Category: Quotes

From the blog “Rage is Good” by Cailo from Montgomery, Alabama about her experiences as a clinic escort:

“Anti-Abortion Protestors are Lunatics”
6/9/2006

“The toenail-painted hat lady doesn’t look like the protesters on the news, those mostly men, holding horrible posters of dead babies while screaming “murderer” in women’s faces. the hat lady doesn’t carry big posters. she wears gingham sundresses and lipstick and pink toenail polish. she wears wide brimmed sunbonnets decorated with floppy, oversized bows. she is petite and even kind of puny. she’s married to the president of the alabama christian coalition. she carries a bible with her, and usually a hymnal, and all morning she stands on the sidewalk outside of the clinic, softly singing songs about Jesus …several mornings a week, the toenail-painted hat lady paces back and forth in front of the clinic, reciting the same saccharine words over and over to every woman trying to enter the building: “morning! how are you today? if you’re here for an abortion, i’d like to help you!” the hat lady (and the preacher or two who sometimes accompany her) isn’t allowed on the grass or the parking lot or the driveway. she can stand only on the sidewalk; one step anywhere else, and we call the cops, and she gets hauled to jail. so, as we walk with women — and sometimes the men who are with them — from their cars to the door, we’re careful to stay off the sidewalk and stick to the grass. one of us walks next to the woman; the other body-blocks the hat lady. once, i “accidentally” walked backwards, because i knew she was behind me. i didn’t knock her over, but i knocked her off guard. and she wasn’t able to get to her satchel of pamphlets in time. …the woman who organizes the escorting has warned us to take the protesters seriously. “these are dangerous people,” she says.”

One former clinic escort and pro-choice activist recounts the following:

“I was told to antagonize the pro-lifers and I made the girls throw out any pro-life literature before entering the clinic. … We would tell them, `Those people out there are terrorists, it’s safer in here. They’re crazy.’ I even told one group, `That woman out there was just released from Meadowview Mental Hospital. Don’t talk to her; she killed her family’. … As soon as I got here last August, I joined the “Freedom of Choice Action League.” They’re big at Pine and Market… the clinic director tells us, every time we beat up the pro-lifers, to cover their cameras. … I wrote [an editorial to the Wichita Eagle] that pro-abortionists displayed sex toys in front of children and how they dumped semen and urine on people at national rescues. I personally defaced churches, LIFE, Inc., and HopeNet. I apologize for that. … “

Former pro-abortion activist Raymond Rivera

Operation Rescue was a pro-life group that staged demonstrations and sit ins at abortion clinics in the 1990s. They were often opposed by pro-choice activists to sometimes instigated violence. according to one such activist:

“We decided to link arms and snake our way in front of the antis [anti-choicers – pro-lifers] and block as much of the perimeter as we could. We moved quickly and the antis and police were caught unaware. It seemed like slow motion but it was probably only about 30 seconds: We were in. The antis started whining to the police and pointing fingers. “They’re pushing! We were here first!” they said. Too bad! We came to Wichita to keep this clinic open and right is on our side!”

Wichita Journals: On the Front Lines for Reproductive Freedom by Brooke & Margo, Seattle Refuse & Resist!

Also:

“At a little before noon, we left the clinic for Woodard Park, the site of Operation Save America’s abhorrent “fetus funeral.” A tiny white coffin…[we] held a pro-choice speak-out to remember the real human lives lost in the struggle for abortion rights: the seven abortion providers who have been murdered at the hands of the antis…We also spent time talking about our own experiences with abortion. Our stories countered the lies designed to make women feel ashamed of making the responsible choice to have an abortion and determine the destinies of our own lives.”

Operation Rescue was an organization that picketed abortion clinics and sometimes blocked them. All the participants signed a pledge to be nonviolent and nonconfrontational. Pro-choice writers and activists portrayed them as being violent, but in reality they usually conducted very peaceful sit ins.

The following passage is an excerpt from the March 1989 publication entitled “Clinic Defense: A Model,” by the Bay Area Coalition Against Operation Rescue (BACAOR)

“Isolate and humiliate. It is critical to separate in some way the resident OR leader or troublemakers. We assign them a particular escort and do our best to isolate them from the others by getting them to lose their cool, look foolish, argue with us, etc. Although in general sexual jokes or extreme harassment are not useful with the OR picketers, if baiting an OR about his treatment of women, his sexuality, and how many times he masturbates will keep him from bothering clients and from being able to effectively direct the others, do it. Remember, we are under no obligation to be polite to these people … They have already broken Miss Manners code by being at the clinic at all … Confining our behavior toward OR to the legal realm has distinct limitations.”

“About a year ago, I began to wonder what could be done about the Pregnancy Problem Action Centre, a Right to Life front, which tells young women terrifying lies about abortion. I decided that bombing them would just make them feel more righteous and martyred, give them more ammunition in their ‘holy war.’ Without their financial power and access to the media, graffiti [sic] seemed like an appropriate way to shriek defiance at them. One graffiti I did was on a church wall. I put ‘Isn’t your God a Misogynist?’ It helped break one of my own taboos, while expressing my anger at religion. It felt good.”

Anonymous pro-abortion vandal, quoted in Jill Posener’s book Louder Than Words

“I resent strongly the charges that I am a murderer, a killer, a devil. I resent the right [of demonstrators] to sit-in at my clinic. If they ever do that to my clinic again, it’s to the death. Only one of us is coming out of there.”

Bill Baird, quoted in The Idaho Statesman, November 19, 1981.

“I think it’s [picketing] religious persecution. These ‘good Christians’ don’t respect anyone else’s religion.”

Marilyn Buckham, director of the Buffalo GYN Womenservices Clinic, after the abortionist who worked there attacked and seriously injured a pro-life picketer with a baseball bat. Quoted in Paul Likoudis. “Buffalo Abortionist Attacks Pro-Lifers with Baseball Bat.” The Wanderer, December 15, 1988, page 1.

“Most feminists, predictably, can’t stand them [pro-life women]…Anti-abortion feminist groups have been banned from ERA rallies, rebuffed in their attempts to join consortiums of women’s groups, and forbidden to meet in campus women’s centers. The rift has been present since the earliest days of the women’s movement. Pat Goltz, the member of Ohio NOW who founded FFL in 1972, was asked and then forced to give up her NOW membership because of her anti-abortion activities. NOW’s president Molly Yard says that she would meet the same fate today. “I don’t know how someone can be a feminist if she’s not for a woman’s right to her own life,” she says. Seventeen years later, seven-term congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar of Ohio is consistently refused endorsement by women’s organizations because she opposes abortion, even though she has been a leading supporter of the ERA, pay equity, and aid for poor and elderly women.”

Pamela Ehrens. “Anti-Abortion, Pro-Feminism?” Mother Jones, May 1989, pages 31 and 45.