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UNITED NATIONS - Madame Toure, Guinea’s U. S.
f representative, holds her hands to her ears as Indian
Ambassador Samar Sen speaks at U. N. Security Council
session here. Sen. introduced a four-power draft calling for
Flight from pregnancy
For many, abortion just air fare away
By JONATHAN BEATY
Copley News Service
IjOS ANGELES - When
Betty-Jo stepped from the Dal
las jetliner into the fluorescent
glare of Los Angeles Inter
national Airport, she looked
momentarily lost, bewildered
and very young.
She wore faded jeans and a
light blue shirt, tails hanging
out. Her brown hair was fluffed
into soft curls.
Betty-Jo is a high school
junior from a small town near
Dallas, but the school books un
der her arm Saturday night
were part of an elaborate
subterfuge. She told her par-
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ents earlier in the day that she
was spending the weekend with
a girl friend to study for a test.
She was afraid to tell them
she was flying to I>os Angeles to
have an abortion.
Unknown to Betty-Jo, five
other girls on her flight were
there for the same reason.
One by one, they were
plucked unerringly from the
swarm of arriving passengers
by Diane Switzer, an attractive
25-year-old brunette from the
Problem Pregnancy In
formation Service (PPIS).
“Are you looking for Diane?”
she asked each one and then di
rected the girls to a growing
crowd of young women in the
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waiting room.
A few passenger exits away,
more staff members from
PPIS met a plane coming in
moments later from Houston
and more young women were
added to the waiting group.
leading the 20 or more girls
in a straggling line to the
waiting station wagons in the
airport parking lot, Diane and
several other young men and
women from PPIS kept up a
stream of casual chatter about
the weather or about a new
movie —about anything at all.
“It’s very important to act
relaxed and take their minds
off everything,” Diane explains
later. “Most of these girls have
never even been on an airplane
or out of their state and the
thought of going off alone to
have an abortion is terribly
frightening. Our clinics in
Texas only tell them they will
be met at the airport by Diane,
or Jim, or Bill, or Marie and
they describe us. So the girls
are really taking a lot on faith.
“But we’ve never lost one;
there have been some mix-ups,
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especially the girls from the
East that have to fly to Ken
nedy Airport in New York, but
we have honestly never lost
one.”
Problem Pregnancy In
formation Service and other
agencies like it are new
phenomena on the American
scene.
Run entirely by casually
dressed young people, the
agency is a far-flung abortion
referral service, bringing
thousands of women from the
heartland of America to
California and New York for
low-cost, legal and nearly in
stant hospital abortions.
The pace is hectic, and the
staff members, who are paid an
average of SSOO a month, work
12- to 16-hour days, six and
seven days a week.
“None of us is in it to make
money,” Diane says.
The flood of women appears
never ending.
When an office in suburban
El Segundo opened late last
year, it began by handling five
abortions a week. Within two
months, the figure had climbed
to 15 a week, mostly women
from the Los Angeles area who
had read about PPIS in the
underground press.
Some of the women were re
ferred by free clinics; a very
few by private physicians. By
April, the El Segundo office, a
two-bedroom apartment in a
private apartment house, had
become a beehive of activity.
Telephones in each room ring
constantly, 100 calls a day —
calls asking for advice about
birth control methods or
abortions.
The referral agency rents a
small fleet of station wagons
and vans that moves constantly
between the airport and a hotel
where girls coming in stay
overnight.
Staffers are on hand to meet
flights coming in throughout
the day, seven days a week
from cities throughout the
Southwest, and after a daz
zlingly brief hospital stay, the
women are ferried back to the
airport and put on home-bound
planes.
This particular weekend,
about 100 women arrived in Los
Angeles to be met by PPIS
staffers.
They are driven in caravans
to one of three hospitals in Los
Angeles used by PPIS. Other
hospitals accommodate similar
numbers of patients from other
referral agencies.
The unheralded boom in
abortion referral is the result of
California’s Therapeutic
Abortion Act, passed in 1967. In
the last year, a sufficient
number of doctors and private
hospitals have been willing to
stretch the provisions of the
Therapeutic Abortion Act
enough to make one-day
abortions possible.
By contrast, conservative
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ATLANTA —Speaker Solomon Blatt (1) of the South Carolina
State House of Representatives gives advice which brings
smiles to Miss Mary Frances Roland, graduate of the
University of Georgia, who was named Barwick Scholar of
Texas still jails people for
advertising birth control
methods. And the approach to a
legal abortion in states like
Colorado, which recently
liberalized its laws, is so in
volved that pregnant women
despair of the weeks that pass
before arrangements are
complete.
There is another factor.
Highly organized referral
agencies balance their pro
duction-line methodology with
the lowest possible price and
anonymity.
Bob Matson, the 28-year-old
director of PPIS, has used the
sheer volume of his operation
to drive down the price of an
abortion to an all-inclusive fee
of $l6O.
This compares to the $350,
and often twice that amount,
charged by most private
physicians and hospitals.
For out-of-state patients,
Matson has used this volume to
arrange cut-cost group rates
with doctors, hospitals, motels
and even airlines.
PPIS, Matson says, is the
second biggest customer of
Southwestern Airlines.
The goal, the long-haired
soft-spoken Matson says, is to
lower the price even further
and make quick, simple and
legal abortions available to
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anyone who wants one.
IADS ANGELES - Many of
the abortions being arranged
by the Problem Pregnancy In
formation Service (PPIS) are
performed at the Bel Air Me
morial Hospital, a small, pri
vate hospital in ultraexclusive
Bel Air.
Every second patient at Bel
Air today is there for an abor
tion and the number is growing
daily. Like the PPIS office, the
atmosphere is hurried and staff
members daily are learning
new ways to expedite the oper
ations.
On a recent Sunday, two doc
tors performed 51 abortions at
Bel Air in a little more than
four hours. Bob Matson, 28-
year-old director of PPIS, be
lieves the hospital staff can
eventually handle 1,400 abor
tions a month without reducing
the quality of care.
On the weekend, the assem
bly line begins at dawn as car
loads of women arrive from
their motel. One wing of the
modern hospital has been
turned over to abortion proce
dures. The women sit in the
lobby and in the halls on rows of
chairs as they await their
turns.
PPIS staffers are every
where, answering questions,
— Griffin Daily News Friday, August2s,l972
Page 7
1972, and to Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter and to E. T.
Barwick (r), chairman of E. T. Barwick Foundation, Inc.,
which give the Barwick scholarships. A total of 1,600 have
been given since the program started in 1955. (UPI)
explaining the steps involved,
delivering messages and trying
to give the women confidence.
Staffers believe their role in re
ducing the emotional trauma
of abortion is indispensable. It
is a belief the hospital staff
shares.
“We couldn't possibly handle
this kind of a load without these
kids,” says one registered
nurse. “By the end of the day
they seem to know everybody
by name and they are literally
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there holding the girls’ hands
as they're wheeled into the
operating room.”
The women are first ushered
through a tiny lab where blood
rest for an hour while the ef
fects of the anesthesia wear off.
The first girls are dressed
and on their way back to the
airport before the end of the
line completes the paper work.
How has the administrative
tangle that takes days to com
plete in most hospitals been
stepped up?
One clue can be seen by
watching young Dr. Rubin
Marmet, who performs many
of the operations.