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In reply to the discussion: Abortion clinic tomorrow what should [View all]haele
(15,607 posts)Women's Clinic "Pro birth" protesters are like someone else's misbehaving, over-privileged child. You can't reason with them, and you can't spank them in public. You just need to get past them and go on about your business.
As for the actual walk to the door - check out the lay of the land first. Protesters are only supposed to be on the public sidewalk, so you need to minimize the amount of the exposure to that area to walk to the door. The primary thing that you will be doing is staying between the woman you are escorting and any protesters that might want to block your path.
If someone attempts to stop you, just remember, it's assault if they touch you. If they get in your way, calmly remind them they can't block access to any door or driveway - and leave it at that. Be ready to take pictures if they close in or attempt to put hands on you and tell them that will be evidence when you report them to the police for assault and intimidation.
The most they can do is force you to shoulder past them.
As for anything you can say to them, remember - they can think what they want, and make assumptions due to the clinic's scheduled doctors, but they don't know what the woman is going in for, and they can't keep legally force anyone not to have any legal medical procedure.
Don't acknowledge anything about why you all are there; you don't have to lie.
If they swarm around in circles yelling "don't kill your baby", loudly say "y'all have no clue what she's here for, so shut up ,stand aside, let her go in and see her doctor."
That's pretty much the mantra to be used. The woman is going in for is a medical procedure at a woman's medical clinic - Why - because that might be the only place she can afford to go to or is able to go to for the medical procedure.
Never say "abortion" to them. Never say "baby" or "fetus" to them. Don't even acknowledge they are part of a cause, even if you are personally "pro-life" and are only doing this because you're helping a friend in trouble out.
These idiots are the same as the beasts of their imaginations, they just like to pretend they are better than the rest of us.
Personal experience and thread hijack - In the late 1980's during the beginning of the "pro-life" clinic violence push from Falwell's Moron Majority, I had a friend with health problems to begin with who was going through a wanted but dangerous pregnancy and the PP clinic was the only one that would take her in on credit (father was deployed, but they weren't married, so she couldn't get treatment from the base doctors).
A couple of us at work offered to help her as escorts. Protesters were a gauntlet of small clusters of beasts, circling, howling and spitting like rabid animals, waiving signs and "accidentally" hitting patients and staff with their stapled on thin plywood pictures of bloody fetus or "precious moments" cartoons.
It frightened her so much the first couple times we took her to see the OB/GYN who was monitoring her pregnancy and trying to figure out a plan of treatment, that she decided to stop going - and didn't tell us that was her plan, she just kept telling us that she was okay, she "found another doctor and everything was under control".
She died a month later, in her bathroom, alone over the weekend, from complications. Dead, because those holier than thou "WE know the will of our small God" assholes wanted to close down a clinic that treated icky wimmens parts they didn't understand - where maybe only 2% of the medical care given to women were legal, safe abortions.
Anyway, I digress.
Thing to remember, these protesters aren't doctors, they don't understand pregnancy and they don't understand medical issues. And they don't care. They really think they're warriors doing good work for some small delusion of John Calvin's ego their huckster preachers have polished up and are selling as a cheap, shiny "Lord of all Creation", poor deluded saps. Gives them a sense of purpose, even if they are really indulging in the greatest blasphemy of all to a real Creator God/s/Creation Situation by pretending to know the will of something that is behind this whole, huge universe of possibilities.
Unfortunately for most rational people and the rest of the World as a whole. But, secular law does not allow us to teach them reality with a two by four, so it's best to minimize the amount of damage they can do by making as small a target as possible for the emotional payoff they get from harassing the helpless.
Haele
On edit - do you know how much I despise these deluded idiots for doing these sorts of things. Even if they are someone's otherwise sweet and kindly grandmother or uncle; they let their brains be turned into fearful mush by sociopaths prettied up in religious sheep's clothing. They are doing their own devil's work, and they refuse to see it.