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And she hurt.

“It was very painful,” Megan says bluntly. “This sounds really disgusting and harsh, but it felt like I had just attached a vacuum cleaner to my body and turned it on.”

Afterwards, the emotions continued.

“It’s a tailspin,” Megan recalls. “You feel all emotions at once. You feel pain. You feel regret, maybe a little. You feel a tremendous sense of responsibility and relief that it’s over.”

No one, not even a doctor, will ever be able to tell they had abortions. The only ones who know are those who already knew. And anyone else the women told later.

The Other Side On its paperwork, the Akron Women’s Medical Group uses the term “pregnancy termination” to refer to abortion. Anti-abortion groups, like Right to Life, call abortion murder.

“It’s killing,” says Michelle Sawyer, executive director of Right to Life of Greater Akron. “And nobody should make the choice to kill. We don’t even say pro-life or pro-choice. We say pro-life, pro-death. It’s pro-life, pro-murder.”

Sawyer’s group provides information and assistance it hopes women will use to carry pregnancies to term. Most women who come to Right to Life considering abortions cite financial difficulties. Sawyer refers them to agencies that provide housing assistance or maternity clothes, baby food and other supplies. She gives them information about adoption agencies. She hands out pamphlets describing what her group sees as the horrors of abortion.

It was Right to Life that brought the Genocide Awareness Project to Kent State two years ago. The project was a circular mountain of posters depicting aborted fetuses. The display drew heated criticism, but Sawyer says it was not inappropriate because college students represent a “mature” audience.

Sawyer has no idea how many women her group has convinced to carry their pregnancies to term. But with billboards and county-fair displays and setups at college campuses, she can only hope that some women have heeded Right to Life’s call.

Still, abortion is a legal medical procedure. So it makes Anderson especially mad when she gets calls from crazed pro-lifers — all men, she says. “Do you know you kill babies?” the anonymous callers snarl. Some threaten to kill Anderson.

“That’s disgusting,” Anderson says. “My response to them is, ‘Would you like to come and sit down and talk about it?’ I haven’t had anyone take me up on that.”

Neither Sawyer nor her organization condones violence.

“Those are wacky individuals,” she says. “Why would somebody be pro-life and go out and kill people?”

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Although the sign outside its building on East Market Street reads “Akron Womans Medical Group,” the clinic prefers the name Akron Women’s Medical Group. An abortion at the clinic costs from $260 to $390. A woman eligible for all discounts — she chooses only local anesthetic, she’s on welfare, she’s a full-time parent — pays the least. Women who do not qualify for any discounts and who choose to be made fully unconscious pay the most.The “abortion pill,” RU-486, costs $442 and is administered in a two-part procedure on different days.Per year, the clinic performs around 150 second-trimester abortions, for pregnancies of 15-24 weeks. By fall of 2001, they had administered RU-486 to about 300 women since its legalization in December 1999.