Roundup: Anti-Choicers' Callous Disregard for Children

Roundup: Anti-Choicers’ Callous Disregard for Children

Feb 10, 2010, 9:40am

Rachel Larris

Clinic defense workers know that abortion protesters often seem to care more for what's in other women's bodies than the needs of actual children. The new clinic in Massachusetts proves no exception.

Those that do clinic defense work know that abortion
protesters, who sometimes bring children with them, often seem to care more for
what’s in other women’s bodies than the needs of actual children. The new clinic in Massachusetts, located close to a school, is no exception. It’s day one at the new health care clinic in
Brookline, Massachusetts and the anti-abortion
protesters show up with gruesome signs.

When he walked his child to preschool
this morning, Brookline
resident David Gray passed past several antiabortion protesters on Harvard
Street who had signs with photos of fetuses and one
that said "Thou Shall not Kill."

So after Gray left his child at school
for the day, he walked up to the demonstrators and asked that they refrain from
holding up signs with graphic images that could scare young children.

"I asked them if they are going to
be out here to think about the children who go to school here every day, and
think about the pictures they show," Gray said.

But Gray and dozens of other parents
who can be seen walking hand-in-hand with their children on the way to school
in Brookline Village
every morning may have to get used to the sight of antiabortion demonstrations.

Protesters said they plan to be outside
111 Harvard St.
every day now that Women’s Health Services, a clinic that provides abortions,
has relocated there after 17 years in Chestnut Hill. The clinic opened in the
new location Tuesday morning.

It’s interesting that the local businesses and a few
neighbors are upset that the clinic draws protesters, but they blame the clinic
and not the protesters.

Standing outside her preschool and
watching protesters Tuesday morning, Ina Brother, executive director of the
Little Corner Schoolhouse at 110
Harvard St., said it seemed as people were walking
past the demonstrators without paying them any attention.

But Brother said she believes the
clinic should have moved to a different location.
"It’s the wrong place," she said. "Look at all of the children
walking to school."

Of course the anti-abortion protesters don’t care about the
children they
see walking past them.

"We’re not going to go away,” said
Rita Russo of Norwood, who stood outside the clinic with a poster of Jesus
draped around her neck yesterday. "It would be invisible if we weren’t here. We
don’t want it to be invisible.”

Speaking of not caring who they hurt, Scott Roeder, recently convicted of the murder of
Dr. George Tiller says
he has no regrets.

In his first public comments since his trial for
the murder of Dr. George Tiller, Scott Roeder also criticized those who sought
to keep the issue of abortion out of the proceedings altogether, saying it was
like asserting that the trial for abolitionist John Brown was not about
slavery.

"My beliefs were that the lives of unborn
children were being taken by abortion," Roeder said in the video posted on
YouTube Monday. "How you can keep that out of the trial is beyond me,
because that was the one entire motive for the action that was taken."

His 10-minute conversation with abortion opponent
Dave Leach is the first in a series recorded last week that will be posted
online with Roeder’s blessing, Leach told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Charmingly Roeder also compared Tiller’s family to being the same as the wife of mobster "hit man."

In other news: In
Iowa Republicans failed to force a vote to move
a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage out of committee. And in
Ireland, American Evangelical abstinence programs are trying
to find a foothold.

February 10, 2010

Abortion
doctor’s killer says he has no regrets Associated Press

ACLU
accuses Fresno College prof. of anti-gay preaching in class Examiner.com

Antiabortion
demonstrators picket Brookline clinic opening Boston Globe

Age
no contraceptive, women warned Associated Press

More
tolerance for gay troops as end of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is debated
Washington Post

Wake
Commissioners to Debate Taxpayer-Funded Abortion Lincoln Tribune

Anne
Hathaway quits Catholicism for gay brother USA Today

Abortion
bill to close legal loophole passes in Utah House Fox13

Is
abstinence-based sex education the best choice for our teens? Irish Times