By Gretchen Keiser

The atmosphere outside Midtown Hospital on Saturday mornings can be hostile.

Beginning at about 7 a.m. staff members and patients begin to arrive and are greeted by a small contingent of sign-carrying picketers, who hand out literature graphically depicting the effects of abortion.

The picketers are cheerful, but aggressive, approaching everyone who walks up the path to the white-columned building at Ponce de Leon Avenue and Piedmont. Some people walk briskly by, refusing the handouts with a shake of the head. Others take the literature. Some aggressively refuse, warning and even threatening if they are approached.

The picketing began outside Georgia’s only licensed abortion hospital last June by members of Maranatha Christian Ministries, a non-denominational campus ministry program which has a group at Georgia Tech. The leadership of Maranatha decided last year to encourage local groups to begin picketing abortion clinics, said Shelby Luse, a 27-year-old member of the group who is among the leaders at Georgia Tech. “We felt the Lord was leading us to go down to Midtown Hospital,” he said. They come every Saturday morning, which seems to be a particularly active time at the hospital, and stay for several hours, hoping by their presence and the literature they hand out to convince a few people not go through with the abortion they have come to the facility to undergo.

“People are not aware of what the argument is on the other side of the fence. All they know is abortion,” Luse said. “The doctors won’t even discuss the other side of the argument.”

As people leave their cars in parking lots adjacent to the hospital and start up the walk, they’ll hear someone in the group shout out, “There’s an alternative.” Another may call out statistics on the numbers of people in Fulton County on waiting lists to adopt children.

Between 7:30 and 9:30 a.m. last Saturday, a steady stream of people arrived, most often a man and woman together, sometimes a woman accompanied by a girlfriend. Twice young couples came with an older woman, apparently the mother of one of the couple.

A lean beanpole of a teenager, who looks like a young high school student, comes up the walk with a young woman. Both look red-rimmed around the eyes. He takes the hand-out silently, a look of sorrow and resignation on his face.

A threesome approaches, a couple with an older woman. She holds out her arm, warning the group not to come near her. Going up the walk, the young man embraces the girl, trying to comfort her.

Inside the glass door, a uniformed security guard keeps nearly constant watch, ready to reprove the picketers if they stop moving and can be accused of loitering. They, in turn, watch him to see if he encourages people to throw away the anti-abortion literature once they are inside the door.

The Maranatha group has been seeking help from other pro-life people and in the last two weeks has been joined by a family, John and Jill Hart, members of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta who come with two of their four children. The previous Saturday, their first, they saw one young man change his mind after talking to the picketers and go inside and bring a young woman out.

”The guy went in there in tears saying, ‘I hope I’m not too late’ and he wasn’t,” John Hart said.

“You can’t blame the women of this country – it’s the men who haven’t stood up,” he continued. “I think when the men start standing up for the life they’ve created and brought about and stop putting all the burden on the women, we’ll start seeing a change.”

He said that he believed that people have to move beyond criticizing those having abortions and “start helping the people that have to make these choices.” Whatever commitment it takes to care for the women and children involved, the country must make it, he said. But he termed the 10 million abortions that have taken place in the last decade “a national disgrace.”

“With a curse like this in the midst of us, how can we claim to be a civilized Christian nation?” he asked.

He carried his son, David, one and a half, on his shoulders in the morning rain. Four-year-old Beth also walked, holding her mother’s hand and the family carried a sign saying “babies are beautiful.”

“It’s a tragedy,” Hart said softly as another group went up the walk and through the glass door. The renovated building’s large front windows showed a room gradually filling with young women seated and waiting. It was some time after nine in the morning. Most were casually well dressed, wearing the designer jeans that are the fashion trademark of the day.

Abruptly the picketing came to a halt. An argument broke out between one of the picketers and a passerby who was on his way to work. The young man erupted over a personal comment made to him by the picketer and started threatening violence. The security guard came out and the police were called.

Though the fury dissipated, the police sent the picketers off for the day after a police supervisor quietly reviewed the ground rules and assured the picketers they have the right to demonstrate if they avoid “cat calls” and name-calling. The group broke up, agreeing to come back next Saturday morning.