Patients don't have to accept either pamphlet. Most wave them away, their minds made up.
For the few women who arrive ambivalent or beset by guilt, Harrison's nurse has posted statistics on the exam-room mirror: One out of every four pregnant women in the U.S. chooses abortion. A third of all women in this country will have at least one abortion by the time they're 45.
"You think there's room in hell for all those women?" the nurse will ask.
If the woman remains troubled, the nurse tells her to go home and think it over.
"If they truly feel they're killing a baby, we're not going to do an abortion for them," says the nurse, who asked not to be identified for fear protesters would target her.
The 17-year-old in for a consultation this morning assures the nurse that she does not consider the embryo inside her a baby.
"Not until it's developed," she says. "That would be about three months?"
"It's completely formed about nine weeks," the nurse tells her. "Yours is more like a chicken yolk."
The girl, who is five weeks pregnant, looks relieved. "Then no," she says, "it's not a baby." Her mother sits in the corner wiping her tears.
Harrison draws his own moral line at the end of the second trimester, or 26 weeks since the first day of the woman's last menstrual period. Until that point, he will abort for any reason.
"It's not a baby to me until the mother tells me it's a baby," he says.
But Harrison refuses to end third-trimester pregnancies, even if the fetus is severely disabled. Some premature infants born at that stage, or even a few weeks earlier, can survive. Harrison believes they may be developed enough to feel pain in utero. Just a handful of doctors around the nation will abort a fetus at this stage.
"I just don't think it should be done," says Harrison, who calls the practice infanticide.
Most women seek abortions much earlier in pregnancy; nearly 90% are in their first trimester. As long as Roe vs. Wade stands, states cannot ban abortions that early but legislatures can impose a variety of conditions.
At least 28 states, including Arkansas, require patients to receive counseling before the day of their abortion. Arkansas is also one of 26 states to require underage girls to get parental consent.
Abortion rights activists say such laws burden women unnecessarily, forcing them to miss work, find child care and pay for transportation to make two trips to the clinic, which may be hundreds of miles away. There's one abortion clinic in Mississippi and one in South Dakota. There are two in Missouri and two in Arkansas.
