Letting the Signs Talk
The night before, our hotel seemed filled with pro-choice advocates. Any time we shared an elevator ride with any other women they assumed my friend and I were with the march. We remained relatively silent and just nodded a lot, not knowing what to expect.
The next morning, on our way to the meeting room, we saw some folks with “Women Deserve Better” and “Feminists for Life” T-shirts, and grabbed them, thanking them. We finally were not alone in that place.
We learned that the march organizers — NOW, NARAL, Planned Parenthood and the Feminist Majority (misnamed, as they are neither true feminists nor a majority) — being the great advocates for women’s freedoms that they are, had gone to court the week before to deny our First Amendment right to free speech. They asked Judge Gladys Kessler, district judge for the District of Columbia, to uphold the denial of our permit application. We had asked to stand directly across the street from the Rally on the National Mall.
We split up our group of 500 to take positions at the three places we were allowed permits. My group was at Constitution and 15th. We invited the Women Deserve Better and Feminists For Life and the great young people of American Collegians for Life to join us. Permits being at such a premium because the march organizers were fighting them in court, we didn’t want these groups to be left wandering around to risk being accused of illegal loitering.
The whole point of the protest was to let our signs do all the talking for us. We were not to respond to anything. It was hard to do. At each location, we stood single file along the sidewalk, as pro-choice marchers streamed past us toward the rally, already in progress.
There are well over five hundred women members, maybe even over one thousand nationwide of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign, but it is because of treatment like we got that we didn’t have five hundred or more holding those signs. Who wants to be brutalized verbally by thousands in public when we’ve already chosen something that brutalized us physically and emotionally?
We stood, all 500 of us, in total silence as planned, for over five hours, not replying or saying one word to anything that was said or done to us, and I do mean anything. The silence had the most incredible impact on the pro-choice people walking by. They seemed to fully expect a barrage of insults and condemnation. Some actually crossed the street to avoid us, but most did not. It was actually eerily calm and quiet even while probably a couple thousand walked by toward the rally.
I won’t go into the vulgarity of the signs and chants we heard that day, too numerous and cheap and even depraved to mention. The signs that made absolutely no sense whatsoever left us shaking our heads to see if it would clear our vision: “PRO-CHILD…PRO-CHOICE.” Was this from the Dictionary of President William Jefferson Clinton? Another doublespeak sign was “Pro-Family…Pro-Faith…Pro-Choice.” These were not hand-drawn signs, but production-run pre-prints. I can only guess which of the major organizers dreamed up those oxymorons and are having a sick laugh over fooling the public.
The march organizers also blatantly stole the longtime motto of American Life League’s “PRO-LIFE: Without Compromise — Without Exception — Without Apology” and had mass-produced signs reading “ABORTION: Without Compromise — Without Exception — Without Apologies.”
At the end of the day, though, one of our groups did report a true miracle: one woman in the midst of the mass of marchers, came over to our friends, said, “What am I doing out here?” and asked us to exchange her NARAL sign for one of ours.
One conversion to the truth… that we know of… Please pray for the rest.
Copyright © 2004 Annie Banno
Annie Banno is the Connecticut State Leader of OPERATION OUTCRY: SILENT NO MORE, and one of three post-abortive women writing on the blog “After Abortion”. To contact her or sign up to receive her free newsletter, e-mail smok22@charter.net.
Contempt and Abuse
At least a dozen women (probably between 45 and 65 years old) who saw my sign before the march sneered at me saying, “I had two [abortions] and I don’t regret them for a second!” The bragging quality shocked me at first, but as the day wore on, it just saddened me.
I silently made eye contact with as many people as possible, women and men. The older, middle-aged ones had their eyes glued straight ahead for the most part. But almost all the young women, even of high school age, looked at my sign as they walked by on that sidewalk, laughing among themselves and their boyfriends or girlfriends. When my sign caught their eye, they then reflexively looked to see who was holding it. After our eyes met, a few quickly looked away, not wanting to know, but most just stared at me a long time in shock. A lot of brows furrowed as they walked away, no longer laughing; they’d never even thought it was possible, I suppose, that a woman would think twice about her abortion, could really regret having done it.
One of our men holding the I REGRET LOST FATHERHOOD signs was a lone, 22-year-old college fellow, handsome as a movie star, quiet and reflective. The pain was so evident on his face. He’d come to the group all by himself. Said little to anyone. Perhaps his buddies wouldn’t understand or had already laughed at him for missing his little boy or girl who he’d never know. We only learned his story at the very end of the day, walking back to the hotel, as he offered to carry my friend’s tripod and camera case. My heart just broke.
There were a ton of men at the march. Young to old, what seemed like thousands of husbands-dragged-along, even up to the ages of 85. Yes, they even had two double length busses for those elderly. And many, many young women. They must have recruited heavily from the college campuses, and perhaps even high schools.
We stood in that long, silent line on the left side of the march route from 10:30 till 12:30, when the march began right at our corner. We lined the barricades at the curb then right at the corner, in a broad view (not just in the marchers' peripheral vision) we were the first group of counter-protesters that they saw.
The riot police, perhaps fifty in our area, in full battle gear, lined up on the march-side of the barricades, facing us, about 10-15 feet apart. Before the march, I said to the few of them standing right in front of me, “Thank you for being here. I know it’s your job so you have to be here, but thank you anyway. You won’t be getting any trouble from us.” One of the policemen nodded his head respectfully at me in silent acknowledgment and thanks.
But then they all moved up the street a ways, so for about the first two hours, there were no riot policemen or women within about 35 feet or so of where I stood. And that’s how the marchers got to walk directly on the opposite side of the barricade I touched — nose to nose with us, almost. I held my sign high, so those in the middle of the street’s packed throng could see it. Many people in the distance, in the center of the crowd, craned their necks to read our signs.
I suppose I was probably the first of about maybe 35-40 of the I REGRET signs the marchers saw that day at numerous spots along the three locations. Perhaps that’s why I got so many of the attacks. After they read my sign, at least 25 separate women throughout the day laughed at me and spat out these exact same words, “Then you shouldn’t have had it, that’s all!” Some even shrugged, like it was that easy to make that decision.
I saw women read my sign and burst out laughing and pointing at me, saying sarcastically, “Po-o-or baby!” I saw men look me right in the eye after reading the sign as they shouted out the chants that are the 30-year-old standards of the pro-abortion movement, like “Pro-Life? That’s a lie! YOU don’t care if women die!” and “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!” Little did they know how much we do care and do help women to survive and have a better alternative.
Others saw the sign and said to me, “Too bad!” The ones holding the signs “Don’t Want An Abortion? DON’T HAVE ONE!” wove their way from the opposite side of the crowd just to wave their sign in my face and taunt me.
One woman, maybe about 30ish, started screaming at me, at the top of her lungs, “I CHOSE! AND I’M PROUD!” over and over and over again. The others around her took up the chant, some verbatim, some saying instead, “I CHOOSE! AND I’M PROUD!” The veins were popping out on her forehead and neck, her face was beet red, and she was hunched over at the waist as she shrieked out the words at high volume, glowering at me, for at least five minutes straight. If there is a definition of “frothing at the mouth,” that was it.
Later, after reading my sign, one woman started a chant that about a hundred marchers began screaming at me, “THAT WAS YOUR CHOICE!” essentially telling me I had no right to be upset or to regret. They stopped marching and stood right in front of me, all one-hundred of them glaring directly at me, some not more than 2-3 feet away, jabbing fingers at me in the air, their faces twisted and contorted with contempt.
I just looked from face to face, amazed at what I was seeing. It was starting to get frightening. The riot police were nowhere to be seen. They were off up the street and allowed the marchers to pass by within inches of us at that spot in the very start of the march.
After about two hours of the marchers being that close, a woman I had not met came over to me and put her arm around me. She said, “I just couldn’t listen to and watch you take more of that abuse. I’m here to hold you up in prayer and stand by you.” Her name is Gloria. How fitting a name for my “angel,” for she was truly sent to me when I needed her most!
She rubbed my shoulder in sympathy and comfort, and I hugged her back, thanking her. Her husband Michael (the archangel’s name? Hmmm…) just behind me also said, “We are going to stand on either side of you and just pray for you, that God give you the strength to withstand this, and to protect you. You’ve taken enough.”
The young college woman at the fence to my left, Kelly from Boston College’s ACL, and all her college friends around her, also hugged me or patted me on the back and said they were praying for me too. So many of these great college kids came up to me and just said, in such a reverent voice, “Thank you for doing this.” I know the others were saying it to the rest of us post-abortive women holding these signs throughout our three groups, too. Please keep them us all in your prayers.
I said to them, “It always turns out that the ones who are the most upset at us, the angriest ones, the ones who are so hateful, have so much to cover up, and this is how they do it. They are the post-abortive ones, even if they don’t say so. And they’re the ones who hit the wall the hardest when they do. I know, because I denied it for over 20 years…I know what happens when it all comes out.”
As my new friend, Gloria, rubbed my shoulder, she also literally helped support my arm, as I’d been holding the sign up high for so long that my arms were tired and drained of blood.
The Face of Compassion
I suddenly felt the tears come. At first, I think I cried because I’d been trying to deflect and not react to so much venom for two hours, that now that others were helping me be strong, I could allow myself to be a little weak. I then cried because I miss the daughter I’ll never know.
You know how it all rushes through you at once when you start weeping? Everything comes out. I cried because, here were these thousands of people fighting for a right I wish they’d never allowed me to have, instead of fighting for the daughters and sons I and millions of others will never have. I felt they were fighting for the death of my daughter, to deny me the right to grieve her.
Then I realized I wasn’t crying so much for me as I was for them. I felt they were fighting to hide their loss because to come to grips with it, after being so fervently pro-choice, would bring upon them the same kind of abuse I was getting. I felt so crushingly sad for them. The cold, angry hearts, the screaming remorselessness, the relentless cruelty toward me and toward another living human being, their own flesh and blood. I realized that they don’t see those living human beings as the gift they are, because if they did, the façade could no longer justify their “choice.” Just as I one day stopped hiding the truth of my choice.
Openly weeping, as my new/old-soul friends gathered around me, hands on my arms or shoulders, my vision was so blurred I could no longer make eye contact with the people in the crowd. I could only sense that something was changing. People were still looking and pointing, but no longer laughing or screaming at me. I didn’t care what they said or did to me anymore. I didn't care if they laughed that I was crying out there in front of thousands. I just couldn’t keep it in anymore. The looks that I did catch had become subdued and stunned at the same time.
A young man of about 20 stopped as he was about to pass right in front of me. He looked Chinese-American, and he just stared as I cried. I looked in his eyes since he was right in front of me. Weeping, I pleaded with him, “How can you be in this march supporting this? I lost a daughter to this, and it is the worst thing I have ever done or will ever do in my entire life, and I can never outlive this pain.” He looked like he was going to cry. I asked him, “How old are you?” He quietly replied, “22.” I could barely speak, but I told him, “My daughter would have been 25, and she could have been your girlfriend…or maybe even your future wife.”
I couldn’t speak after that, and neither could he. He just looked at me with such pain in his eyes and touched my arm and said, “I am so sorry…” as he reluctantly moved on slowly.
Shortly, it seemed to me the police returned and put some men in front of me, forming a sort of invisible line, to keep the crowds away from us by about fifteen feet or so.
A woman dressed in pink with a short-cropped haircut caught my eye from the crowd as I’d been crying. She gazed at me, and called out, “I regret my abortion too!” But she was part of the march. I didn’t understand what she really was trying to say. She was still pro-choice, it seemed. Yet she locked eyes on mine, and looked really sad for me. As the crowd moved her along, I just looked at her, still teary-eyed, not knowing what to say back. I thought she’d moved past, when suddenly she broke free and ran back, past the riot cop, and threw her arms around my neck to hug me, to console me! I was stunned, but I hugged her back and wept hard again, whispering to her, “Why are you out here in this? How can you still believe it’s OK?” It was not a condemnation; it was an invitation, an honest incredulous bewilderment on my part, and a sincere wish that she too would find comfort for her pain forever, not just for this moment.
She didn’t say anything, because I could hear her start crying too. She hugged me tight for what seemed like very long minutes. The whole crowd beyond her stopped and stared. No one spoke or made a sound, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. It’s as if everyone was just holding their breath. It seemed like time stood still. And for us, it did. We just cried on each other’s shoulders in the midst of all this madness and hate. I still didn’t know quite what to think, but when she finally pulled back, I thanked her, and we just looked at each other a moment, feeling each other’s pain, but then she ran back into the crowd and disappeared.
A little while later, another woman locked eyes with me as she moved slowly forward. We just looked at each other, and I realized that every time I had met someone’s gaze like this and they just kept looking into my eyes, they could see the truth of their own pain. Just as this woman, about my age, was about to pass out of sight, I saw her mouth the silent words, “I’m sorry…” I smiled that pursed, sad smile in thanks and nodded my head. I wondered, “Is she saying she’s sorry for my pain? Or is she sorry for the abuse that others were giving me? Or is she sorry for both of us?”
The women who were compassionate understood why I held that sign. Another in our group, Wendy, a student at Georgetown’s Nursing School, said she saw a different woman look at my sign and actually begin to weep. Others said they saw at least 2 or 3 more women do the same when they saw the I REGRET signs.
Some pro-choicers will fight me on this, but: all these women showed compassion, for us and for themselves. Because in their minds, I think, they saw themselves holding that sign, now that others had made it possible and acceptable to do so. That word comes from the Latin and means “to suffer with someone.”
The first step to healing, they say, is recognizing that there’s a problem. Those women weeping and saying they were sorry for us saw that we were willing to suffer with them, that we shared the same problem — that we knew our abortions were wrong — and they also saw that we had found enough peace and healing to be able to stand up and fight so that they too could heal.
Almost immediately after that, a woman ran right up to me and asked, “Why exactly do you regret your abortion?” The cops didn’t stop her. I was about to answer her, since I thought she’d asked it in a genuine, want-to-know way, when she then blurted out in disbelief, “Or did you really have an abortion at all!?” I was speechless at the question, and Gloria piped up and nicely but indignantly said, “How can you ask her that? I’ve been listening as she stood here for hours taking all this abuse and hatred from you all! Why would she subject herself to that if she didn’t have one?”
I finally said to the woman, “I regret because I don’t have my only daughter here with me now on this earth, and because my abortion gave me endometriosis, I had major surgery because of that and a lot of pain, and because it’s caused me a lifetime of pain and grieving that only now is coming all out of me since I denied it for over 20 years. That’s’ why I regret it.” She then ran back to the march, without saying another word. It seemed almost as if she’d been dared by a friend to come over and ask, and really perhaps didn’t care to know the answer.
