Wadsworth center marks 20th year Women’s clinic touts guidance, not judgment

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BANGOR – Pam Crocker is blond, blue-eyed and bubbly. She also is single, 20 years old, unemployed and pregnant with her second child.

Earlier this week, she hopped onto an exam table at the Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center in Bangor as she laughed and talked to Terry Marley-DeRosier, her nurse practitioner.

“I come here because I feel comfortable here,” Crocker said. The center is the only independent women’s health center in Maine and one of only about 20 in the nation. Being independent and nonprofit provides the center freedom from the rules and regulations that are tacked onto federal funding.

“The people are nicer here, and I can talk to Terry about anything. If I seem quiet or ‘off’ in any way, she’ll ask me how things are at home and I know I can tell her.”

Marley-DeRosier knows that on another day, another 20-year-old woman in a similar situation might come in seeking an abortion, and the nurse would provide all the information that woman would need to make her decision.

Crocker, however, is receiving prenatal care on this day and joyfully is anticipating the birth of her second child. She plans to marry the baby’s father next month. He is the father of her first baby, too.

When she was pregnant nearly three years ago with her first child, she learned quickly that many doctors in the area would not accept new patients on Medicaid. Though Medicaid reimburses doctors only about 40 cents on the dollar, the Mabel Wadsworth Center gladly accepts those patients.

“With my first pregnancy, I had complications, and one doctor during a hospital visit told me I shouldn’t be having the baby at all since I was only 18 and not married,” Crocker said. “At the center there is no judgment of me or my decision, just good health care that I can afford and support.”

“This center is about educating women on what their choices are and supporting them when they make that choice,” said Ruth Lockhart, the center’s co-founder and executive director, during a recent interview. “It’s not about judging their decision or their lifestyle.”

If there is one thing that Lockhart would like to do as the Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center approaches its 20th birthday, it would be to dispel the falsehoods that surround the Harlow Street agency.

It’s not just an abortion clinic, though the protesters who appear regularly outside the facility would have the public think so. Abortion accounts for only about 10 percent of services rendered at the center.

It’s not just a center for lesbians; the vast majority of the center’s clients are heterosexual females.

And it’s not just a center for low-income women.

“We are proud to provide reproductive health care for low-income women, but we also have many clients who are insured with private insurance companies but who choose to come here because of the services we provide and the way they are treated,” Lockhart said from her cluttered office tucked into the back of the space at In-Town Plaza.

“What many people don’t understand is that the more insured women that we do serve, the more underinsured or uninsured women we can help,” she said.

In 1984, when five area women sat around a kitchen table trying to figure out how to best provide reproductive health services and education to area women, they realized that government restrictions changed with each administration and too often smothered their ability to provide the information many women sought.

“We could talk to teens about pregnancy and options, but couldn’t mention abortion. We could talk about AIDS, but we couldn’t mention homosexuality,” Lockhart said. “We decided we wanted to provide education and services that were needed, not just those that the administration agreed with.”

So the center was formed, with the organizers at first providing just education at clinics and health fairs and using their kitchen tables and the trunks of their cars as offices.

In 1992, the center received enough money to open offices on Harlow Street, where it remains.

With 11 employees, the center stands as a tribute to its namesake, Mabel Wadsworth. Wadsworth, now 94, came to Maine in the 1940s. She was a nurse and the wife of a doctor who quickly realized that Maine women, especially in rural areas, needed access to birth control.

“She literally would go out to the hinterlands and provide these women with diaphragms,” Lockhart said.

In the past 20 years, many things have changed around the clinic and the services it provides, but many things have stayed the same.

“Everybody thinks we are probably most often sought out to answer questions about abortion. But when we began, the questions we were most asked were about menopause, and that’s the same today,” the executive director said.

Choice, Lockhart said, is not only about a woman’s right to abortion, but also about her right to make all choices when it comes to her health – estrogen or no estrogen, drugs or alternative treatments.

When the clinic started, there was little information about menopause, premenstrual syndrome or abortion. Today those issues are discussed openly in the media, and some women become overwhelmed by the amount of information available, Lockhart said.

“First there was too little information. Today there is so much that women don’t know what to believe,” she said. “They can come here and we give them not only the education but also the attention they need so that they can make the decision right for them.

“We don’t just give them what I might call cookie-cutter remedies.”

Carolyn Gontoski was raising two kids in Greenbush in a home with no water or power when she first heard of the Wadsworth center. Gontoski has served on the board of directors at the center and remains a devoted volunteer.

“My mother was one of eight sisters and they talked every day and I grew up seeing that and I wanted that, but I had become so isolated,” Gontoski said recently. “I saw a flier for a health fair and I went and met these women and they made me feel validated.

“I felt better, not so timid, and for the first time in a long time believed in myself,” she said.

Gontoski said she had allowed herself to be controlled by her life, rather than the other way around. She was so busy raising her kids, gardening and tending the family’s animals that she lost sight of herself.

“Choice is not just about abortion. It’s about how you live your life, and the center embodies that and lives that everyday,” she stressed. “I finally learned to make my own choices, and now that I’m older, I love it, and I’ve learned to nurture myself.”

While the center prides itself on its open-door policy for all women, the glassed-in, secure entryway, with an intercom next to the locked door, is indicative of the continued fear and controversy that surrounds abortion.

The center was first targeted by abortion protesters in 1994, two years after it opened its Harlow Street doors. Today protesters carrying graphic, enlarged pictures purported to be of aborted fetuses still picket the center twice a week.

In 1994, shortly after John Salvi burst into two women’s health clinics near Boston and killed two receptionists, the windows at the Mabel Wadsworth Center were smashed.

“That same morning, as we were standing around looking at them boarding up our windows, one of our supporters called and asked, ‘How much money do you need to put in a security system?’ We got an estimate of $15,000, and that donor paid for it,” Lockhart said.

“Our doors are open. You just have to get through the security first,” she said.

Lockhart sees a possibility that the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion, could be overturned. Should that day come, she says, she feels confident that Maine will immediately pass its own abortion legalization law.

“I feel so blessed to live in Maine, which is strongly pro-choice,” she said.

Looking ahead, “I do see a collapse and eventual rebuilding of our entire medical delivery system, and I think the center has to be prepared for that and its role in that rebuilding,” Lockhart said.

Meanwhile, Crocker remains in her home in rural Exeter, thankful that she found the center. She’s comfortable with her life decisions and looking forward to marrying her children’s father, whom she’s been with since she was 15.

“I know how fortunate I am,” the young mother said. “Other teenagers who get pregnant don’t end up in the situation I’m in.

“I have a home and I have great support from my fiance and my family and I’m getting great medical care,” she said.