Reply #12: Yes ...

[RoyGBiv]

I went to college at a small regional university, and during my second year I decided I needed to do something more than talk the talk about my views and convictions. There were very few campus organizations that could be considered progressive, so I joined most of them at one time or another, one of which was a women's rights group that was calling for volunteers willing to do this. This turned out to be the only group I stayed with any length of time as it was the only one that really did anything but sit in a room and complain about the state of the world. (This was during Bush I's term, and most of us had cast our first votes for Dukakis and were highly disappointed.)

I experienced some of the same things you did. This resulted in many long discussions/arguments with family members -- I was raised in a Southern Baptist environment for the most part -- about the hypocrisy of so-called Christians who spewed some of the vilest filth from their mouths and threatened some of the most awful things, a great deal of it directed at women who were going to these clinics not for abortions at all. (I ended up joining an Atheists and Agnostics group the next term due to all this.)

One of my better memories involves a police officer who was working crowd control at a rather large, organized protest of a clinic where we were working. I ended up near him and started conversing, trying to cut some of the tension. (We all had this latent feeling the cops were there less to protect us than the people threatening us.) We sorta warmed to each other, and at one point I remember him saying something like, "I don't really like the idea of abortions, but these people are just crazy. They've made me more pro-choice than any politician."

My worst involved no single person, just all the women who were reduced to tears and started openly questioning their lives in the face of this onslaught. It is amazing to me how much philosophical questioning can come out of a person during a few minutes when placed under great stress. Thoughts of how they might have managed the rest of their lives after their experiences in these situations have always haunted me. I've often feared the protesters drove some of these women to do drastic things to themselves afterward.