"In the hotel where they're registered under a false name, up the elevator and past two security guards at the door, the abortionist and his wife are relaxing.

She casts her legs on an ottoman and leans back on the bed, propped up on her elbows. He slumps in an armchair in the shadows. Long day. Before this trip to Washington they were in New York, and before that they were home, where they never stay long. Home is Nebraska, but Nebraska isn't much of a home. (They used to get stalked at the Omaha airport; one protester passed out leaflets to boarding passengers: 'Is there a killer on this flight?')

LeRoy Carhart just turned 59: a grandfather, husband of 36 years, former Air Force surgeon, Republican, feminist, Methodist and abortion doctor. This summer he successfully challenged Nebraska's 'partial birth' abortion ban in the Supreme Court. He's one of three abortionists in the state, and the only one who will perform surgical abortions past 16 weeks. He is a marked man.

Naturally, there's a price. This protection, for example, which sometimes feels like a mobile prison. When LeRoy and Mary travel and he's going to be in the public eye-last week he was honored by Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington - they get bodyguards. To go two blocks from the hotel to the Planned Parenthood building, they have to take a private car accompanied by a blond guy with ramrod posture and a wire in his ear.

LeRoy Carhart wishes America were different. He wishes it could be more like, say, the Netherlands, where abortion is less of a dirty word. He wishes he weren't persecuted for a practice that's wholly legal. But he's not leaving Nebraska, not leaving this business. 'Stubborn' his wife calls him.

'I've been accused of chasing windmills,' he says.

This is the unlikely life cycle of an abortion doctor. LeRoy Carhart didn't enter this line of work because of ideology. He entered it and the ideology found him.

Mary and LeRoy Carhart have been together virtually since fifth grade in Hamilton, N.J. They used to walk home from school together She went to his baseball games and he to her 4-H meetings, and they had their first date at their eighth-grade graduation.

Mary became a high school science teacher and they had two children. LeRoy entered the Air Force in 1964, later went to medical school, and was a surgeon from 1978 until the mid-'80s. They were stationed in Nebraska and settled there, in Bellevue, 20 minutes from Omaha. Their lives were a little sheltered. ('I went through college,' LeRoy says. 'I didn't know marijuana existed until a training film in the Air Force.') Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court in 1973 and neither paid much attention.

But Carhart did have a passing interest in abortion, born of some things he'd seen in medical school at Halmemann Medical College in Philadelphia. Women came into the hospital suffering from infections and injuries after trying to perform abortions on themselves. Some of the methods you've heard of: knitting needles, crochet hooks. And maybe some you haven't: 'We had women that would douche with lye,' Carhart says.

Flash forward to 1987. Retired from the Air Force, Carhart had recently opened a private surgery practice. A nurse he knew asked him once, twice, three times if he'd consider replacing an abortion doctor who was leaving her clinic. He was an abortion rights advocate but had the experience of only 'two or three' abortions he'd performed in medical school under a state law that allowed them under rare conditions. Besides, he had his private practice to worry about. He turned her down-once, twice.

Then he changed his mind.

'She just said they desperately needed somebody. I was doing enough to stay busy with my new practice but not setting the world on fire,' Carhart says. 'There was a definite need, it was something I was interested in ... I had time to do it.'

What about the risk? The controversy?

'It never occurred,' Mary Carhart says.

Really?

Well, Carhart says, he knew that the clinic he was going to work at 'had been twice burned by arson.' But that was back in the '70s. It seemed like the atmosphere had mellowed.

In truth, not.

In 1991 the Carharts' farm burned down: Their mobile home, their stables: 17 horses, in addition to a dog and a cat, were killed. The cause of the fire is unknown, though Carhart believes it was arson. (He says he received a letter shortly after the fire linking the horses' death to the abortions he'd performed, but lost it; the official inquiries were inconclusive.)

Carhart still has difficulty talking about the fire. It did something to him: He couldn't clean the rubble of his former home for six years. And something else: After the blaze he decided to go at abortion practice full-speed. He became what's known as a 'circuit rider,' traveling to nearby states to perform abortions in places where need outstripped willing doctors.

It was, on the one hand, a decision based on his medical ethics. 'I just think that if you come to me and say, 'I can't carry this baby' . . . my place in medicine is to give you the care you need,' Carhart says.

But it was also a decision of a more personal nature. He would not let them win. 'I realized that if you're going to do abortions, you're going to be a target of attack, so you might as well do a lot of them.'

The Carharts' current clinic (which Mary manages) unabashedly proclaims itself 'The Abortion and Contraception Clinic of Nebraska' on a massive 30-by-8-foot sign. It sits across from a Catholic school and draws patients from South Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado and elsewhere.

It's a vortex for controversy. Over the years, the Carharts say, they have had a clinic window broken and the door locks glued. One morning they, discovered that someone had dumped 'bucket upon bucket"' of hog manure at the clinic door.

The couple have drawn fire from Nebraska's leaders, as well. A former juvenile court judge recently organized an antiabortion rally around the clinic. This summer state Sen. Paul Hartnett, who tried and failed to pass legislation banning research on aborted fetal tissue (which Carhart donates to the University of Nebraska), purchased, with partners, the building that houses the clinic, and has been trying to evict it. Buying the property was a good business opportunity, Hartnett says, and besides, it'll be good to 'clean up the area.'

This summer's Supreme Court fight pitted Carhart against Nebraska Attorney General Donald Stenberg, who opposes the dilation-and-extraction ('partial birth') method of abortion, in which a physician partially delivers the fetus, then collapses the skull by suctioning its contents. Stenberg argued that the procedure bordered on infanticide. Carhart opposed the ban, saying it was so loosely worded that it would effectively prohibit the method favored for terminating second-trimester pregnancies.

The court ruled that Nebraska's ban constituted an 'undue burden' on a woman's right to an abortion, but left the door open for a more narrowly worded ban on the D&X procedure. (Later in the summer, a federal appeals court in Richmond decided a similar Virginia ban on partial-birth abortion as unconstitutional on the same grounds.)

The Carharts can name the regular protesters who've been on their case for years - Sharon this and Melissa that. 'The anti's,' LeRoy and Mary call them. They post photographs of the regulars on their clinic Web site, with the warning: 'If you are approached by any of the following Anti-Choice individuals, they are not clinic employees and are present only to harass you!'

LeRoy and Mary have their own private nicknames for the anti's, like 'Preacherman,' who had long, Jesus-style hair, carried a Bible and used a stepladder to peer over a fence into the clinic. ('Actually,' say Mary, 'he was pretty nice.')

'Nurse Ratched,' Mary says, used to protest in a nurse's uniform 'to confuse the patients.' There's 'The Troll' ('He's got a short man's complex,' says LeRoy), 'Grandpa' ('He passed away') and 'Scissorman.' There's 'Potatohead' ('He's got, a very unusually shaped head,' LeRoy says; Mary adds that he 'comes with the little old lady with the parasol').

And of course there's Larry Donlan, who knows the sidewalk outside Carhart's clinic as a priest knows his pulpit, who has met the doctor in airports, who tape-records their exchanges, who once approached Carhart at dinner in a restaurant and videotaped him.

'Any time that we talk to the abortion killers we're going to tape what they say, because they lie,' Donlan says. 'Carhart is very, very disliked in Bellevue.'

So, the Carharts tread lightly in their world. They avoid routines. They don't go grocery shopping at just one store and they don't leave home the same time each day. They don't say publicly where they live.

LeRoy says publicity helps his cause. 'I just think I have to put a face on an abortionist,' he says. 'The biggest weapon the abortion fighters have had is marginalization.'

And he has Mary.

'I don't feel alone because she's there. And I wouldn't try to do this if she wasn't there.'

Together, they keep each other's humor up. She keeps his facts straight. Conversations with Carhart are long and rambling, and he stops often to consult his wife. (Was it 73? '74? A vasectomy? Appendectomy? St. Louis? Texas?) She carries the credit cards because he's always losing his wallet.

This fight, Carhart says, 'is as fundamental as freedom itself. I think I have to fight this fight or else I just end up dethming my beliefs.' He stops, corrects himself. 'Our beliefs'" (Libby Copeland, The Washington Post, October 28, 2000).