The Planned Parenthood health center in Brooklyn occupies ten thousand square feet on the sixth floor of an office building across the street from a courthouse. After you get off the elevator, you have to go through a metal detector. A guard behind bulletproof glass inspects your bags. The day I was there, in June, the waiting room was full; the line at the registration desk was ten deep. A bowl on the counter was filled with condoms, giveaways. A sign on the wall explained Plan B, the morning-after pill. In the waiting room, a couple of dozen women sat in rows of blue plastic chairs, texting. A few wandered over to a display of glossy brochures and picked up “Am I Ready to Have Sex?” or “Birth Control and GYN Care: For FREE. For REAL.”
Aside from its proximity to the site of the United States’ first birth-control clinic—opened in Brooklyn in 1916—the place is a typical Planned Parenthood clinic. Last year, seventeen thousand patients received medical care here. Two-thirds were insured by Medicaid, or paid reduced rates, or received free treatment. They were tested for S.T.I.s and U.T.I.s; they were prescribed birth-control pills and antibiotics; they were fitted for diaphragms and I.U.D.s and cervical caps; they learned how to check their breasts for lumps. They had pregnancy tests and Pap smears and abortions.
Nearly every woman there looked to be in her twenties, and everyone was wearing flip-flops and jeans and T-shirts or halter tops; outside, it was sultry. Ponytailed college students carried bike helmets and backpacks; women wearing head scarves clutched handbags. One woman had brought her boyfriend. Another had brought her son. He was playing with a Nintendo DS. Thumbs herky-jerky, he would sometimes elbow his mother by accident, and she would smile and stroke his cheek.
Nellie Santiago-Rivera has been the director of the Brooklyn health center for the past eleven years. The corkboard behind her desk is covered with family photographs. When she was a teen-ager growing up in the Bronx, a friend brought her to the Planned Parenthood clinic at 149th Street to get contraception. “Birth control is not something we talked about in my family,” she told me. Her parents were born in Puerto Rico. “We believed, ‘You light the candle, and you pray.’ ” A report published in 1965, when Santiago-Rivera was a girl, found that ninety-four per cent of women who died in New York City from illegal abortions were either black or Puerto Rican.
The Brooklyn health center is one of four clinics run by Planned Parenthood of New York City, an affiliate of the national organization. There’s one in Manhattan, one in the Bronx, and one in Staten Island. There are eighty-two Planned Parenthood affiliates nationwide, operating nearly eight hundred clinics. Planned Parenthood says that one in five women in the United States has been treated at a Planned Parenthood clinic. Critics of Planned Parenthood, who are engaged in a sustained attack on the organization, say that most of those women are going to those clinics to have abortions, paid for, in violation of the Hyde Amendment, with taxpayer money.