she arrives at work.
At least here, in Dallas, the protesters mostly stay on the sidewalk. The doctor slips inside the mirrored glass doors of the clinic - one of the busiest abortion facilities in the United States.
She comes here once a month, part of an unofficial network of physicians who travel across state lines to perform abortions in places where few doctors are willing to do so.
It's not yet 9 a.m., and the clinic's waiting rooms are filled. Women with their husbands. Women pushing strollers. Women alone.
The young doctor will spend 60 hours in Dallas this trip and perform 50 abortions. She will have to run in the hallways to keep up with her packed schedule.
The California physician was one of more than a dozen doctors interviewed by The Los Angeles Times who commute to other states to perform abortions. She allowed a reporter and a photographer to accompany her to Dallas on the condition that she not be identified and that her face not be shown in photographs, citing concerns for her safety.
The doctor acknowledged that when she began traveling out of state to
