Another Planned Parenthood Protest Showdown

The antiabortion coalition ProtestPP called for a day of nationwide demonstrations which spurred plans for...
The anti-abortion coalition #ProtestPP called for a day of nationwide demonstrations, which spurred plans for counterprotests in support of Planned Parenthood.PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW KELLY / REUTERS

In January, 1993, the New York City Council moved unanimously to erect a sign at the intersection of Bleecker and Mott streets designating the small corner on the eastern edge of the West Village as Margaret Sanger Square. The bill, introduced by Kathryn Freed, noted that Sanger had opened America’s first birth-control clinic, in Brooklyn, in 1916, and that when she was arrested and jailed on obscenity charges she had taught her fellow-inmates about contraception. Her second birth-control clinic eventually became part of Planned Parenthood in New York City, which now serves more than fifty thousand patients each year and has been headquartered at the corner of Bleecker and Mott since 1992.

On Saturday morning, as slush melted and police officers waved people away from subway lines under repair, protesters assembled to turn Margaret Sanger Square into a decorous, surreal, and occasionally confusing showdown. The anti-abortion coalition #ProtestPP, which describes Planned Parenthood as an “abortion chain” and an “organization that specializes in killing children,” had called for a day of nationwide demonstrations. This spurred plans for counterprotests in support of Planned Parenthood, though Planned Parenthood clinics around the country requested that these counterprotests take place off-site: opposing demonstrations would be doubly overwhelming to patients (not to mention observers, and perhaps even participants; after all, “Defend Planned Parenthood” and “Defund Planned Parenthood” are only one letter apart).

Honoring those wishes, organizers in New York planned a pro-choice rally for midday in Washington Square Park. It was a success: thousands of people gathered, many in bright-pink scarves and “pussyhats.” Eve Ensler spoke, calling Planned Parenthood the “bedrock of reproductive health care in this country.” A dappled Australian shepherd walked around in purple booties, bearing a sign that read “Good Boys <3 Planned Parenthood.” Plenty of pro-choice demonstrators turned up at Bleecker and Mott as well. There, a line of people held up colorful letters that spelled out “TRUST WOMEN,” and, behind them, people held signs: “I ain’t sorry”; “Planned Parenthood saved my life.” Police kept the street clear for cars and for patients, who were escorted into the clinic by women in pink vests. The much smaller group of anti-abortion protestors stayed quiet. They had planned a silent protest. Many of them clutched rosaries and muttered a steady stream of prayers.

I approached them and waited for a prayer break. A white man who looked to be in his mid-fifties clutched a medium-sized American flag and smiled up at the heavens. “Did God help us pick a good President or what?” he said. An older Filipino woman next to him nodded, still murmuring. She held a sign that, rather surprisingly, referenced the song “Bad and Boujee,” by the Atlanta hip-hop group Migos. It read, “Rain drop, drop top / Planned Parenthood gains millions making hearts stop.” Her name was Esmyrna, she lived on the Lower East Side, and she’d never heard of Migos. “I just grabbed it from the pile of signs over there,” she said, pointing to an assortment of posters on the sidewalk. She told me that she comes to Planned Parenthood with her church group on the first Saturday of every month, to pray. “The unborn—they are the most forgotten,” she said. Next to her, a man said to no one, over and over, “Why should any of our tax dollars go to killing people?”

A pert young woman with sea-glass-colored eyes and a white knit beanie came over; she had been handing out pamphlets about fetal size at the entrance of the clinic, attempting to draw patients away from Planned Parenthood at the last minute. She was an N.Y.U. nursing student, and this was what she did every Saturday. “I’ve heard a motivating number of stories of women who have walked away,” she said. “They’re often at the clinic because they simply don’t have people in their life who love them. They don’t have support.” It was “taboo,” she said, to be anti-abortion in New York, and in her field of study. “It can be a challenge, telling people the truth—that it doesn’t empower women to say, ‘We can solve this by killing your child.’ ” She gave me her name, and then, later, found me and asked me not to use it. “Since I’m fighting the powers that be,” she said.

The 2010 midterm elections marked the beginning of a reproductive-rights rollback across the country; since then, Planned Parenthood has been a favored target for conservative politicians. In 2011, Jill Lepore wrote in this magazine that anti–Planned Parenthood sentiment represented “two political passions—opposition to abortion and opposition to government programs for the poor—operating as one.” Repeated attempts to defund the organization have been unsuccessful; a sting attempt to catch its employees selling fetal tissue resulted in an indictment of the video makers rather than Planned Parenthood. Support for the organization has swelled since the election of Donald Trump, and in many cities on Saturday, pro-choice demonstrations easily overwhelmed the anti-abortion ones. Nonetheless—and despite the fact that Planned Parenthood cannot use federal money for abortion services, and will serve an estimated one in five American women over the course of their lives—Republicans have renewed their vows to defund it. Late last week, I talked to Dr. Leo Han, an ob-gyn based in Oregon and a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. He noted that, since abortion has never been federally funded, the political debate about Planned Parenthood is, practically speaking, a debate about defunding women’s preventive care. But, of course, the conversation about Planned Parenthood revolves entirely around abortion. #ProtestPP notes, correctly, that Planned Parenthood is the nation’s largest single provider of abortions, and that it provides a much smaller percentage of the nation’s mammograms and pap smears. To them, this is proof that the organization is nefarious. To others, this is proof of the outsize burden Planned Parenthood shoulders by administering a procedure that is constantly under attack.

A communications firm contracted by Advocate for Youth’s 1 in 3 campaign* put me in touch with a woman named Mary, who lives in North Carolina. She went to a Planned Parenthood clinic for the first time in 2011. Her gynecologist guessed the connection between her previous birth control, prescribed elsewhere, and her ocular migraines; Mary switched formulations and never had another migraine again. A few years back, while she was attending community college and cleaning tuxedos at a mall rental shop for minimum wage, she fell short on money a couple of days before she needed to pick up a new birth control pack. She got pregnant, and went to Planned Parenthood to get an abortion. Protesters called out, “Young mother, young mother,” to her, as she walked into the clinic. She cried in the bathroom, feeling guilty for not having the money, for not having the kind of life that could make a child happy, for having gotten pregnant in the first place.

I asked her what she would have done if she’d been unable to get a referral to a place within driving distance, if she’d had to travel to a different state. “I would have a kid right now,” she said. “And I was not financially stable at the time. I remember growing up really poor, and I did not enjoy my childhood. I wanted a better life for any child of mine.” She told me that she was making above minimum wage for the first time ever now. She’d transferred to a university and was going to study abroad. “I’m going to have a career and a future,” she said. “And that’s what I want to have when I have a kid.”

After I put down the phone, I received an e-mail from Treasa Dalton, an organizer of the New York #ProtestPP demonstration and the vice-president of Pro-Life Future N.Y.C. She described the group as “pro-life millennials who want to build a culture of life.” I asked her if she believed Planned Parenthood patients were being misled or wrongly served. “Planned Parenthood falsely markets itself as a necessary women’s health provider,” she wrote. “The reality is, they promote the idea that abortion is necessary for women’s equality, which I find misleading. The basis of equality is that all humans are equal. So who are we to deem some lives valuable and others not?”

*An earlier version of this post misstated the organization that connected the writer to Mary.