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"They'll rip out your cardiovasculars!". by Brian Edwards-Tiekert |
It is cold.
It is cold at 7AM in Bridgeport and the wind is fierce across the parking lot where I am standing and hugging myself and waiting for the sun to get higher.
The buildings on the other side of the street are abandoned, boarded up, and crumbling-except for the large gray one directly across from me. It is ugly. It is made out of gray bricks, thousands of gray bricks, practically uninterrupted except for one lonely window. That window looks out over two half-full parking lots, an elevated section of highway, and a crowd of twenty other people who are hugging themselves to keep warm.
Half of them are protesters, and they are there because the building with one window is a health clinic that performs abortions twice a week. They have pamphlets and flyers and photographs of botched and bloody abortions, they have bibles and little plastic fetuses, they have wooden signs and a metal stroller full of fake fetal body parts.
The other half are clinic escorts, volunteers, and they are there because of the protesters. They have
fluorescent jerseys with ‘Clinic Escort’ written in English on one side and in Spanish on the other.
The clinic only performs abortions on Tuesday and Saturday mornings, and they have all their patients come in between 7 and 9 in the morning. Most of the women who come in look very, very scared. The protesters run up to their cars and follow them up to the front door of the clinic, shouting, cajoling, threatening, praying, offering pamphlets: anything to keep them from going into that gray building. The escorts are there to walk between the women and the protesters. They aren’t there to comfort them, they aren’t there to tell them everything will be all right. They’re there to occupy a few crucial feet of personal space, space that could be filled by the protesters and their plastic fetuses and bloody photographs.
"When the cars pull up outside of the clinic, don’t run up to them." That was the first cardinal rule of escorting we were taught during training: Don’t Run. It doesn’t matter if the protesters, the ‘antis,’ run up to the cars first, Don’t Run. People get nervous when they see anyone running at them, it doesn’t matter who. Running is what the antis do. Just walk as fast as you can.
"When you’re escorting someone, don’t talk about the antis." That was the second cardinal rule of escorting we were taught. Don’t draw their attention to the protesters: hearing about them is almost as bad as hearing from them. And the antis feed off of attention.
The third cardinal rule was this: "Don’t talk to the antis."
Every Tuesday and Saturday morning the same protesters come out to defend the unborn, and every Tuesday and Saturday the same escorts turn out to defend the living. There’s some variation in each group from morning to morning, the five students that drive down from Wesley, for example, but the majority of the people there are there every time.
If politics makes strange bedfellows, then routine makes even stranger ones. There’s a bizarre familiarity between the people who are there all the time. Talk to one of the regular escorts, and she knows the name of every protester there. She also has her own nicknames for them. She knows what most of them do for a living, and she knows which of the assorted anti-abortion groups they’re affiliated with.
Stanley, for instance, is pretty much a fixture at the clinic. Everyone knows his name. He’s been protesting every day, in any weather, since Roe v. Wade. He’s short, white haired, and his face, which could be called handsome if it didn’t spend so much time twisted in a grimace and howling at patients, is usually covered in a layer of white stubble. He’s a 70 year old virgin who’s still waiting for a ‘pure’ woman.
He parks his van across the street from the clinic every morning, and covers it with homemade wooden signs. They’re written in adhesive block-letters: "JESUS DIED FOR YOU WILL YOU KILL HIS BABY?" "CANCER RISK UP 300% WITH 2-3 ABORTIONS," "THEY KILL BABIES HERE" (the ‘s’ is glued on backwards), "GOD DOESN"T FORGET!" He must be something of a collector, because it’s obvious that he has his favorites. The cancer one always gets propped against his front windshield. He keeps a sign with a large photograph of a dismembered fetus propped on his roof, facing the only window in the clinic. He carries around his favorite: a blow-up of an article on a woman who died during an abortion.
Even lugging around that heavy sign, he sprints across the street to confront the women getting out of their cars. "Your mother loved you, don’t kill your baby." He chants it to patients, to himself, to the crowd of escorts and protesters in general. He rocks back on his heels and reels with the force of his on conviction, and his enthusiasm compensates for his lack of eloquence.
"Are you going in there to kill your baby?" he’ll demand nine or ten times without being answered. When he’s out of sight of the camera, he’ll lean into the patients and push escorts out of the way to deliver his message: "Sometimes when they do they abortions, they have to rip your organs out! They'll tear out your cardiovasculars!" To boyfriends and husbands: "Sir, if you let her go in there, you might not get her back alive!" To everyone: "Don’t go in there, it’s against the law!" To the clinic’s lonely window: "Abortion is illegal!" He tries to follow a train of thought: "It’s against the law because murder is against the law! ... and abortion is murder!" His voice gains volume, and he delivers the coup de grace: "It’s in the Declaration of Independence!" He basks in the glow of his statement for a minute, then starts chanting again: "Your mother loved you, don’t kill your baby!"
Silent Bob is Stanley’s crony. He holds up Stanley’s signs and shows them to people and grins, but he never says anything. They almost look like twins when they stand next to each other, short, white-haired, holding large wooden signs and grinning at their own righteousness.
Carmen is a ‘life counselor.’ She alternates between offering financial aid if a woman wants to keep her child and telling horror stories of abortions gone wrong. She has a few photographs of ambulances being loaded in front of the clinic. She says four women were hospitalized because of botched abortions last summer. Before the escorts started using a camera, Carmen would walk backwards in front of the women headed for the clinic. She’d walk where the women had to look at her and listen to her, and she’d walk very slowly so they’d have to slow down too. That stopped when a judge told her it constituted blocking access to the clinic.
The Preacher never approaches people in their cars, but he’s one of the most intimidating protesters at the clinic. He paces up and down the sidewalk in agitation, muttering under his breath, sometimes lurching aggressively toward escorts. He’s tall, almost six and a half feet, and he has a mustache that would make him look a little bit like Hitler if it grew in thicker. He’s a minister in real life, and leads prayer circles in front of the clinic.
Art harangues the women going in. He’s a tall black man who follows patients from their cars up to the clinic door. He holds a plastic model of black fetus the size of his thumb, and tells women that that’s what their baby looks like at three weeks. He tells blacks that they’re committing black genocide. He even rebukes the escorts: "Isn’t this nice, one woman helping another woman kill her child!"
From across the street, the protesters and the escorts merge into one mass of people going through a common ritual. The escorts talk about the weather. The protesters talk about the weather. The protesters talk about God. The escorts talk about the protesters. One of the escorts videotapes everything, to keep the protesters from getting violent. One of the protesters tapes everything, to keep up with the escorts. Some of the protesters split off into prayer circles, chanting the prayers they know by heart. Some of the escorts duck into the clinic, to warm up, where a pot of hot coffee is always waiting for them.
When a car with a woman in the passenger seat parks nearby, people split off from both groups to hunt it down. The antis run. The escorts walk very fast. On the sidewalk, the protesters and escorts are interspersed in small clusters, politely ignoring each other for the most part, out of an almost professional courtesy.
I say ‘for the most part,’ because not everyone respects the peace. Sometimes the religious protesters try to convert the younger escorts. A woman stops praying and approaches me, clutching her fetus, "I just have one question for you, who’s going to speak for the rights of the unborn?"
I don’t answer.
"Can’t you answer my question? Who’s going to speak for the rights of the unborn?"
I cross to the other side of the street.
"Why can’t anyone answer my question? Why can’t anyone tell me who’s going to speak for the rights of the unborn?" she repeats to the streetful of people.
It isn’t just the protesters who cross the line: some of the older escorts talk back too. There are two men in particular who come sometimes and stand in front of the clinic, insulting Stanley. "Come on, Stanley.... you just want it up the ass, is all!" They seem less concerned with the women coming into the clinic then with starting a row with the protesters. The protesters feed off the attention, and the ensuing shouting match just makes the clinic look a little more imposing.
Of course, the protesters don’t just try to convert us. I escort a teenage woman across the threshold of the clinic, and Art has gotten himself so worked up talking about black genocide, that he turns to me the moment the door closes:
"You think you’re innocent, but you’re not. None of you are innocent."
I’m walking away.
"Look at that face, like you don’t know what’s going on!"
He’s following me.
"Why don’t you send some real men down from Wesleyan, none of these wussy men! Huh? Why do you send down these wussy men, is that all you’ve got?"
I’m the only man escorting from Wesleyan, so he must be talking to me.
I’d like to answer him back. I’d like to tell him that we have over a hundred trained escorts at Wesleyan, and we can send more down if he likes. I’d like to ask him why he thinks we want to send men down to protect women’s rights (we have a policy of not letting more than one male escort approach a car at a time).
He’s clutching a tiny black fetus, the size of his thumb. He holds it up and asks me: "Where would you be if your mother had an abortion?"
She did.My mother got pregnant as a teenager in a working-class section of Providence. She had an abortion because she didn’t mean to get pregnant, because she didn’t want to raise a child then, and she went on to get a college degree and a PhD in Political Science. She founded the Women’s Studies department at SUNY Purchase, taught there for more than twenty years, and raised me.
When she died, they wanted to name a building after her. They founded a lecture series in her honor instead.
Now I’m enrolled at Wesleyan University, escorting abortion patients some mornings, because my mother did have an abortion, and that’s where it got me.
At one of of the lectures in my mother’s memory, a friend of her spoke about the issue before introducing the speaker: "Mary always said we had to confront the issue by by being open about our own abortions. She had one. I have had two. Growing up as a confused gay teenager, I had to go to Tijuana for two illegal abortions. I got an infection from the second one and almost died there."
But I can’t tell this protester any of that, and by the time I finish thinking it, he’s already walking up to the next car.
The women coming in are mostly young. Some of them don’t look any older than 15. Many of them are black or Latino. None of them look happy.
One woman arrives from a local prison. She’s escorted by two wardens, driven in a State Correctional Facilities van. The tall black protester points at her triumphantly, "Would you look at that, we’re paying for this woman to murder her child! Our tax dollars are paying for this!" Stanley shouts at her, too. "You’ve had your sex." He spits out the last word, "Don’t kill your baby!"
One woman is crying on her way into the clinic. One protester is holding pictures of bloody fetuses up in front of face, a second is telling her about some women they had to take out of the clinic in an ambulance, a third is offering her financial aid if she’ll keep her child.
Some women come with girlfriends, others come with men. The men they come with can be almost as bad as the protesters. Some get into shouting matches with the antis, stopping the middle of the street to curse them out, stopping with a woman next to them who desperately needs to keep moving forward. One woman won’t get out of the car because she doesn’t want to be on film. She points at the camera the escorts are using.
"Just shut up and get in there!" Her boyfriend grabs her by the arm and pulls her to her feet.
I shout at the cameraman to stop recording.
"But I don’t want to be on film!"
"It doesn’t fucking matter, I said move!"
"Walk fast," we tell them when they get out of their cars.
Walk fast, look ahead, try not to see the signs on Stanley’s van, try to ignore the four people shouting at you and waving pictures in your face, walk fast and don’t stop.
Theregular escorts just won a court case against Stanley for blocking access to the clinic. He used to push and shove the escorts to get near the women on their way in. He still does it when he’s out of sight of the camera. But now there’s an injunction against him... if a woman going into the clinic tells him she doesn’t want to speak to him, he has to stay at least five feet away from her. Five feet might not seem like much, but it’s better than twice as far as an escort can keep him away by standing between him and the patient.
So now there’s one more thing we tell women on their way in: "Tell that man you don’t want to talk to him and he has to stay away from you."
I tell that to a woman I’m walking across the parking lot. Stanley’s maneuvered in front of the other escort and he’s practically pressed up against the woman.
"Ma’am, are you going in there to kill your baby? Are you going in there to kill your baby? Ma’am don’t go in there."
"Go away." She tells him, loud and firm.
"Ma’am don’t go in there to kill your baby if you go in there they’re gonna kill your baby and and sometimes they have to rip out your organs!"
"Go Away!" She faces him and shouts it. He doesn’t. If anything, he’s encouraged by the fact that she’s saying anything to him, his voice gains strength and momentum.
"Sometime they go in there and they have to rip out your organs too and if you go in there you might not come back out. Don’t kill God’s baby!"
She stops.
She turns to him and shouts each word: "I SAID GO AWAY!"
He’s stopped right next to her, about six inches away. The other escort, an older woman, catches up and starts haranguing him.
"Stanley, she told you to go away! You know what that means. You have to stay away from her now. Stanley!"
Confused, he looks at her and sputters. "But, but I’m just standing here."
All four of us are. Stanley and the escort start arguing while the woman looks back and forth. The argument grows more heated, and the woman is left in the wake, standing there when she should be moving toward the clinic.
"Walk fast" we tell them, but it doesn’t do any good when we get too consumed with the protesters to walk them in ourselves. The woman has a sort of lost expression on her face until I suggest we keep going to the clinic.
It is cold.
It is cold in front of the clinic and the wind is blowing hard across the protesters and the escorts alike.
It blows some of the signs off of Stanley’s van, and he rushes across the street to gather them up.
It blows over the baby stroller full of plastic dissected fetal parts, which roll and slide down the street. Three or four protesters run after them. Almost panicked, they ask each other what parts they’ve recovered, trying to see if anything’s lost. They put everything back in place, and then sigh in relief. The same woman who approached me earlier clutches her own plastic fetus tighter and says: "Isn’t God just so powerful?"
I want to ask these people why they feel so strongly about a little plastic model. I want to ask them why they’re there every morning. I want to ask them why, if they feel so strongly about preventing abortions that they’re willing to offer financial aid to pregnant mothers, they don’t do something that will really make a difference, like teaching contraception in public high schools? Why they don’t hand out condoms to women who aren’t pregnant yet instead of bloody photos to those who already are. I want to ask them all this, but I don’t cross that line. I don’t run up to the cars when they pull in. I don’t talk to the women about the antis. I don’t talk to the antis.
I just stand there in the cold, and try and use my body to keep a few feet of space between women coming into the clinic and the protesters who’ve made it their mission to unnerve them in any way possible.