Clinic Escorting: The New Catholic Sidewalk Ministry?
As Call To Action discerns our involvement in reproductive justice, we’ll be featuring stories from and about Catholics, including CTA members, involved in abortion care. In the following piece, CTA member Emily Harrison and communications coordinator Lauren Barbato reflect on their experiences with anti-abortion harassment as clinic escorts and the importance of challenging Catholic-led “sidewalk counseling” ministries.
Image courtesy of Robin Marty.
When Call To Action member Emily Harrison arrives at the clinic each Saturday morning for her shift as an abortion doula, she must confront a line of protesters. Most of the “regulars” are Catholics desperate to evangelize her, rosaries in hand.
“God loves you,” they would tell her. “You don’t have to do this.”
Harrison, who previously served as a clinic escort for two years before transitioning to her role as a doula, knows that God loves her. “I would tell [the protesters], ‘I’m not having problems with that,’” Harrison says. “And if my church did adoration, I would have gone to adoration after all my shifts, because I always felt so called to reconnect with my faith.”
As an abortion doula, Harrison guides patients through their abortion experiences, from the waiting room to the recovery room. She’s at once a mediator, advocate, and confidant. She listens to patients’ fears, offers prayers or comforting words when they request them, sits with them as they cry, or, maybe, even just sits with them in silence.
Very rarely did Harrison doubt her work as an abortion doula or clinic escort. Yet encountering these protesters each week is frustrating, emotionally draining, and even scary—especially when it’s a priest or a religious sister on the other side of the barricade.
“For the 30 seconds that I would feel a twinge [of doubt], it was when a priest or a sister was trying to evangelize me from the street,” she says. “You have these church officials yelling at you and you don’t know what to do.”
Her biggest fear is running into her parish priest outside the clinic one morning. “That authority figure, that spiritual figure who I looked up to for four years–having him tell me that [my work as an abortion doula] is wrong? Instead of 30 seconds of a doubt spiral, it probably would have been an hour of deep thinking and meditating over what I believe,” Harrison admits.
Yet Harrison’s also a believer in the axiom: You can’t have faith without doubt. Doubt is natural. And it’s this deep connection to her faith that keeps her going past the barricade of protesters.
“I wanted to tell them: I’m praying for you to stop harassing people. If you’re doing this because this is your Catholic duty, there are so many other more productive things you can do with your time that would also be considered your Catholic duty. Especially in the D.C. area (where I lived), where homelessness is so rampant. ... So, when they tried to evangelize me and be like, ‘God loves you. You don’t have to do this,’ I would say, ‘I know God loves me. I’m not having problems with that.’”
In post-Roe America, the need for both clinic escorts and abortion doulas has become even greater. Abortion doulas such as Harrison help patients navigate the process of undergoing an abortion—a process made more complicated due to increasing state legislation and financial barriers in the healthcare system. Clinic escorts provide physical safety and emotional reassurance for patients on the way to and from the clinic’s front door or waiting room. Depending on the clinic, some of these patients may not even be seeking an abortion but trying to access their local clinic for contraception or a well-woman exam.
Like Harrison, I’ve also served as a clinic escort in Philadelphia. Every morning, protesters would chant the Hail Mary, their voices growing louder whenever someone turns the corner. Students from a nearby Catholic college pray with their foreheads pressed against the metal barricades. These protesters have followed patients to and from their cars; they’ve even followed the patients’ partners, mothers, sisters, and cousins. To the women, they would plead: “Don’t you want to give life to that baby? You’re already a mother! You’re going to regret this!” The male partners, the protesters would condemn to Hell.
More often than not, it’s men—including priests—who loiter here each morning, holding mass-printed placards: Ask me about abortion reversal. Ask me about a free ultrasound. In the few, fleeting moments, before I pull the neon-green vest over my head, these men plead: “We can help you leave this industry!”
Once the vest is on, these men walk up to the barricade and greet me: “Good morning, baby murderer.”
On the morning of Ash Wednesday, I was the lone escort at the clinic. Three male protesters flocked to a sedan as soon as it stopped outside the entrance. The men surrounded the young woman as she stepped out of the still-running car, attempting to grab her by the shoulders and block her from moving. I near-vaulted over the barricade as her mother rolled down her window and shouted: “Leave her alone!”
Contemporary Catholics often center the prophetic call to social action around the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In the wake of Vatican II and its numerous reforms, direct, public actions were viewed as the new, modern ways for Catholics to express their religiosity. Indeed, the Catholic anti-abortion movement grew out of this radically spiritual—yet not always radically progressive—grassroots movement, where both good Catholic housewives and civil rights-minded priests such as Daniel Berrigan and James Groppi could team up outside Planned Parenthood clinics.
It would be a dangerously rosy revision to write that these Catholics were fighting for “life.” Lost in these grand tales of Berrigan’s dramatic arrests is the very real impact clinic barricades, protests, and other direct actions targeting abortion clinics have on the patients. Decades of stigmatizing the procedure, providers, and patients have bolstered this notably Catholic movement of sidewalk ministries such as “counseling” and clinic “rescues.”
Image courtesy of Lorie Shaull.
These tactics cannot be untangled from physical violence. A spate of lethal violence against abortion providers and patients throughout the 1980s and 90s led to the passage of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, which makes physically blocking access to an abortion clinic, or using force against patients, clinic workers, escorts, and protesters a federal crime. Despite these federal protections, there’s been an uptick in targeted harassment, vandalism, assault, and violent threats against abortion providers since 2020.
The Dobbs decision in 2022 may have undone Roe v. Wade, but it hasn’t eradicated violence or harassment against people who seek abortions and their healthcare providers. In states where clinics providing abortion services still legally operate, direct actions targeting abortion clinic workers and patients continue. Just last January, a Planned Parenthood in Peoria, Illinois endured extensive damage from a firebombing.
What’s also concerning is how these direct actions, including sidewalk ministries, targeting abortion clinics and patients have reemerged as a rallying cry for pro-life Catholics and Christians. Parishes promote these ministries in their church bulletins; a recent bulletin I saw from a South Jersey parish claimed sidewalk ministries are effective “75 percent of the time” in “blocking” patients from having an abortion. And as the Department of Justice continues to indict perpetrators of anti-abortion violence and harassment under the FACE Act, for incidences that occurred both before and after the Dobbs decision, conservative Catholic and Christian news media has flipped the script. A recent feature from the conservative outlet Compact, “Prolifers in the Crosshairs,” argues that the DOJ is discriminating against crisis pregnancy centers and not taking violence against crisis pregnancy centers as seriously as violence against abortion providers.
Prior to the federal trial of Michael Houck, a regular fixture outside the Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia’s Center City, the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Coalition organized a prayer vigil outside the courthouse. Houck, a Catholic, has been prominently featured on Catholic News Agency and EWTN over the years. Houck was facing up to 11 years in prison for assaulting a clinic escort, though he was acquitted of these charges.
Do we Catholics want to claim these sidewalk ministries, and more importantly, do we want to claim them as righteous actions of compassion and social justice?
For many well-meaning Catholics, opposing abortion may feel like a “Catholic duty,” Harrison says. She believes the mindset that only other people have abortions or support abortion access, but not us—not good Catholics—is a mindset that needs to be reexamined in this post-Roe America.
And the first step may be, when looking at these sidewalk ministries and the history of anti-abortion violence, to ask: Are we helping patients, or are we causing more trauma and harm?
