Abortion Clinic Protesters: ‘Sidewalk Counselors’ or ‘Sidewalk Terrorists’?
Marty Walz, president and chief executive officer of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, confirms that the clinic does assist women who miscarry. “I can’t even imagine how the protesters don’t understand the level of cruelty to a woman like that,” she says.
“All they’re doing is scaring our patients. Including patients who are coming in for birth control, who don’t want to have an unintended pregnancy.”
“I would never call them counselors,” Pia, a Boston woman who goes to Planned Parenthood for her annual exams and to get contraception, says. “I’d call them sidewalk terrorists.”
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For the demonstrators, those options are distractions. They say reproductive choice is bad for women, leading to a social devaluation of motherhood — being a mother is now just one choice among many, not a sacred and definitional calling.
“The fullness of being a woman is being a mother,” Father Andrew Beauregard, a Franciscan monk who comes to pray the rosary outside the Boston Planned Parenthood, says. “For a woman to say that she has to have control over her body or over herself in such a way that she can’t be a mother really speaks to a degradation towards women.
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