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The escalation of anti-abortion violence and killing of abortion providers and clinic staff in the early 1990s raised tensions within the abortion provider community. Frustrated with what they perceived as inadequate support, NAF members began to leave the organization and established the November Gang and the National Coalition of Abortion Providers. Much smaller than NAF and made up of mostly independent clinics, both the November Gang and NCAP encouraged more open conversations about the difficult questions in abortion care such as the role of violence and fetal death. Members of the November Gang also introduced head and heart counselling to offer women greater support as they dealt with the increasing stigmatization of abortion. The development of intact D&E and debate of the so-called partial birth abortion ban further increased tensions in the abortion provider community as abortion providers and their supporters disagreed over whether and how to defend intact D&E procedures. When the US Supreme Court decision upheld the ban of intact D&E in its decision Gonzales v. Carhart, anti-abortion activists had, for the first time, successfully banned an abortion procedure. Despite these developments, patients continued to affirm their right to choose abortion.

This chapter recounts how New York City Transit Authority rail service planners Peter Cafiero, Chuck Kirchner, Glenn Lunden, and Jon Melnick resurrected the Second Avenue subway in 1988. Even though the Transit Authority was in the early stages of its 1987–91 capital program, the planners' bosses wanted to start getting ready for the next program, which would run from 1992 to 1996. The first step would be to create a document that assessed the authority's long-term needs and identified projects that would rehabilitate the subway system, increase ridership, improve productivity, and expand system capacity. One proposal the planners wrote to address the Lexington Avenue's problems was an idea that the MTA planner Bob Olmsted had first championed in 1975—a Second Avenue subway north of 63rd Street. As the Second Avenue subway proposal moved up the Transit Authority hierarchy, the authority's president, David Gunn, agreed that the time was right to begin thinking about expanding the subway system. Before he could devote significant resources to advancing the Second Avenue subway, however, it would have to compete with other potential megaprojects under discussion at the MTA's agencies.