LOCAL SPIN 09.26.13

Sometime in the 1940s, family lore has it, my late Aunt Zoshkia looked around her dank apartment and made a decision. She saw the seven mouths she had birthed, the ones she could barely feed. She counted the rainbow bruises her sadistic drunk husband had inflicted. The decision: She couldn’t give birth to another of his children. She visited the neighborhood’s unofficial pharmacist and came home with slippery elm bark. When the bark is packed against the cervix, it dilates it and causes an abortion.

Flash forward to the late 1960s, and Zoshkia’s sister looked around her home in another South Side Chicago neighborhood and tried to make a similar decision. She was by then in her early 40s, caring for her dying parents, and responsible for keeping two kids fed and clothed because her husband – my father – was disabled and drunk a healthy portion of the time. She went to her doctor and told him she didn’t think she could do it. The pregnancy was an accident, she couldn’t deal with one more child and she asked him for help.

Roe v. Wade was six years from becoming law. And her doctor talked her out of an abortion.

And thus it is I am here, to tell you about the completely horrible people who exercised their First Amendment rights and appeared at public schools all over the county starting Sept. 16, displaying large-format, full-color pictures of what they purport to be aborted fetuses, and handing out pamphlets on abortion. Those pamphlets contained “helpful” information, including how Planned Parenthood engages in “reproductive racism,” and that if a woman is raped and gets pregnant, abortion “doesn’t unrape the mother.”

The two groups traveled from Southern California and set up at Monterey Peninsula College, P.G. High, Salinas High and Hartnell College. It seemed to be the same shtick at all locations: One group comprising mostly white middle-aged men and one group comprising mostly young white college students set up similar displays. They would approach a passerby, try to hand out a pamphlet and, if rebuffed, question the refusal: “What do you think about abortion?”

At P.G. High, the men pamphleting became so aggressive, according to Principal Matt Bell, the school called the police and sent out a mass email to parents. Salinas High, as it does in so many things, adopted a more laissez-faire attitude; I had to find out about it from my kid who goes there.

Things were a bit more dicey at MPC. I received an email late on Friday, Sept. 14, from MPC student William Guilfoyle; he was looking for help contacting local activists to launch a counter-demonstration. Most of the student body wasn’t aware the groups were setting up shop. MPC Interim Vice President of Student Affairs Marty Johnson did an admirable job of spinning campus reaction. In an email to me, Johnson writes, “I observed a political science class and their professor engage in a respectful discussion… It was an excellent example of the exercise of academic freedom and free speech.”

What I had to pry out of Johnson, though, was the fact that security personnel were on hand not just to observe (as he initially told me) but to keep students from becoming loudly confrontational and enforce the college’s “Time, Place and Manner” policy. Apparently it was fine for an anti-choicer to follow a woman through campus and question her beliefs, but it wasn’t fine for students to yell about freedom of choice or aggressively, verbally engage the anti-choicers. There were complaints from instructors and personnel in nearby buildings, Johnson wrote, about yelling, expletives and rude gestures.

One student cautioned was my older son, who was threatened with removal from campus and possible suspension.

Frankly, I find shouting down wingnuts who seek to persecute women for exercising their rights over their own bodies an excellent exercise of academic freedom and freedom of speech, but that’s just me.

And it’s ironic that while security was there to tell those who were being too loud to quiet down, a day later the campus hosted a festival with bounce houses and amplified music. I guess there really is a time, place and manner for everything.

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com.