Crosses to Bear
At the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Bryan, questions of faith, conscience, biology, and politics collide every day on the front lines of the new war over abortion.
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But the coalition's walk through the wilderness was soon followed by redemption. The group found new inspiration and resolve in David Bereit, a pharmaceutical salesman and A&M graduate in his early thirties with a gift for impassioned oratory. A coalition board member, Bereit (pronounced like a directive: "Be right") became the executive director in 2001, when Gulde left to be a full-time mother. In him, his supporters see the promise of victory. "He is David fighting Goliath," said Clark. "He has a slingshot, but he has very sharp, precise aim." His detractors at Planned Parenthood are less generous, characterizing him as an opportunist who looks pious for the camera and a self-promoter who is using the coalition to advance his own national ambitions. "The kinder, gentler Randall Terry" they call him, referring to the charismatic and radical former leader of Operation Rescue. Always upbeat, Bereit takes criticism in stride. "My job is not to be liked by everyone," he said. "The role of the coalition is to bring abortion to the forefront of people's minds so that they must come to grips with it. As a result, we are stretching people beyond their comfort zone, through peaceful means. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that there is a certain amount of nonviolent tension that is necessary to bring about change in a community. We are creating that tension."
That tension is felt most keenly along the fence that surrounds the clinic, where picketers now line the sidewalk from dawn until dusk, in shifts that the coalition assigns to volunteers. They keep watch in the snow, the driving rain, and the dog days of summer. "We are witnessing," explained A&M student Austin Riddle. "We're witnesses to the truth, like witnesses in court. We are witnesses to murder. We will not be complacent, like people were in Nazi Germany, and look the other way." Like many of the protesters who stand outside the clinic, Riddle is clean-cut, white, and devout. A few eccentrics stand among the crowd; until recently, one protester wore a Grim Reaper costume. Another man holds up his cross whenever he sees the clinic's staff, as if warding off vampires. But most of the demonstrators are just regular people who go to church on Sunday. Women with babies on their hips stand beside clean-shaven men holding worn black bibles. Children stand hand in hand, waving at the traffic. They pray silently or kneel or count the rosary with such devotion that the lacquer on their prayer beads has worn thin. Drivers passing by honk and smile, giving the thumbs-up sign. Others yell, "Get a job!" or "Go home, bigots!"
Over the roar of traffic, the protesters try to appeal to the women who come to the clinic on Wednesdays. "It is hard to scream love," lamented Marilisa Field, a blue-eyed, blond A&M student with a beatific face. "But even if we save one child, it's worth it." She and other "sidewalk counselors" walk along the fence, calling out to clients as they stride across the parking lot: "Good morning, Mom! We care about you. We want to share some information about your options. We want to help you. We're praying for you." The sidewalk counselors do not condone the less charitable comments other protesters have spoken in anger. Men entering the clinic have been scolded with "Hey, Dad, be a real man!" and women leaving the clinic have, on occasion, been told they are going to hell. "That's un-Christian behavior, and it does not help our cause," Field said. But the rage behind those insults is felt quietly by many of the people standing outside the clinic. "Life is not something that just kicks in at the end of the first trimester," said Professor Clark. "The oak tree is in the acorn." Their belief that abortion is unethical is without ambiguity; cases of rape and incest, for example, do not merit exclusion. "Two wrongs don't make a right," Matchen explained. "And once you start making exceptions, where do they end?"
Members of the Coalition for Life gathered together on a brisk evening in late February for their annual fundraiser. The civic center was filled to overflowing; the final tally of attendees was 860, a testament to Bereit's ability to rouse people to action. (Two years ago, 275 people attended.) The event had the convivial feel of a church supper. Baptist and Catholic groups sat at long folding tables, dining on roast beef and sweet tea. Priests in collars mingled with the all-American crowd. Bereit did not deliver his most vitriolic speech, in which he compares Planned Parenthood to a murderer on the loose, punctuating his lecture with the sound of recorded gunshots. ("While you were brushing your teeth and making sure you look real pretty in the mirror"—bam!—"the killer cuts down another child before her time.") That night, he was more subdued, simply reminding his audience of the context of this battle. "In Texas, we have a very unique responsibility in this American struggle against abortion, because it was just over thirty years ago that it all began right here, in the Lone Star State," he said, his voice rising with emotion as he surveyed the room. "Just three hours up the road, in a little restaurant on Greenville Avenue in Dallas, a young woman named Norma McCorvey sat down with two ambitious attorneys who told her that they wanted to overturn the laws in Texas that prohibited abortion. They convinced her to sign on the line as 'Jane Roe.'"
But it was the guest speaker, a young woman named Gianna Jessen, who brought people to their feet. She told them of her mother's unsuccessful attempt to abort her during the last trimester of pregnancy and of how she had survived. At the end of her speech, she asked the audience how much money they should all pray for to help with the coalition's mission. "Two hundred thousand dollars?" she said, fielding suggestions. "Whatever it takes. Okay, should we pray for three hundred thousand dollars?"
And then a voice rose from the crowd. "Let's pray to close Planned Parenthood!" a woman cried. The auditorium erupted in whoops and applause. "Amen!" people shouted. "Amen!"
THE DOCTOR BEGAN TO ADMINISTER a shot of lidocaine. "You might feel a little pinch," he said. "I'm going to numb your cervix now." When the anesthetic had started to work, he slid a succession of thin, tapered dilators into her cervix. The woman flinched only once, rustling the white paper beneath her. When her cervix was dilated far enough, the doctor threaded a thin plastic tube through it, into her uterus. The tube was connected to a small pump that he held in his hand. Once he was ready, he would begin squeezing the pump, which would empty the contents of her uterus.
DYANN SANTOS FIRST SAW THE "Wanted" posters as she drove to work one morning in the summer of 1999. They were hard to miss. Every time she stopped at a red light or took a right turn on her route from College Station to Bryan, a poster bearing a photo of the clinic's doctor fluttered at eye level from a street sign or a telephone pole. "Someone knew my way to work," she said. "Someone had planned this out for me to see."
Soon her neighbors began receiving postcards. "Under current Texas law, abortion providers, like convicted sex offenders, are required by state law to register with the State," they read, listing her home address. Farther down, the tone became more informal: "Please feel free to call Dyann at [her home number] or possibly catch her in the Wal-Mart parking lot. She drives a small 1999 silver Honda with Texas Tag [her license plate number]." Dozens more postcards arrived without return addresses. One listed the "body count" Santos was responsible for and the warning "God has his own way of keeping score!" And so she took precautions. She transferred her teenage son to a private school. She took different routes home. She changed her phone number, twice. She stopped taking walks at night.
Santos was not the only target of the mail campaign, which has continued intermittently over the past four years and has included hundreds of letters and postcards. Nurses have received photographs of mutilated fetuses, scrawled with handwritten notes like "Brandi, did you know that God sees everything you do and remembers?" Other nurses have been reported to the Texas Board of Nurse Examiners for "the willful taking of human lives." Clinic volunteers, like 77-year-old Barbara Anderson, have been sent poems: "My name is Barbara Anderson, and I love to see them die / They lose their arms, they lose their legs, and then they lose their very life / And all the time I laugh and sing, because I love the sight." Escorts have received postcards that list familiar details of their lives. "Dear Jennifer," read one. "Your Mom and Dad, as well as Matt and Cynthia, must really be proud of you, Jennifer. You attended the best university in the state, dress in the finest clothes, drive a great-looking new '99 Blazer, and from all reports, did pretty well in school. But every [week] you go down to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic to assist in the killing of the most helpless of God's creatures."
Not all the harassment has been anonymous. Debbie McCall, the clinic's community service director, was manning a Planned Parenthood booth at an A&M health fair two years ago when a man she had never seen before ran up and threw a note at her, then disappeared into the crowd. Across the piece of paper was written one word: "Murderer." At another health fair that year, a man whom McCall had observed picketing the clinic before approached her. "I'm keeping an eye on you," he said with a grin. "You should be careful driving home down that lonely highway." McCall commutes from the town of Crockett, 72 miles away, along a two-lane road that threads through farmland. "I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck," she recalled. Still, she had little recourse. As with the anonymous mail and the "Wanted" posters, no one had broken the law. No threats of "imminent bodily injury," as the law requires, had been made. "They go right up to the edge of the law," observed Melissa Reyna, a nurse who worked at the clinic for three years. "They keep pushing that line a little further. The concern when I worked there was that someday, someone—that one loose cannon out there—would step over the line."
Planned Parenthood believes that the coalition has either participated in the anonymous mail campaign or knows who is carrying it out. "The coalition's members stand outside the clinic and write down license plate numbers," said Dr. Elizabeth Berigan, a local internist and a member of the Planned Parenthood board. "The postcards have slowed down, but when clients used to get them, it was always a few days after they visited the clinic, at the address their cars were registered to. This isn't rocket science. If the coalition isn't sending the postcards, they're not keeping very good control over their notes."
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