After she walked away Josh told me, “That’s so sad, Dad. I don’t feel like eating anymore.”
“Yeah, it was sad.” I looked at him. “Just finish your french fries and drink a little more of your milk.”
Planned Parenthood was just another part of our neighborhood, like the Busy Bee or the Granite, until the demonstrators appeared in front of the clinic. At first their stridency was novel, out of place, but eventually they became an ongoing part of the landscape, something familiar and unremarkable. On weekdays there were always men, never more than three or four, and even on Saturdays, when their numbers swelled to one or even two hundred people, the crowd was still overwhelmingly male. When they sang hymns or prayed together it sounded different than in church, where women’s voices predominate.
On weekdays the demonstrators walked restlessly back in forth in front of the clinic, wearing placards and carrying signs. One protestor, a white man who appeared to be in his early sixties, wore a sandwich sign with a poster-sized blowup of a fetus under large letters that read, ABORTION IS MURDER. The sign extended from his shoulders well past his knees and the fetus in the picture was huge, larger than life. The first time I saw his sign I wondered where he got it, how it was made. How do you get a photograph blown up so big? What did the person doing the enlarging think about it?
I had talked with some anti-abortion protesters several years before this. They were demonstrating in front of a church where I had brought some students from Boston University, where I was the Episcopal Chaplain. The students were wary and hung back, but I was interested in asking questions, hearing more about what the protesters believed, what motivated them.
I asked one woman if being pro-life also meant she opposed the death penalty. She didn’t. “We’re here to save innocent lives,” she told me. “People facing the death penalty are not innocent.”
“I understand,” I said, although I wasn’t completely sure that I did.
Another woman told me she was impelled to demonstrate because she believed life began at conception, and so I asked her if she thought there should be funeral services when a mother miscarries. She didn’t know. She told me she had never really thought about it before.
We were not in Brookline when the clinic attacks occurred, but were driving back from Washington, D. C., where we had been visiting my parents and sisters after Christmas. My wife had flown back earlier to visit a friend in New Hampshire, so Josh and I had a book on tape to keep us occupied for the long drive back. I was focused on driving, Josh got engrossed in the story, and so we were completely insulated and unaware of what had happened in our neighborhood until we arrived back home. I called my friend Kenn who had been house and dog sitting for us to let him know we were safely back.
“You sure missed all the excitement, didn’t you.” he said.
“What excitement?” I asked.
“You’re kidding. Didn’t you hear about it? Someone attacked Planned Parenthood and Preterm, shot a bunch of people, killed two women who worked there. It was the lead story on the national news at 7.”
He described the way police had combed the area for most of the day, both in cars and helicopters, searching for the attacker. “This place was crazy, there were cops everywhere. I walked Sparky right down Beacon Street this morning. We must have gone by Planned Parenthood five minutes before it happened.”
I told Josh what I had learned. He grew quite alarmed, frightened that the killer might still be lurking in our neighborhood. He did not want me to leave him alone for any reason, either to walk Sparky or to buy the milk, bread and cereal we would need for breakfast. He asked about how sturdy the doors and locks on our house were, whether we would be safe that night as we slept.
“Josh, don’t worry, this is probably the safest place in the country right now. Whoever did this is long gone, escaped. He’s probably a thousand miles from here.” My reassurance felt reflexively parental but I believed it. I was certain the guy was far away, that we were safe.
“Don’t leave me alone, just walk Sparky in the front yard if you have to walk him,” Josh pleaded.
Sparky needed to go out and we needed groceries. I wanted to see where it had happened. “Listen, there’s nothing to worry about. I need to go to the Beacon Market and buy some stuff, and I have to walk Sparky. I’ll only be gone for ten minutes, you’ll be completely safe. You can stay upstairs, play video games or watch t.v. I’ll be right back. If you’d like, you can come with me.”
“No, I’m not walking around out there. I’ll stay here, but don’t take too long, O.K. Dad?”
When I got to Beacon Street I saw that across on the Planned Parenthood side there were five or six news trucks parked and klieg lights set up, bright as fireworks, which made the December night seem colder. There were several police cars in front of the clinic, two of them double parked which slowed the traffic down as it narrowed to one lane. A t.v. reporter stood in front of the therapist’s office a couple doors down, talking into a camera. He was too distant for me to hear his words, but I watched as he turned, gestured with his left arm back at the entrance to Planned Parenthood, and then turned back to the camera.
On our side of the street there were no lights, no trucks, no reporters, no police. I tied Sparky’s leash to a parking meter in front of the Beacon Supermarket, bought what I needed, and then untied him and walked home.
The police caught John Salvi the next day in Virginia, where he had shot at another clinic, this time hitting no one. After some negotiations between court officials in Virginia and Massachusetts, Salvi was brought back to Massachusetts and arraigned in Brookline, appearing in court with heavy security, wearing a bulletproof vest.
Salvi’s lawyer announced after the arraignment that the question at the trial would not be so much a matter of what happened, but why it happened, which is a question many people have asked.
Some suggested that referring to abortion as murder, to doctors who perform abortions as child murderers, putting their names and faces on fliers reading “Wanted for Murder”, and comparing the abortions performed in this country to the Nazi holocaust may incite people to precisely the kinds of violent actions that occurred in Brookline and countless other places since then.
Those who oppose abortion have insisted they bear no responsibility for these tragic events. They do not advocate violence but say it is the result of a few isolated individuals acting on their own. Apparently these few they have been quite busy; over 200 clinics were bombed or burned, and over 400 death threats were received by doctors and clinic workers the year Salvi went on his rampage.
Several days after the shooting I went to a public meeting at Brookline high school organized for people to discuss ways to support doctors and clinic workers. I sat with a friend who is also an Episcopal priest, and she and I listened to the usual range of people who attend and speak out in such meetings. There was bombastic rhetoric, solid suggestions, a few concrete actions proposed.
Near the end of the meeting a woman made her way to the microphone. She began, somewhat haltingly, “We have been talking a lot about all the things we can do. Many people have suggested a lot of practical steps to take, ways to organize and to get power. But I keep thinking we’ve jumped over something, we’re skipping a step.” She stopped, took a breath. “We haven’t really talked about what this has been like for us, how we feel. Many of us felt as though the recent national elections were depressing, discouraging, and now, added to that, come these attacks. They were horrible, and terrifying, and so sad, so sad. I am frightened. I don’t want to quit, I came out here tonight, but this is so discouraging and I am so frightened. I need to say that.” She sat down. The room was quiet.
I realized at that moment that back on the night of the attacks, when I reassured Josh that we were safe, I had been wrong. It may have been true that the attacker had fled, but the fact remained that around the corner from our house, across the street from the Beacon Market and the Busy Bee Restaurant, places where we shop and have dinner and catch the trolley, women had been shot with a rifle by someone who did not know them and who had never met them, and one of them was dead. Up the street, in the building where Josh got his braces tightened and I bought him a candy bar, other people were also shot and another woman killed.
Josh was right, we should be scared. Our doors were not thick enough, our locks were not strong enough to keep this away.
Three years earlier, when Josh was nine, our family drove across the country, visiting several national parks, including Bryce Canyon in Southwestern Utah. We arrived there in the late afternoon, and after we got settled in our cabin Josh and I went exploring in the fading, dusky light. We made our way to the edge of the canyon and looked out, and then we turned and walked back through some woods. It was getting dark, hard to see. Josh stopped me, pointing. Up ahead something moved. It was a deer.
“Can we get closer, Dad?” Josh whispered.
“Sure,” I told him. “Walk slowly, and be quiet.”
Josh moved carefully ahead, and I followed. We had never seen a deer up close before, and I was excited for him. He moved very slowly, deliberately. We approached the deer which now stood, watching us, not moving but attentive. Josh got closer, and the deer raised its head.
Josh sensed that it was frightened. He quit moving forward, stood motionless, and then slowly, carefully, he lifted his arm, extending it out toward the deer, with two fingers raised in a peace sign. He held his hand out, not moving, and then whispered to the deer, “It’s all right.”
The deer’s ears flickered forward and then it sprang away.
Josh turned to me, excited. “We got so close, Dad. Did you see it? Wasn’t that great?”
“Yeah, it was great. You were so careful and gentle.”
“I showed him that we wouldn’t hurt him. Do you think he understood?”
“Yes, I think so.”
I was moved by his nine-year old’s hope that he could communicate to the deer that there was nothing to fear. “Come on, let’s go.” I reached for his hand as we turned and started moving toward our cabin, and he let me hold it as we walked along, slowly finding our way back together through the dark.
