Anti-Choice Protesters Picket Outside Construction Worker’s Home

Within 18 hours of writing a post about how anti-choice protesters are fucking nuts, I got an email from Planned Parenthood that revealed just how frighteningly dead on I was. In Colorado, forced-birth proponents are protesting a Planned Parenthood clinic being built in Denver by picketing outside of a construction worker’s home.

The Greenwood Village enclave of Green Oaks is filled with large, custom-built million-dollar homes. And, for two months now, its quiet residential streets have also been filled with as many as 25 anti-abortion protesters.

Their goal is to discourage Bill Hornaday, an executive with Weitz Corp., from finishing work on a new Planned Parenthood headquarters miles away in Denver, near 38th Avenue and Quebec Street.

“This is ridiculous,” said Hornady’s neighbor.

“There is no end to what they’ll do. This is not really about abortion. It’s not about free speech. It’s about intimidation. It’s about harassment,” said a resident, who wished to remain anonymous.

He is the father of two kids, ages 16 and 19.

The 16-year-old boy told 7NEWS he hides in the basement when he sees the van, covered in anti-abortion posters, go through the neighborhood, about four times a week.

The teen said he’s scared when he sees a van sitting in front of the home before sunrise, with an older man in the driver’s seat, pointing a video camera at him.

He’s responded by videotaping adults bringing their own small children to the protest, complete with the large, graphic images of bloody aborted fetuses.

The family told 7NEWS they’ve been yelled at while simply doing yard work, as if they are somehow complicit in the construction man’s endeavors.

They showed 7NEWS a plastic baggie filled with red liquid and a doll in the shape of an aborted fetus that they found at the end of their long driveway. Several neighbors found the same item early one Saturday morning, he said.

The neighbor said a couple of dolls were even found inside mailboxes.

The family said the construction executive felt so bad he came over to apologize to his neighbors for all the commotion. They told Hornaday there was no need to apologize.

Just when you think they’ve hit new lows, the nut jobs love to pull out a surprise. You can click on the news article link to see partial video from the teen boy’s film. It’s pretty disturbing shit, particularly the part where the anti-choice leader proclaims that there will be no peace if Hornaday does not back down.

I have to say that I appreciate the insight of Hornaday’s neighbor. Granted, I think that just about anyone would be upset about having these protesters outside of their homes, regardless of their feelings on abortion. But the neighbor seems to understand that this protest is about nothing more than fear and intimidation. And that’s the one and only silver lining to these types of protests: it allows ordinary people to see anti-choicers for what they are. It is rather amazing that someone could think that these types of protests may actually help their cause. There was backlash to the protests in Aurora, as one could have predicted. You may be able to scare certain people out of doing their jobs, but these anti-choice tactics sure aren’t helping their image or presenting their point of view as rational. In another article (below), a woman who seems to be quite anti-choice herself also decries the protests, and the way that the protesters hang out where the school buses drop off neighborhood children.

The city council recently placed restrictions on protester activity; they can now only protest between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and have signs no larger than two feet by three feet. What’s sad is that these mild restrictions are an improvement. That article includes more video of protester activity; including a woman standing on a ladder so that she can see over a wall protecting a Planned Parenthood, screaming to the women going inside to “give their babies the gift of life this Christmas.”

As I said yesterday, we’re not dealing with scrupulous people. There are indeed some who oppose abortion but do so in a principled manner, despite how much I disagree with them and how false I perceive their conclusions to be. Sadly, they seem to be getting fewer in numbers, which is why we’re also fighting over issues like contraception and dealing with such profound misogyny. But the minority of informed and honest anti-abortion individuals are not the kind who protest outside of clinics or outside of people’s homes. They’re not the ones using bullhorns to scream at me as I pull out of the PP driveway, or the ones screaming at women to not kill their babies. They are not the reason that abortion clinics need patient escorts and bullet-proof windows. No, we’re dealing with the zealots, the ones who won’t let little things like reason and decency get in the way of making a statement.

My personal thanks go out to Mr. Hornaday and his workers for their resilience.

Right now, Planned Parenthood is accepting year-end donations. As regular readers know, they are my pet organization. We need to remember that 2008 is going to be a big year for reproductive rights. Federal and state elections, potential ballot initiatives to outlaw abortion in both Missouri and South Dakota, and ballot initiatives that would outlaw abortion and some forms of birth control are all on the table. If you have the means to give, I encourage you to give it your strong consideration.