My View

Every morning I step out the front of my apartment into the energy of the city. But everyday I step out to face heated controversy. Before me, the sight of an unassuming building partially shielded by a tall wooden fence. The building is plain and lacks windows and ornamentation. It seems quiet. The crowd that gathers at its parking lot entrance is not. A group assembles six days per week to display their pro-life opposition to the Planned Parenthood. The routine nature of the scene does not soften the tense atmosphere it creates.



The facility's patients unavoidably are faced with their unknown adversaries. The picketers clumsily stumble across the entrance. Their purposefully slow pace halts the patients in pursuit of their doctors appointments. The pause in entry is the window of persuasion for picketers. They begin to state their argument to the patients. The 1994 Freedom Access to Clinic Entrance (F.A.C.E) Act prohibits obstruction to the facility, so they move as slowly as possible over to the sides. The oversized posters in the protestors hands and propted up on the curb. The pictures are of babies with errie, doe faces. The head picketer has her signiture Virgin Mary framed portrait. Rosary beads are tangled in her tight grip and hang over the goudy, gold frame.



She says the same thing to each woman, "Your baby is a child of God. You can't kill His child!"



By then, the vehicle or pediestrian has just enough room to slowly slide into the lot. The head picketer shadows the patient just a few steps in one last hope in preventing her appointment, her sin. The walk from the vehicle to the door is filled with voices from the sidewalk. As she enters, regretting the fight lost, the group reassembles to their moving blob until the next patient. When the confrontation can begin again.



This is my view. The view from my home is decades of ideological controversary. The 1973 Supreme Court ruling of Roe v Wade provided women the right to choose, still under heated debate and protest by Pro-Lifers. The professionalization provided safe, well equiped facilities dramatically reducing injuries and deaths due to procedures. Violence and harrassment from Pro-Lifers became prevelant. When violence escalated to murder in 1994, federal penelaties were enacted for crimes, threats and obstruction of abortion facilities.



From my window, I can see the tense dissagreement of thirty-five years. Privacy and protection teeters in controversy. Is a right ever without scrutiny, judgement, ridicule? Privacy is measured in degrees of intrusion, while freedom in the number of injustices. My view is lack of progress.


Sources:

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/health-topics/abortion-4260.html

http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/history_abortion.html