ARTICLES

Trash Hero

DUMPSTER DIVE RAISES QUESTIONS

By James McCoy

This chart, giving the numbers of abortions performed during nine months last year by each clinic in California's largest abortion chain, may make your eyes glaze over. It looks like a document faxed to an arm-chair pro-lifer by the state health department. This chart, however, having been faxed from the pathology lab used by Family Planning Associates, eventually wound up in one of its abortion clinic's dumpsters where it was scooped up by a pro-lifer who was willing to get his hands dirty. Tim Wilson, active in pro-life work in San Diego in the late 80s and early 90s but now living in Inglewood, rummaged through the trash thrown out by the 20 Family Planning Associates clinics because the only abortions the State of California tracks "are the ones funded at taxpayer expense," he said.

"The reason I originally went in the trash," said Wilson, who started about two years ago, "is a 'for sale' sign went up at the Inglewood Family Planning Associates clinic, and I wanted to see why the building was for sale. I never did find out why it was for sale, but I found some very interesting trash, especially stuff sent from one clinic to another.... So I went to another clinic to find out about Inglewood." Wilson explained that the 20 clinics are constantly sharing information with each other; he was more likely to find out about the Inglewood clinic by examining the trash at another clinic to which Inglewood had sent a fax. In fact, the clinics share financial resources as well; they are all owned and operated by abortionist Edward Allred. "Even if Inglewood lost money, Allred would keep it open to keep the competition out," Wilson said.

Wilson never did find out why the Inglewood clinic building was for sale, but by weaving together a fax here, a memo there, retrieved from more than 300 "dumpster dives," Wilson determined not only the exact number of abortions performed by Family Planning Associates, but who was performing them -- not just physicians but other healthcare professionals as well.

Asked to describe a typical dumpster dive, Wilson laughed. "There'll be discarded gowns and operating-room trash." That's what you ignore. "You go for the office-room trash and the lounge trash.... It's like mining a vein; when you find a good vein, you just keep mining."

Wilson has not found aborted babies in the abortion clinic dumpsters or in the dumpster for Professional Pathology in Long Beach, although he has seen them in containers through the window there.

How does he cope with stressful sights like that? "I don't know how I cope with it," Wilson replied. Even the paperwork is stressful, he added, since it folds, spindles and collates "the human tragedy." Perhaps it's to avoid such stress that lawmakers in Sacramento have repeatedly shied from mandating the collection of statistics for all abortions performed in California, according to Jan Carroll, legislative analyst for the California ProLife Council. "We have introduced [legislation mandating collection] three or four times," she said. "It fails because anything in it with the 'A-word' fails." When it comes to abortion, "they will not pass even the most minor of legislation..."

Currently, the MediCal-funded abortions are tracked, Carroll said, "but they are losing track because they're putting so many MediCal funded abortions into HMO systems." When women get their abortions through an HMO referral to an abortion provider, "they don't get back a report of what number were provided."

If that's so, how accurate can the statistics be which for a few years now have shown a drop in the number of abortions? "That's a very good question," Carroll said. "We've been dependent on [Planned Parenthood's] Alan Guttmacher Institute and organizations like that."

Until now. What does Wilson make of the statistics he found, provided by the abortion providers themselves for themselves? "Obviously, the numbers seem to be falling," he said, "but that's happening around the country. They seem to be falling more in Orange County and San Diego County than other places.... In Orange County they lost one of their abortionists...

"I was able to find their names and addresses from stuff that was thrown away," he went on. Last summer, Wilson and his wife (and fellow activist) sent a mailing to each doctor, stating that their organization, Choose Now, was "compiling a list of doctors who routinely perform abortions" and that no response was necessary if he "met that criteria." A week later, Choose Now sent a flyer to the doctor's neighbors saying, "did you know that your neighbor, Dr. [NAME], is an abortionist?"

"The purpose is not to get these people to quit," said Wilson, "the purpose is to get other people not to go into the abortion industry." Nevertheless, "after we did it, two abortionists did stop working for Family Planning Associates -- that was not our goal -- but that was a fact."

Last month, Wilson sent a similar mailing to 88 putative Allred abortion clinic nurses, from the nurse practitioners who work directly with the abortionists to the "back-office supervisors" who control the abortion mill's flow.

At press time, Allred had not yet taken legal action; was Wilson bracing himself for any? "I don't know," he said, "everything we've done is legal and ethical and moral."