VIGILANTE BOYFRIEND

By MARGARET CARLSON

There were a lot of people in the town of Blair, Nebraska, who thought they knew what was best for "Mary Smith,'' 15 years old and pregnant. But it's unlikely that most of them, including the police, were acting lawfully. In May 1994, Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which makes it a federal crime to use force or threaten to use force against a woman seeking an abortion. The law was intended to end the vigilante violence that had exploded at abortion clinics around the country. The lawmakers probably didn't even envision the possibility of vigilante action against a pregnant girl and her family in the middle of the night with the active support of local law enforcement. But the 1994 law applies to a pregnant woman in all places at all times, according to the A.C.L.U. lawyers representing the Nebraska girl's family. It will be the first time the issue has been litigated in this way.

Moreover, a boyfriend has no legal standing to interfere in a decision about a pregnancy--or even be notified of that decision. Eleven states have laws that give husbands the right to notification or consent, but those statutes were declared unconstitutional in the 1992 Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. The court ruled that spousal-consent laws embody "a view of marriage ... repugnant to our present understanding of marriage." The decision recognized that controversial, unwanted pregnancies occur only under murky, vexing circumstances in which the relationship is already too dysfunctional for there to be voluntary communication. The court argued that since it is the woman who carries the child and bears the responsibility of raising it, the grave decision of whether or not to become a mother belongs to her. A man cannot force a woman either to have an abortion or to give birth on the ground that he participated in the pregnancy.

But this ruling has not entirely stopped men from trying to intimidate pregnant women--or kept some judges from letting them get away with it. In the late 1980s lawyers associated with the National Right to Life Committee distributed a kind of fathers' rights litigation packet-pleadings that showed men how to get an injunction against a pregnant wife or girlfriend seeking abortion. These legal gambits often worked at the lowest level. An appeal to a higher court was almost always successful, but not all women had the money to bring an appeal. In any event, the more immutable laws of gestation sometimes handed the man a victory anyway: the time during which a woman could comfortably and legally seek an abortion would simply run out.

Mary Smith is pressing her case long after giving birth to a girl. At most, she and her family can win some financial compensation for the public hell the town put them through as they tried to make a constitutionally protected private decision. While Heath Mayfield, the father of the baby, is still at the local high school, playing football, Mary Smith's life is permanently altered. The harassment was so bad that the Smiths pulled up stakes and moved to Iowa, where Mary lives at home with her daughter and attends school. And it continues even now. The day the Smiths sued the Tulls, the white frame house the Smiths still own in Blair was pelted with spaghetti sauce, sprayed with shaving cream and draped with toilet paper. Obscenities were scrawled on the garage window with butter. If mother and baby are doing fine, it's not due to any kindnesses from the citizens of Blair.