by Marlene Gerber Fried

About the author: Marlene Gerber Fried is a professor in the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, and co-chair of the National Network of Abortion Funds.

“Mary” calls me from South Dakota, asking if we can help. “Susan,” her seventeen-year-old daughter, is pregnant. The man involved is the father of Susan’s two-year-old child, but Susan has a restraining order against him. She is in her second trimester, and the only clinic in their state doesn’t do abortions past fourteen weeks, so she will have to go to Kansas to have the abortion. Susan and her mother have tried, but they can’t raise all the money needed for the trip and the procedure. The man’s...