Saturday Mornings With Abortion Protestors: On Being a Clinic Escort

My first day at the clinic, a man commits suicide by jumping off a building across the street.

It’s a bright but deceptively cold March morning, the sky an unbroken cornflower blue dome. I don’t see him; I’m trying, futilely, to find a sun-warmed patch of sidewalk for my critically under-socked feet, and my back is turned.  Soon, the street fills with first responders, and police officers erect a barrier around the sidewalk where the man’s body lies. I stand awkwardly with a few other escorts in my white lab coat, issued by the clinic to help women differentiate us from the protesters. It’s tight over my winter puffer and makes my arms stick out like the Michelin man. While we watch, silent and grim, two protesters sidle up to me, a man and a woman, just close enough for me to hear them but far enough away that it wouldn’t appear to an observer that they’re having a conversation for my benefit. Which, I discover, they are.

“Isn’t it a shame?” the woman says loudly, looking in the direction of the sirens. “Everyone rushes to help this person who’s already dead, but no one comes to help the babies.”

“That’s all they care about, death,” the man answers. “Culture of Death! They love death!” He finally turns to me. “They are escorts of death! Escorts of death!”

“What do you think happened to them,” the woman wonders, “to make them love death so much?”

Across the street, someone covers the body with a white sheet, like in the movies.

One of the more experienced volunteers comes over to rescue me, and gives me a smile-grimace.

“Welcome to escorting,” she says.

 ***

We see the same protesters week after week. They drive in from a church almost twenty miles away, but always beat us there, until we begin to speculate that they just sleep outside the clinic the night before. The group is led by Pastor Creep (not pictured), a sixty-ish man with wire-rimmed glasses and, in the winter, a graying beard. He loves to riff on the Holocaust: “Just like the Nazis!” he bellows at Ruby, a fellow escort, and I as we walk a woman and her incredulous friend to the door. “Leading the Jews to the gas chamber. ‘Oh, you’re just going to take a shower!’ But they never came out!”

Miriam, another volunteer and the descendent of Holocaust survivors, checks her watch. “Seven thirty-five,” she says, “and we’re already on the Nazis.”

There’s also the Preacher, a bellower of sermons and Bible arcana who brings his two young sons to hold gruesome, digitally manipulated signs no matter what the weather. He positions himself directly in front of the clinic entrance on the sidewalk so he can shout into the reception area every time the door opens: “Can you hear the babies crying? Crying! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

Once, on a raw, wind-licked January morning, a homeless man without a coat appears across the street from the clinic. He clutches his stomach, bent double in obvious agony. When Beth, a pugnacious older volunteer who comes out every week despite severe back pain and difficulty walking, suggests that the Preacher go assist the man, as a Christian, he answers: “He’s made his choices! At least he got to be born! He’s had his chance.”

The Preacher shares turf with Are You Ready?, a man in his late twenties who carries a collapsible cross on his shoulder with the words are you ready? written in white paint. Are You Ready? has informed us many times that he’s a reformed sinner, a former fornicator and drunkard and thinker of lascivious thoughts. He takes this as a license to lean especially hard on the men who accompany their wives and girlfriends to the clinic, with “Be a man!” or “Man up!”, or, in June, “Happy Father’s Day!”, which backfired on him in a big way as stricken young men practically threw themselves through the clinic doors. Ruby and Ken, one of our few male escorts, and I can’t stop laughing about it for the rest of the morning.

Nothing makes the protesters angrier than seeing us laugh.

Killing with a smile, they roar. Laughter is our only power. When we greet patients with a smile and calmly walk them to the clinic door, unruffled by the screaming and pamphlets thrust into their hands and graphic signs lining the sidewalk, we win a small victory. When a patient smiles back at me, or tries to make a little joke, I feel like throwing a parade. Smiling in the face of unmitigated hostility is both a method of self-preservation and an act of defiance.

On one of these occasions, I greet a patient with what can only be described as the Hugh Grant two-handed wave from Love Actually. As Ruby and I laugh about it afterward, an older protester, a woman I don’t recognize, corners me against the wall, her finger in my face, to tell me that all the babies I have helped kill will dance around me on Judgment Day. I let her talk. This is another strategy: we engage the protesters, encourage them to shame and bully and taunt us, to distract them from the patients.

“And all of those babies will be black!” she adds. Black genocide is a favorite topic among the protesters. Their leaflets on the genocidal elimination of babies of color drive Ruby, the mixed-race daughter of a black woman, cross-eyed with rage. It’s an easy way to demonize everyone involved: to the protesters, the white escorts like me invade minority neighborhoods to kill black babies, and the escorts of color like Ruby are traitors to their race. So are the patients of color seeking abortion. And the green grass grows all around all around and we’re all murderers and racists.

Another protester joins us, a woman I call Message of Love, for her penchant for diatribes like this: “This could be your last hour on earth. You could get hit by that bus. And then you will absolutely burn in hell for eternity! But this is a message of love.” She especially likes me, perhaps because she mistakes my long-suffering silence for contemplation, even tacit approval.

“I know this bothers you, deep down inside,” she says, while the other woman nods. I consider explaining to her that worries about my personal judgment day don’t keep me up at night; that if I die, and discover that the creator of the universe believes that the proper way to worship him is to chase a woman across the street and down the sidewalk waving a pamphlet full of false science at her and calling her a murderer two inches from her face, I will be glad I opted out of such a corrupt system during life. I’ll dance all the way to hell. But I catch myself. I repeat in my head what we always tell our patients: you don’t owe them anything.

Many women feel compelled to explain themselves: I’m just here for a pap smear, or, I’m just here supporting a friend.

“You don’t need to answer them,” I say to the patients over and over again. “Under no circumstances do they deserve to hear intimate details of your medical life. Just ignore them.”

I learn quickly that the most valuable thing I can do as an escort is talk. About anything. Once I identify myself as a volunteer for the clinic and begin walking beside a patient, I talk and talk and talk. If only so when the women reach reception and begin the long wait, they remember my voice, low and encouraging and babbling about the weather, instead of the screams of the protesters, beckoning them to hell.