We don’t like to talk about the old days, we ex-teenaged activists. We don’t discuss how we stood in front of hospitals and clinics with our signs. We don’t recall the bitter cold, the blazing heat, the uncomfortable passersby, their quickened steps. We don’t discuss the adults who ran the movement into anguished defeat. We don’t talk about the bicycle locks, the arrests, the holding tanks, the prison sentences. And we don’t talk about the Other Side, the victorious rent-a-mob who gathered across the street from us in the cold or heat, furious when we tried to outlast them in extreme weather. We had hymn sheets, and they had the chants that burned themselves into our teenage souls.
“Sexist, racist, anti-gay, born-again bigots, go away! One, two, three, four! Open up the clinic door! Sexist, racist, anti-gay, Hitler Youth, go away! The people have spoken: the clinic must stay open!”
They came to recognize some of us; we came to recognize some of them. Many of them were involved in other radical causes. Some were teenagers we couldn’t understand. I remember our shock as one pro-choice girl began a speech to the news cameras, “As a sexually active teenager....” Our minds were blown by such brazenness. Perhaps one of us said a silent rosary for the girl, moving frozen fingers over the beads.
Our most recognizable opponent was an obese, raisin-eyed woman with straight brown hair. She was loud, even without her megaphone. She was sarcastic and pugnacious. She whipped up her activists at rallies with sneers about her “old Catholic mother.” The activists would laugh and cheer, and the woman would lead them in chants of “Choice! Choice! Choice! Choice! Choice!”
At one of these rallies, I saw her activists weeping as they chanted. And I realized that for them there was more to this word than abortion rights: it meant the right to do and be what they wanted and not have their old mother — or anyone else — make them feel guilty.
I couldn’t stomach protests for long. I was tired of girls and women looking at me and my friends with abject fear as they scuttled past us into the hateful clinics. I was horrified by the many PR mistakes of pro-life adults. I stopped picketing.
But I had 15 minutes of fame when two of the raisin-eyed woman’s underlings actually picked me up and carried me out of the local Women’s Day parade. Battle-hardened, I realized that my angry tears were a media gold mine. They got me onto radio and the front page of The Varsity, the University of Toronto student newspaper. The raisin-eyed woman was caught by surprise. Her people had thrown a woman out of the Women’s Day parade? Embarrassing. I felt avenged for all the times she had screamed her hateful chants at me through a megaphone. Hitler Youth, eh? Tell that to your female skinheads.
Last summer I was downtown with a good friend. She suggested we visit a new friend of hers, a penniless artist. He lived in a battered old house with other presumably penniless but interesting people. Clouds of marijuana smoke wafted from the front porch. My friend greeted the smokers sweetly and led me to the backyard where she had a conversation through a window with a loud female tenant.
The voice invited us in, and I saw the speaker. White-haired and obese, she was watching TV in the common room. My memory stirred uneasily. Was that—? And my suspicions were confirmed by the introductions. It was her, the raisin-eyed woman, the woman who screamed insults and obscenities at my friends and me over and over again, the woman who helped win a terrible victory for my ideological foes, who worked against our clumsy attempts for life. Old! Huge! Living in a dump! I prayed she wouldn’t recognize me.
I got out of there as soon as I decently could. The others seemed puzzled. But the old days came flooding back. The cold. The chants. The gentle, embarrassing hymns. The police vans taking my friends away. (“Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey-ey-ey, go-od-bye!”) The annoyed, confused judges. The CBC microphone in my face. The Toronto firebombing that blackened any credibility pro-lifers still had in Ontario, though the culprits were never identified.
I was in my early adulthood again, wounded, angry, proud, despairing, defeated. Was this astonishing meeting just a coincidence? Or was there a divine plan behind it? Was I supposed to have said, “I’m the former president of U. of T. Pro-life. How are you doing? How’s your old Catholic mother?”
Head spinning, I walked up to the Newman Centre. I tried explaining what had happened to a young friend. He didn’t understand, but he fetched the current president of the U. of T. pro-life group. She emerged from the TV room, young, smiling and friendly.
Dorothy Cummings is a Toronto-based writer. She has an MA in English literature from the University of Toronto and an M.Div./STB from Regis College. She is currently on leave from doctoral studies in theology at Boston College.
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