That morning, when the security guard asked him to empty his pockets, Dee had said, What for?
Dee was good with her boy, but that didn’t mean she was going to have a baby with him. Where did he work? Where did his money come from? He wasn’t putting on a uniform to go work at Burger King. Dee would end up in jail or dead like her husband, and then what would she have?
“You sound very sure,” Claudia said. “About the abortion. So why did you wait so long?”
“I didn’t wait!” Ladan cried, loud enough to be heard in the waiting room. “Three months ago I call for an appointment. They put my name on the list. They say they’ll call me back so I wait and wait, but they never call. I call again and they say okay, but I have to have counseling first. Then, for the abortion, I need to make another appointment.”
“Wait, what?” Claudia could make no sense of what she was hearing. “Who told you that?”
“The counselor. Katie was her name. The girl who answered the phone.” Ladan looked perplexed. “Did she make a mistake?”
No, Claudia thought. Please, not again.
SOME YEARS BACK, A NEW CLINIC HAD OPENED IN THE FENWAY, two miles west of Mercy Street. Claudia learned, later, that clinic was the wrong word, since no actual medicine was practiced there. Women’s Health Network was a crisis pregnancy center, run by an Oklahoma nonprofit called the Whole Family Initiative. It existed for one reason only: to trick women out of getting abortions. The place was a fraud.
The con was simple. When a woman called to make an appointment for an AB, she was connected to a friendly young “counselor,” recruited from a Christian college in the Midwest. An appointment was made, an ultrasound performed—the image enhanced to make the fetus look like a full-term infant, a plump and adorable Kewpie doll. After the ultrasound came a lengthy counseling session, an aggressive sales pitch by a Christian adoption agency. If the patient still wanted an AB, she was offered a second appointment, which would be canceled and rescheduled several times. By the time she figured out what was happening, it was usually too late to terminate. This was no accident. It had been the goal all along.
When the bogus clinic first opened, Claudia and Mary made a recon trip to check it out. Walking through the front door was a surreal experience. The Whole Family Initiative had gone to great lengths, and considerable expense, to replicate the peculiar atmosphere of their workplace: the same potted plants and comfy chairs, well-thumbed magazines on the same innocuous subjects: cooking, travel, decorating. （Everybody eats. Everybody likes sunsets. Everybody has a couch.） The sign out front was painted in the same colors, blue and sunny yellow. Even the typeface—a rounded sans serif—was identical.
To the untrained eye, the overall effect was convincing. To the trained eye, it was all wrong. The place had no metal detector, no cameras, not even a security guard. At a real clinic, such measures would be automatic. At a real clinic, the staff would be afraid.
The other difference was the toys. The reception area resembled a day-care center, or the waiting room of a pediatrician’s office. In one corner was a Fisher-Price workbench and a racetrack for tiny cars; in the opposite corner, a miniature kitchen with toy stove and sink. Toys for boys and toys for girls.
The ruse was breathtakingly elaborate—and from what Claudia could tell, it sometimes worked. The victims were usually poor, usually young. Some, like Ladan, were recent immigrants. The Hannah Ramseys of the world—rich White girls torn between Yale and Dartmouth—rarely fell for the con.
The fake clinic stayed open for nearly a year, until the Whole Family Initiative quietly folded; its founder, caught in a sexting scandal, had resigned in disgrace. The building in the Fenway sat empty for months, until it reopened as an Aveda hair salon. Claudia hadn’t thought about the fake clinic in years. Now, apparently, another crisis pregnancy center had opened its doors.
LADAN WAS SKEPTICAL.
“But that’s crazy!” she said when Claudia had finished explaining. “Why do they want to trick people like that?”