Abort, Retry, Fail?

Abstinence-only education has always struck me as a bad idea. It’s ideologically biased and doesn’t present children with all the information they deserve. And it’s going to make abortion illegal down the road.

When I was a clinic defender for Planned Parenthood, a nearby Catholic church organized protests every weekend. There were no abortions performed on weekends, but that was when that protestors and defenders were free, so it worked out OK. In an equally odd arrangement, the Protestant churches in the area protested at the Blackwell clinic, a few blocks away. The two clinics were the only ones within hundreds of miles– everything else had been protested or zoned out of existence– so this was the division of labor for all anti-abortion protesting in eastern Pennsylvania and significant portions of Jersey.

The typical crowd was five or ten elderly white suburbanites hassling the largely young, urban, black and latina women coming into the clinic. Plus of course five or ten defenders, a paddy wagon, a police car, and three or five cops standing around bored and wary. We all knew the rules: touch somebody and you get arrested, but you can yell all you want. The defenders were instructed to ignore the protestors, and just stand between the protestors and anyone trying to get into the clinic.

It was mostly a gay neighborhood, and there was one guy, with perfect hair and cute sweats and a teeny dog and a really stereotyped lisp, who would get really mad and try and engage them in… well, not debate. He’d just yell in his “I moved to a gay neighborhood so I wouldn’t have to deal with people like you” moral outrage, and they’d yell about hellfire and brimstone, and meanwhile his dog would inspect the lamp-post and women would sneak around them both and go on into the clinic to get pap smears or birth control pills or prenatal care or whatever nonsurgical services were performed on weekends.

The third weekend of each month there was mass in the street. This meant a turnout of about one or two hundred, including people’s kids and grandkids. I was angry that they brought babies in strollers with pictures of aborted fetuses and signs saying “Survivor of Abortion Holocaust.” But what got me was the teenagers in hip clothes. It was 1996 or so, which meant baggy pants, suede skate shoes, and big t-shirts with big silver-ink slogans. The slogans said things like “Jesus has a Posse” or “Look Don’t Touch” or “Proud Virgin.”

One other guy who’s a defender looks over at these abstinence-only, anti-abortion teenagers, who were looking cool and sullen like any other teenagers except for the whole “no sex, drugs, or fun” bit, and he says, “Why is it always the ugly chicks that are in favor of abstinence?”