Guest Blog: Blinded by the right: My past as an anti-abortion activist

Guest Blog: This article is Natalie Lochwin's account of her family's involvement in the anti-choice movement when she was a teenager.



To start, I didn't want to write this. So I searched hoping to find someone that had a similar experience to share and to read their take on their progression from "pro-life/anti-choice/anti- abortion" to believing in and advocating for abortion rights. I'm sharing this story of my past anti-choice activism because it is a past I have been ashamed of. Yet it also shaped me and is part of what, ironically, made me who I am today.

This, in the end, is a story about how destructive an influence this movement can be not only socially, but to individuals as well.

In the late 80's, when I was 16, my mother had decided to move the family away from the inner 'rough' city of Toronto and to take us to live, tucked away, in safe, clean, boring suburbia.

The day Canada's abortion law was struck down I recall my mother watching the news and listening to the reaction from the public. She was motivated to do something and to get involved. Determined to take a stand. I didn't really know or care about this issue. I was still a kid really, in high school, geeky, blessed with an awkward nature and teenaged skin.

My mother, however,  decided that we (my mom, my sisters, and I) would go down and picket the hospital circuit with our home made anti-choice signs and hand out pamphlets spouting anti-abortion propaganda. Regularly after school we would travel down with her from Etobicoke, grab some veggie pitas en route and protest the "killing"of the unborn in front of the hospitals. I'd beg to do something else after school, to go out with friends, but the answer was always no. There was no other option. Picketing and homework were my lot.

We had become Born Again Christians. My mother had believed that this would save her crumbling marriage and stop her kids from turning into wayward anarchist heathens. To my mother Christianity and Pro-life activism changed everything. It delivered us from skull earrings, sprouting multicoloured hair and from 'satanic' black nail polish. We were saved!

We began to "fellowship" with other like-minded folks, as is done in movements like this. We were going to church and youth events all the time.

I grew to like the attention, negative or positive. We became known and somewhat famous in the anti-choice movement as an "activist family". At one point Toronto Life magazine even featured us in a piece.

A sick and paranoid mythology was part of anti-choice ideology. We'd heard about the evil "pro-aborts", how they hated children, how they'd get pregnant and  intentionally have abortions. They really believed "feminazis", as they called feminists, were evil, and that they sacrificed fetuses- in some sort of satanic ceremony. Clinics were rumored to sell fetal parts for medical experiments and to meat processing plants and fancy cosmetics companies-for the collagen. They claimed there were experiments on "living" fetuses, decapitated fetuses and so forth.

We'd hang out at Aid to Women, an anti-choice, "counseling" organization that was littered with Christian propaganda and expressed a truly extremist anti-abortion ideology. The atmosphere was extremely oppressive and very controlling. According to them, the mainstream, secular media were all liars and any stats or information that seemed to contradict their views were lies or government conspiracies.  Followers were always strongly encouraged to follow Christian or Catholic sources and to avoid mainstream media. The world presented through their eyes was a very ugly place.

In addition to being very good at controlling their followers, all of whom were religious, it must be noted that few, if any, were involved who were not Catholic, Born Again or some faction of Christianity. Their stated goal was to save babies. But their broader agenda was to "save the world" from the secular, non-Christian agenda, and they had an over the top anti-gay (homosexuals were seen as "aids carriers" who were out to "get the family") and anti-woman manifesto of beliefs and works. Ultimately abortion is just a stepping stone into their paranoid, homophobic, hate-filled world.

Accosting female patients on their way to abortion clinics was just like a game for them. My mother had begun to regularly sidewalk counsel and did convince a young, nineteen year-old woman from Grenada whom she met in the alley not to have an abortion. She dragged her into the fake "pregnancy counseling  centre", the one beside The Morgentaler clinic on Harbord St., and shoved a bunch of pamphlets and a plastic fetus in her face asking her why she wanted to "kill her baby". The young woman began to weep. This was a "victory" for her and made her the envy of other, more experienced, sidewalk "counselors" as they lamented "why do you get to save a baby, I've been doing this longer than you."

Ultimately, we joined Campaign Life Coalition (CLC). My mother was rather generously supporting them, back in the days when they had charitable status, with donations to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. We became involved with many, truly extreme characters. There was Vlad, a Soviet defector, who actually lived at their Dundas St. headquarters. He was an eccentric who worked in the office and was devoutly religious. He would accompany us on regular trips to Buffalo to participate in their Operation Rescue efforts. He hated abortion providers. Asking him once why he would never traditionally protest, he answered me that he would kill the doctors if he saw them. I don't think I brought it up with him again.

We also came to know Ken Campbell, who was a prominent anti-choice Evangelical Christian who spewed his own special brand of reactionary hate via a Christian radio show in the early 90's. He would pontificate on air at great length, often with the blessings and dollars of  his faithful listeners, which included my parents. They, sadly, donated tens of thousands of dollars to him as well.

He would rant on-and-on about the "pro-aborts" and how anti-family they were. He was also extremely fixated on homosexuality, oddly so for someone so hateful to gays. He related stories of how he was tormented by gay men in his dreams!  Every broadcast Campbell made was a call to action against the supposed anti-family, anti-traditional marriage, homosexual agenda. Then, of course, he would beg for money.

Eventually my mother had a falling out with him when he kept pushing for more and more money. The last straw was when he showed up at our home with prearranged loan papers all ready for them to sign. Fortunately, they declined.

Operation Rescue & the exploitation of the young

Lots of exciting things were happening in the Anti-Choice movement in the USA, led by the Christian hardline fanatic pastor Randall Terry, whose "Operation Rescue" movement appropriated civil rights activist tactics and then dared to compare itself with the civil rights movement, even going so far as to sing their songs and twist their slogans. "They ended slavery, we're ending slavery in the womb!", they would say. Randall Terry embraced the role of "prophet" that his followers cast him in. He, and others, worked everyone up to a frenzy in Washington in the early 90's with calls to take action against the murderous doctors. Unfortunately, some of those followers did.

 

In 1994 the Morgentaler clinic in Toronto was bombed. In private in the movement the anonymous cowards who did this were seen as heroes and extolled as noble. They had obeyed a higher law. Morgentaler was said to "deserve" it. They would make comments on how it was ironic he had survived the holocaust only to now kill North American babies.

Emulating the USA, in Canada we started to block clinics too. The movement's male leaders, preferring to lead by words, not example, never put their neck on the line. Often the front line activists at the clinics; Morgentaler's, the Scott, the Cabbagetown clinic, were kids and teens. My 10 and 14 year old sisters were arrested as were many other children. Time after time, kids and teens were encouraged by the anti-abortion adults to do this as they liked the media attention we got.

Sometimes we'd attach our necks with Kryptonite locks to gates or to each other. We were imitating the Lambs of Christ (an extremist American anti-abortion group at the time). A good family friend of ours was a "Lamb". He was a single 40 year old who wanted nothing more, as he put it, than to die in service to the lord. He also had ties to the Army of God who were Christian anti-choice terrorists. He was proud of his explicit Army of God manual, (an underground instruction manual for vandalism and violence against abortion clinics and providers). He was such a fanatic that his father had taken out a million dollar life insurance policy on him. He would accompany my mother and sisters on their strange and confusing "missions" to many U.S. cities campaigning against Christians using birth control. Sometimes she'd suggest that I marry him. Given that  I was 17 at the time, I have always hoped she was joking!

A big part of being a pro-life youth involved socializing and attending various conferences across Ontario and the USA. But this was all a part of of socialization into extremism and their ideology of control.

At one Human Life International conference my sister and I were "shamed" for being vegetarians as this meant we were going against the Bible and against our parent's wishes. Our vegetarianism was deemed anti-Christian.

At our Evangelical church  there were people who spoke in tongues "chosen" to convey a special message from "the Lord". It was, of course, always the same two people who "received" and interpreted. One of the tongue speakers looked me over one time and proclaimed to my mother that she detected witchcraft. This started a whole mess of trouble for me, and my mother got rid of the palm reading books that I had along with many other things.

No matter what, I felt like I could do nothing right. Any thoughts, especially anything sexual, normal for a 16 year old girl to have, were sinful. We were taught we could not trust a single natural thought. Everything about being a teenage girl was evil and unclean. I was convinced and constantly reminded at church and at home that God would judge us and that His vengeance would be visited upon us.

My mother would inquire about our sexuality and remind us that masturbation was wrong and sinful. We were to practice chastity until marriage. Their answers to teenaged hormones were lame. "I'm worth waiting for" buttons were thrust into our palms. The movement and Christian churches had a fundamental mistrust of youth and felt that all of us were in grave danger of becoming sex crazed animals and drug addicts. It is like they simply forgot, or never knew, what it means to be human, to be a young adult, and were unwilling to accept that it is an awkward age meant for discovering and learning about who and what you are.

Why did I go along?  I think for a young person it was about the attention at this point. The excitement of the lead up to an Operation Rescue action, the camaraderie, the police, the media interest, and all of the people. Then to get arrested, to go to jail for a few weeks for a tactic that you aren't even entirely sure makes sense anymore and to get even more attention from those within the cult; much more because of your youth and "dedication". I'd been involved for a few years now and the magic number 18 wasn't too far off, which would mean the end of my Young Offender charges and sentences. Soon I would be in adult court. Just how dedicated was I?

If I could speak to my now long-dead mother now, I might ask her why she let us do this? It destroyed our already fractured family. All we did was obsess over "the cause" and it ate up every weekend and all our free time. It became our focus and it was as though a stranger had  moved into our lives.

What did the "pro-life" movement teach us as kids and young adults? It taught us that god's "law" overrides any other laws or rights. These were the anti-social "values" they instilled. Their family values involved showing graphic and misleading imagery to kids and violating the rights of women repeatedly. It involved invading privacy, doing insane acts like stealing clinic garbage to scrounge for fetal parts, picketing escort's homes, committing vandalism and the condoning and even encouraging of violence against abortion providers and their property. They taught us that there was to be no concern  for anyone's rights or property because we were obeying a higher law, and we answered only to our "god". 

When I read about current Anti-Choice activists, or when I see them at demonstrations or in their propaganda videos, they seem so sincere. Yet many are full of hatred and are sickened by the sight of women standing for reproductive-rights. They see us as the enemy and as bloodthirsty 'baby killers'.

I see familiar faces, like the McCash's, Jim Hughes, Linda Gibbons and others. I see those who I once stood alongside and who now involve their offspring, creating future generations of activists in the sole cause of quashing women's reproductive autonomy and carrying out their reactionary agenda.

Painting a false portrait of abortion rights activists is key to their movement. This portrayal must be as ugly and paranoid as possible to succeed with their flock. Hence their over the top literature, as demonstrated by the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform (CCBR) or Lifesite News. The lies the anti-choice perpetuate and the tactics they use are fundamentally wrong-headed. They are controlling, anti-woman and fundamentally anti-family.

Their agenda reaches far beyond abortion. The beliefs they hold dear are part of an unholy trinity of hate that is anti-abortion, anti-homosexual and anti-feminist. They work tirelessly at scheming new ways to complete or promote their agenda, of which abortion is only a way to draw people in. This is why Campaign Life is also so prominent in opposing Bill-13 in Ontario, and Gay-Straight alliances in general, even though they have nothing at all to do with abortion.

Their vision is of a world where women are happy breeders, at home making dinner and raising their children, fulfilled by their duty as baby-makers with no selfish thoughts of education, career or personal achievement. Pregnancy was viewed as a duty, a must, and a completely natural and necessary rite of passage. They believe that making-babies is for everyone. Whether you're a 15 year old girl who just had sex once and got pregnant, or if you're a rape victim. Married, single sinning "sluts", or even if you have cancer. To them the circumstances are irrelevant.

It would make sense that such a movement, if it was actually about the love of  "unborn babies" would be concerned with the well being of pregnant women and the potential life they carry. You might think that these activists would support a government that would fund daycare, prenatal programs, affordable housing, programs to assist single parent families, or fight for an end to hunger and poverty in our country so women might be in a position more often to be able to safely, when they wanted to, bring a new life into the world. This is not so at all. Anti-abortionists are encouraged to vote according to one issue: abortion and abortion alone. They are fixated, paranoid and poisoned with an anti-female ideology.

This is why their heroes are the Mitt Romneys, Rush Limbaughs and Michael Corens of the world. They are not at all concerned with children or women. Only with fetuses.

It is a truly cult-like movement. Cutting ties if one wants to is not simple as so many of your friends are anti-choice, Evangelical or Catholic. They make sure of that. Weekend retreats and pro-chastity, anti-abortion conferences were held in out of town locations, far from most attendees homes. This made them a great opportunity for bonding and brainwashing. You really believed that when you blocked clinics you were doing something good. Doing the right thing. We believed we were involved in the noble cause of saving women and babies from being dragged to a horrible fate.

Seeing the light 

 

I can't exactly say what opened my eyes. It wasn't one specific incident but rather several. The shootings and anti-abortion violence helped to wake me up of course. 

Then there was anti-choice hysteria surrounding the Nancy Cruzan case in Missouri. She was a woman who after a terrible car accident was in a coma (persistent vegetative state) and whose family requested that she be removed from life support after several years. They believed they were following what would have been her wishes. The Right to Life (RTL) movement in the United States and Canada went berserk, hatching plans to go and 'rescue' her. They claimed that she showed signs of brain activity and that her doctors and family were out to kill her.  There were protests. The court ruled in favour of her family and Nancy was finally allowed to die. The movement's heartless action around Nancy and her family were pivotal in changing my mind and the case stayed with me.

I'd happened to watch an incredible Frontline documentary  "The Death of Nancy Cruzan". The tenderness and love that her father showed for Nancy really moved me. I wondered why the "right to life" movement didn't talk about this? Surely they could see  how much her family loved her and see their pain watching this once vibrant young woman who was brought back by "roadside heroics" to be an empty shell. The real Nancy was never coming back. Her body, now pale and bloated would be unrecognizable to her former self. This was not living with dignity. 

I was in art school now, and was being exposed to liberal thinking. I flourished. My best friend was a wonderful gay man and we became kindred spirits. I read authors like Toni Morrison and experienced the arts education I'd only dreamed of. And yet I would avoid intimate relationships, drinking, and most types of socializing. Feeling uncomfortable in my own skin, unable and unwilling to connect in a healthy, non-paranoid way because I was so used to having a movement and a religion looking over my shoulder.

Fortunately the next twenty years would take me on a new personal and political journey.

Having become a feminist and socialist, as well as the proud mother of a daughter I hope will embrace the freedoms her foremothers fought for, I now see things very differently. I understand that the anti-choice see the world through hate tinted glasses. They are the proverbial wolves in sheep's clothing. Their ugly construct of women and the world bears no resemblance to reality.

Natalie Lochwin is a Toronto activist and artist. She is the Spokesperson for the Socialist Party of Ontario.

A Short Note on Political Violence

I am starting my own personal blog by reposting some of my writing on disparate sites over the last few years that I feel are still relevant to my thinking today. This is an adaptation of a note that I wrote in response to the comments of a fellow leftist in Nova Scotia in late 2009 in response to a debate over the efficacy of political/revolutionary violence.


This was originally written in response to a point about the overthrow of the Batista regime, which is often put forward as the violence of the Castro government against its own people, quite incorrectly,is seen as relatively benign ( a statement as to just how awful the other Communist regimes were). So let us begin by looking at this a little more closely.

Those who justify violence almost always do so on the seemingly moral basis that were it not for the use of violence an immoral regime of one type or another (the Czar, Batista, Saddam Hussein, etc...) would not have been overthrown and this, in-and-of itself, is the sole moral basis that is required for its use.

I think that there are several fundamental problems with this.

The first lies in the similarity between these ideas and Richard Taylor's theories on Fatalism in that those who defend force rely on its future outcome to retroactively provide the pillars of support for its necessity. The success of the overthrow is, by definition, the proof of the justice of their argument.

But their error is also akin to Taylor's in that outcome does NOT indicate necessity. Again using Batista as an example, while it is an undeniable fact that his overthrow was accomplished by the methods of Che and Castro, this in no way means that these were the only methods by which he could have been ousted and, as I will return to later, this by no means indicates that the consequences of these methods, as opposed to other methods that might have been used, resulted in a better outcome than they would have. Further, even if one accepts that the nature of the violence, in this specific context, makes the violence of a more (although, and this is very important, not strictly) defensive as opposed to aggressive nature, a fact that I think most would concede, does this then justify post-revolutionary violence and is this post-revolutionary violence inextricably linked to the basically immoral taking of life that has been deemed to have been acceptable in the pre-revolutionary context in that it has created a mindset in which the exercise of violence is used in order to attain political goals?

One might, as a final addition to the first point, note that similar regimes, in the region and around the world, have been defeated using different methods that now result in better outcomes for their citizens, in terms of both democratic freedoms and standards of living, than exist in Cuba. One might further note that, for as many cases of the success of these methods, such as in Cuba, there are many more cases of its failure. Is it also justified when it completely fails in its intended result, thereby not only killing people, but accomplishing little or even, as often happens, creating a backlash in which objective conditions worsen?

This blends into the second point which is that the outcome of the outcome of the violence needs to be taken into consideration when looking at its objective morality. In essence, did the violence lead not only to the ouster of the old regime, but did it then result in a demonstrably better outcome not only than that which would have resulted had the old regime remained in power, but also than that which might otherwise have been constructed? A crucial aspect of this is the question of whether the violence, both in the sense of killing and in the sense of the very real violence embodied in the denial of basic freedom to millions of people, ended or continued in the wake of the exercise of pre-revolutionary violence.

In the case of the exercise of violence by the Bolsheviks, their regime had little moral basis at its founding (not only not having actually overthrown the Czars, but also having immediately crushed the truly democratic victory of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in elections held in the wake of their November putsch) and it then descended into pure barbarity under Stalin when violence became one of the regime's basic ideological principles and when the victims of this disgraceful moment in history were almost all either entirely innocent or were, in fact, actually supporters of the revolution.

While the case of Cuba is less extreme, this is only in matter of degree, in much the same way that one can speak of relatively humane kings and their nastier counterparts. The lack of democratic rights, the disgusting inability of people to freely leave their country, the use of block committees to defend the revolution which become, in practice, methods of prying into the private and personal affairs of citizens, the banning of a wide array of writers, from Orwell to Trotsky, the use of the death penalty, which is always wrong, but especially in the context of a judicial system which will allow for conviction, appeal and the execution itself in as short a time as a week (as happened, in fact, not all that long ago), the fact that Cuba now ranks as one of the worst human rights offenders in the hemisphere, the fact that many of its accomplishments have now deteriorated or decayed due to ineptitude and lack of flexibility or civilian oversight, etc., etc., all lead one to question if, in the end, the violence, and the mass shooting in the period right after the revolution's victory (which were shootings of unarmed and defenceless people), now seem to be quite as clearly beneficent as they once did.

(One might also note that if our standard is to be solely that violence which results in the ouster of a tyrant and that makes the lives of some or all of those who that tyrant oppressed on some level better, is justified, then Michael Ignatieff's, Christopher Hitchens' or George Bush's justification of the invasion of Iraq on the basis of helping the Kurds is, in fact, completely correct. That it led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and to the rise of Islamic extremism in the rest of the country after the fact does not change the reality that, if you accept the idea of redemptive violence, then George Bush could be seen as a hero in the Kurdish or even the broader context. One cannot logically deny to one's enemies that which one morally excuses in one's self)

I would say that, in the end, the intent of those who exercise the violence, the reasons they do so and the goals they seek to achieve, the society they envision and the methods they are willing to use in its accomplishment, are all every bit as morally significant as the immediate reasoning that has led them to take up arms or to use force. This, again, leads one to the question of just what type of movement, and what type of people, are inclined to the use of political violence and whether or not that impacts on the way they govern when they do succeed.

The reality is that the supporters of violent methods always use the first outcome, the victory over tyranny, or the replacement of one oppressive economic system with something new, to endlessly justify all of the actions that then flow from that revolutionary moment. This initial violence, as well as the violent retributions of those once in power, are used as a support for the bloodbaths that follow.

Even now one stumbles on the deluded rantings of apologists for mass murder all of whose drivel is predicated on the completely false appeal to the notion that "well, after all, they were better than the old regime" or the inanity that killing is acceptable in one context because things were bad in a different context. Often the refrain goes something like "Yes, it is true that Stalin shot a million fellow Communists, after long torture sessions, on trumped up falsehoods presented at grotesque show trials in the few cases where the pretext of a trial was bothered with at all...but don't you realize that at the same time there were ghettos in New York City and blacks were killed and intimidated in the southern US". Statements such as these are paraded about as if the possibility that neither had to occur is unfathomable. It is an argument that seeks to justify that which cannot be justified by claiming an entirely false counterpoint in other completely unjustifiable acts or conditions.

These purveyors of such rot frequently have to resort to holding completely contradictory lines of reasoning on the same subject. They accept or excuse the shooting of unarmed people in one context but not another. They oppose the death penalty everywhere except when applied to completely innocent people in the countries, past-or-present, that they support ideologically. They will, quite correctly, state that the nature of today's capitalism is the underlying cause of famine or preventable death due to hunger, poor drinking water, poverty, etc., and hoist these examples as proof, again correctly, that the system is unjust, while claiming, often in the same breath and entirely incorrectly, that horrific occurrences, such as the aforementioned mass executions, other famines, or completely vile acts of cowardice such as the Tienanmen Square Massacre are NOT proof of the injustice that lies at the root the systems that they defend.

What this is leading to, and will be expanded upon later writings, is that it is the acceptance of violence, the willingness to use it as a political tool, that dooms these movements and revolutions to failure from the start. It is impossible to build a just, socialist, egalitarian society on an edifice of the dead. It is impossible for the very reason that only some will be allowed to determine when it is acceptable to use violence, and that, once the assumption of the necessity of violence has become ingrained in the revolutionary mindset, those who the party or movement endow with this privilege, with this power over life itself, will be morally corrupted from the start and will represent a new class of oppressors every bit as real as those who came before.

It is impossible because the moral compromise is too great.

The defenders of this grand injustice will always point, for example, to the union organizer who braved the threats of the bosses and the violence of their lackeys to unionize the poor miners of Sudbury. But if he or she also supported the shooting of Bukharin in a prison basement in the back of the neck, or the displacement of entire peoples due to the actions of a few, or the consignment of the children of "enemies-of-the-people" to orphanages until they came of age, whence they were sent themselves to the camps, just how moral were they? Is a person who turned the blind eye to Stalin's evil because the USSR had no private ownership of the means-of-production really any different from the German who supported Hitler because he, for a time, made Germany stable, prosperous and efficient?

One is tainted by the actions one supports. Any positive outcome of them is rendered putrid by the scent of blood.

I feel that we must move beyond those who feel that society and human beings can be remade overnight through some forceful revolutionary push by some elite cadre of vanguardists. I feel we must move beyond their obsession with power and its exercise, an exercise that is impossible without a high level of compulsion. The time for this elitist ideal of bourgeois dropouts and pseudo-intellectuals has come and gone.

And so, I think, has the time for defending the use of violence.

In the final analysis, and I again will expand upon this later, I feel we must re-examine our objectives as a transformative social movement. We must accept that complex societies and peoples, and they are all complex, will have to undergo a difficult and challenging process if we wish to attain a truly lasting socialist transformation.

Part of this transformation, if it is ever to occur, must flow from deep feelings of human fellowship. From a genuine and unforced desire to do what is right and to help our neighbours and fellow citizens. From a sense of understanding for human failing and a realization that we, as leftists may not always be correct and must accept the views of others and accept defeats as a way to keep us in balance and in check. Those who feel they have all the answers have been proven by history to be delusional. We must cease to act as if we have that right.

And we must turn away from violence not simply because it does not work but because, in every fundamental respect, it makes us less different from those we oppose. It compromises us. It violates our vision.

As hard as it may be, as long as the struggle will be, we will be made better and stronger if we chose to eschew political violence as a means to political end both here and elsewhere.