Thursday evening, 8 PM, the phone rings. “Karen Hoffman?” a woman asks in a throaty voice. “I’m Barbara, and I’ll be the coordinator this Saturday morning. I’ll meet you in front of Concord at 6 AM. Do you need a wake-up call?” No, I tell her, I’ll be there. I hang up, and wish I hadn’t committed myself to another Saturday of clinic escort.
We were not to engage in discussions, arguments, or prochoice rhetoric with the antichoice demonstrators. We were not to carry signs when escorting. We were to keep our hands in our pockets when we were near antichoice demonstrators to avoid potential physical attacks or accusations of them. We were not to chant prochoice slogans when we escorted, no matter what or how loud the antichoice demonstrators were yelling. This creates more tension and discomfort for the women, we were told. We might say to the women, “Just ignore them, you have a right to come here.” If we felt we couldn’t do these things, we should volunteer in some other capacity. I put my name down for on-call clinic-escort duty.
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Another clinic escort and I station ourselves at the corner just east of Concord. At 7:20, it is raining hard and my feet are soaked. I notice there’s no public washroom nearby. I’ll have to hold out for a couple of hours. I idly watch a yellow school bus with “Armitage Baptist Church” printed on the side pull up, then a van. Sixty, seventy, eighty people start piling out. As the vehicles disgorge their contents, my teeth start to tingle and I realize we are being hit with a major antichoice demonstration.
A marshal comes up and tells us to get ready. Eight of us are going to escort a group of patients through the alley behind the coffee shop to the clinic’s back door. About ten people–patients and their companions–follow us out of the coffee shop. The escorts lock arms surrounding the patients and slowly walk through the crowd of demonstrators gathered in front of the coffee shop. We are bombarded with screams: “Don’t kill your baby!” “Talk to us for five minutes!” “You have blood on your hands!” “Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, be a mother to your baby!”
It looks as though arrests, or the threat of arrests, are pretty effective in keeping the antichoice demonstrators at bay. Only a few refused to move away from the clinic door. When they were put into patrol wagons, the rest of the group moved to the right and left sides of the front door, walking slowly back and forth in long lines. None of the prochoice volunteers gets arrested. Our training pays off. We avoid confrontation, and stand where the police tell us to.
Sitting in the dentist’s chair half an hour later seems unreal. After the intense experience I’ve had this morning, having my gums poked and prodded seems banal. I go home feeling disoriented.
