Be glad you don’t live or work near the Planned Parenthood clinic in Allston/Brighton. Now that the buffer zone law is gone, Saturday morning there is part weird prayer fest and part guessing game.
The prayer fest features mostly elderly people saying Hail Marys and holding crucifixes, rosaries and pictures of the Virgin Mary.
The guessing game happens when a female, any female between 16 and 35, is spotted walking toward the clinic down the wide Commonwealth Avenue sidewalk. Both clinic protesters and clinic escorts try to figure out: Is she coming for an abortion? Or is she just trying to get to her apartment, her car or her job at the Star Market next store?
Inevitably mistakes are made, and the wrong person is swooped down upon. “Really aggravating” is how a swooped down-upon Star Market worker described being mistaken for a patient yesterday.
“Really scary and intimidating,” is how Marty Walz of Planned Parenthood described the newly revved-up scene. “This is no way to access health care.”
And she is right. At a big Boston rally last week, politicians and women’s rights groups vowed to make it safer and more private for women to enter clinics like these. But unless clinics are absorbed into hospitals or bigger medical clinics — and protestors are kept far, far away — that’s just not happening.
“Protect your baby. You’re a mother.”
“Don’t let your baby die, sweetheart.”
“Don’t be the mother of a dead baby.”
This is what self-described sidewalk counselors like Ruth Schiavone say to the women they can get very close to now, following them right up to the clinic door.
Then there are men with huge, gruesome signs of fetuses in pieces. There are the sudden, startling moments that make you jumpy. One comes when a woman across the street starts screaming, “You’re (expletive) bullies! Go pray in church!” Another comes when a young man jogs by and raises his fists in the air, “Birth Control! Yeah! Yeah!”
Then come truly unnerving moments, like when Bob Odenkirk, 27, marches up to people praying and starts bellowing, “Why doesn’t God make abortion impossible? You sir, with the fetus sign, why? If you answer I will give you a million dollars! Does God not care about abortion?”
Odenkirk is right in everybody’s face. He’s got a camera around his neck and wears a backpack — and backpacks make us nervous now. He tells wary police he has a right to be there. But they watch him closely. And I’m glad they do.
Outside the abortion clinic now, the buffer zone gone, you never know who will show up, or what could happen when they do.
