Prayerfully Pro-Choice: How the Pro-choice Movement is Now Losing and Will Continue, to Lose

On any given Saturday, back in 1989, you would find me on an early Saturday morning standing outside a Los Angeles area abortion clinic, helping to escort women in. We called that “clinic defense.” But we weren’t defending the clinics as much as we were defending the women who came to the clinic to get an abortion.

I had just finished my graduate degree and finally had some time on my hands. There was an abortion clinic in Rosemead, California, a few miles from my home. After witnessing the harassment of mostly Hispanic women as they tried to enter the clinic, I decided that I was tall and big enough to physically escort these women safely into the clinic. Also, I spoke a bit of Spanish, so that might help. I did this clinic defense on the down-low for some time as I was also a devout Methodist. Then a woman introduced me to the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights (RCAR) and I passionately pursued setting up a Southern California Chapter of that organization.

This was the beginning of my turn from Theatre to Politics, a calling I would eventually make into a career.

At the time, the clinic protestors were emboldened by a group out of upstate New York called “Operation Rescue.” Their leader, Randall Terry, had successfully organized a national movement of harassment and intimidation of Planned Parenthood and other non-affiliated abortion clinics. At the height of clinic defense in the Los Angeles area, there could be 5,000 people gathered outside an abortion clinic, evenly split by those who were pro-choice and those who were anti-choice.

A lot of pushing and shoving went on and we were trained to lock arms and keep our legs together to prevent the “anti’s” from crawling through and reaching the door. We set up corridors with our bodies to escort women in and out. We surrounded clinics to prevent vandalism and broken windows. On more than one occasion I received death threats and was frequently called outrageous names.

After one clinic defense I was walking with three elderly Japanese women as we carried a banner that said “Prayerfully Pro-Choice” and behind us was a man screaming at us “Witches, Lesbians and Whores.” I turned on the man and yelled at him “Well, two out of three ain’t bad.” At that moment a mounted Los Angeles Police Department officer swung his horse around and went after the man.

At a clinic in Long Beach where there was a large and raucous anti-abortion protest, a man in camouflage singled me out and put his fist to my face. I stared him down and told him to go ahead and hit me, that there were only one hundred a fifty police officers there, so he might as well hit me. I seriously thought the guy would have an aneurism as he tried to contain his hatred of me. At that same protest, I called on a Sergeant to keep his men in order as one uniformed officer had joined the anti-abortion clinic protestors. And that officer ran over to stop me, yelling at me and sweating profusely as his boss pulled him aside.

Along with the clinic defense, I organized religious gatherings in support of “choice” at various churches and synagogues, and a yearly awards gala for those brave souls who had done outstanding pro-choice work and lobbied Sacramento.

I also organized a network of Jewish and Christian congregations in an effort called “No Need to Hide” as response to Terry’s “No Place to Hide” campaign. His “campaign” would put up “wanted posters” with doctors and clinicians pictures, names and addresses on them around their neighborhoods. My “network” of congregations were set up to take in the doctors and clinicians and their families if the violence ran them from their homes.

At the height of it, I spent about an hour on the phone with a clinic director who was seated on her couch with a gun on her lap because the protestors had surrounded her home. I stayed on the phone with her until the congregants I had organized in her community could come get her and take her to safety.

I was given an award of recognition by the California State Senate for my leadership. And a year later, I moved to Washington D.C. to become the national field director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. And later found myself working for another constitutional bedrock, that being free speech.

The bad days of blockading clinics had faded and were replaced by fire bombings and shootings instead. The most infamous of these shootings was of Dr. George Tiller in the foyer of his Evangelical Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas as he served as an usher. Dr. Tiller was known as one of three doctors in the entire United States that performed medically necessary late term abortions. He was a man who saved women’s lives and it cost him his own life.

My passion for “choice” has been re-ignited by the Supreme Court “leak.” While I find abortion to be an awful choice, I know that for many women, it is their only choice.

I wrote the forward for a book by Anne Eggebroten, “Abortion: My Choice, God’s Grace” which chronicles Christian women’s abortion experiences. In that forward, I blamed the church for failing to discuss the issue of abortion even though some twenty percent or more of women sitting in their pews have had one.[1] This lack of acknowledgment causes women shame and separates them from a fuller communion with God.

I’ve gone on to criticize the pro-choice movement and the new world order feminists for their frequent dismissiveness of abortion as “no big deal.” Not to mention their disgusting adolescent adoption of “pussy hats” as a feminist symbol that turns decades of feminist thought into a joke.

I had this discussion with a clergy friend of mine a few months ago. I bemoaned the cavalier attitude of Planned Parenthood and their reference to “crunchy parts.” I wrote an Op-Ed for the Baltimore Sun on the “Solemnity of Abortion” in which I called on Planned Parenthood to apologize to every woman who’d had an abortion in their clinics and to fire lead staff who created such an obnoxious cultural environment.[2]

There have been many points over the last few years when I thought the Pro-Choice movement had lost its way. Among the more shocking was Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s radio interview describing how he would deliver a baby and then have a discussion with the mother on “what to do.” That statement is made even more shocking by the fact that Northam is a pediatrician. That one interview galvanized the anti-choice movement better than Randall Terry could have ever dreamed of achieving.

And now to the leak.

I am watching the Pro-Choice movement being hijacked by radicals such as Anti-fa. Threatening Churches in much the same manner as Operation Rescue threatened clinics in the bad old days. Their favorite particular target is the Catholic Church. And while the Catholic Church did not have an anti-abortion stance until the 1860’s and in fact allowed abortion up to the point of “quickening” until that time, it uniquely stands at the center of the bull’s eye for the fascists who falsely claim they are anti-fascist.

And neither side seems to understand that abortion has always been with us. Its earliest mention dates to the Code of Hammurabi in 17th Century B.C. There is a mention in the Book of Numbers in the Old Testament of an abortifacient. That should a woman become pregnant with another man’s child, her husband is to take her to the Priest and she’s to be given a “potion.”

The simplification of morality when it comes to abortion frequently becomes a tool of the state to control the population. Women’s bodies become territorial lines to be expanded or shrunken depending on head count. One only has to look at China to see a state that uses fertility as a punishment or a gift dependent on political circumstances.

More than anything else, it doesn’t matter if abortion is legal or illegal, women will still have them. In fact, they will risk their own lives to have them. They won’t have to go to dirty back alleys to procure them, they need only look for a friendly pharmacist.

And in fact, the abortion rate was two to three times higher before abortion became legal than it is today. Much of that is due to better, more accessible contraceptive options.[3] Some can also be credited to advances such as the “morning-after” pill.

The Pro-Choice movement needs to step away from its dehumanization of fetuses and affirm abortion is not just another thing that one does like brunch on a Sunday. It is a decision fraught with pain and doubt and one that is uniquely singular to women. It may well be my body and my choice, but it is never without emotional consequence.

And it should never become a slogan to fuel a political campaign.

For that reason I remain Prayerfully Pro-Choice.

[1] That number is higher among Catholic women and lower among Jewish women. [2] https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-pp-abortion-20150810-story.html [3] There is some speculation that processed foods and environmental factors have lowered sperm count among men and that too contributes to lower unintended pregnancy rates.