Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 20, 1990 TAG: 9004200308
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV14 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: SCOT HOFFMAN CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
"Abortion mills are what we're talking about," she told an audience of more than 200 Virginia Tech students, faculty and members of the community.
Abortion, she says in a written statement of her views, is "a skillfully marketed product sold to a woman at a crisis time in her life."
Mary Nottingham, director of the Roanoke Medical Center for Women, where abortions are performed, argued for the abortion-rights movement and contended that Everett was generalizing by judging all clinics the same.
Everett, who had an abortion the same year - 1973 - that abortions became legal through the Supreme Court's Roe vs. Wade decision, was an employee in an abortion clinic and later owned two clinics in the Dallas area between 1977 and 1983.
She described the clinics she worked at and owned as immoral, assembly-line operations that derived profits by making abortions attractive and by increasing volume, sometimes doing as many as 10 or 12 operations an hour.
"We were the McDonald's of abortions," she said during the debate. "We were eventually caught red-handed [by a local TV news program] doing `abortions' on women we knew weren't pregnant."
Everett said she finally got out of the abortion industry when a woman bled to death during an abortion at a clinic.
Nottingham, who has also had an abortion, responded that Everett's old clinics and ones like them are not the rule.
"The first thing that we at our clinic do is ask if the woman has had a positive pregnancy test. We require that," she said. "Besides, I would have to question the integrity of a person who ran a facility the way Miss Everett ran hers."
As in many abortion debates, both sides squared off with numerous - and often contradictory - statistics.
Nottingham, quoting from a study by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, told the audience that only "one in every 200,000 women will die in a legal abortion. This is one-seventh the number of women who would die in pregnancy and from pregnancy complications."
"I saw one out of every 500 women die" in the clinics she worked in, Everett said, adding that data available to her supports her contention. "The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta says one in every 200,000, and this is just not true."
Asked how she reacts to the assumption that many women treat abortions simply as birth control, Nottingham said, "Of all the allegations against women [who have abortions], that is the most direct slap in the face of all. In my experience, I'd say most women have more integrity than to use abortion as a method of birth control. . . . Mostly it's an act of desperation and necessity."
Everett disagreed.
"Our statistics say 98 percent of abortions are for birth control," she said. "We know that abortion is a convenience."
In a question-and-answer session after the one-hour debate, Everett was asked to comment on the issue of abortion in the case of rape.
She replied: "Why would we want to punish the rapist's child for what his or her father did?"
She added that many in the anti-abortion movement support abortion when a pregnancy poses a threat to the mother's life.
Correspondent Kim Sunderland contributed to this article.
by CNB