Banks grew up poor like everybody else in her Brooklyn neighborhood, but with the poise and confidence befitting a high school baton twirler who was — how shall we put this? — built like the Catskills. She was Miss New York State in 1961 and competed in the Miss Universe Contest. She rivaled Sandra Dee and Jayne Mansfield respectively in the face and figure department. She modeled for pulp magazine covers and was often featured in teen magazine spreads, looking appropriately rhapsodic by the likes of Troy Donahue and Chubby Checker.

During a five-year live-in relationship that ended with a five-month marriage, Banks became deeply committed to providing counseling for girls and women who came to the clinic with unwanted pregnancies.

Reasons for seeking an abortion are varied and familiar. Incest. Rape. Illness. Sometimes it is the poverty of a mother abandoned by a man who will not support the children he has already fathered. Women in their 40s quite often decide that they are not up to another 18 years of parenthood. Even parents who want a child may elect to abort a fetus that is profoundly malformed.

With good cheer and a gift for banter developed at Betty's Beauty Shop, Banks disarms nervousness, arranges for an ultrasound, takes a medical history and determines whether the patient's decision was made of her own free will.

She does have to work, but at this point, it is uncertain whether the $17 an hour she earns three and four days a week will keep a roof over the heads of herself and her live-in lovers: five frisking, face-licking, berserker Chinese Crested show dogs, some with hair, some without. A recent confab with her investment counselor was not reassuring.

And every night when she turns in, she knows that the work she cherishes comes with a fringe liability, one of those downsides that you just can't put a price on.

"My husband's clinic in Hempstead was firebombed with 60 people inside and we barely escaped with our lives. The Presidential Women's Clinic was set on fire on July 4. Every time we're threatened, we never know if it's a crank or another Eric Rudolph. We have two wonderful doctors who wear bulletproof vests to work and deal with threats to their families and picketing of their homes.

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