By Gretchen Keiser

Led by a Chicago man who has become famous for aggressively demonstrating against abortion clinics, several hundred pro-life people took part in an act of civil disobedience July 20 at Atlanta’s late-term abortion facility, Midtown Hospital.

After demonstrating and chanting outside the abortion clinic for more than an hour, the group of over 300 demonstrators were asked by activist Joseph Scheidler if they wanted to walk through the clinic’s parking lot in a defiance of posted “no trespassing” signs. A majority of the demonstrators, mostly families who had brought their children, did march through the parking lot, and a lone off-duty Atlanta policeman, who had been hired to provide security for the clinic, allowed the group to pass after making a vain attempt to stop the first few. When it became obvious that the group intended to March through, he yielded to the numbers and let them pass. After walking through the lot alongside the clinic, in which abortions are performed through the 24th week of pregnancy, the demonstrators dispersed.

Scheidler said the act, which took the pro-life group “a little further than they have ever gone before” in demonstrating against abortion, would enable them to take other actions in the future, such as entering abortion clinics unannounced to conduct protests and allowing themselves to be arrested.

The head of the Pro-Life Action League, based in Chicago, and the author of a book, “Closed -- 99 Ways To Stop Abortion,” Scheidler said he has been arrested approximately six times, but that at least twice the arrests amounted to being served with a ticket asking him to appear in court.

“The people of Atlanta, I think they’re going to do it,” he said, referring to his stated aim of closing down abortion clinics across the country. “I did not expect to find the daring,” in the South, which is generally more restrained, Scheidler said, but he repeatedly praised demonstrators for the numbers who appeared and for their “guts.”

Midtown Hospital, which is located on Ponce de Leon Avenue, has been picketed by pro-life demonstrators for at least three years, particularly on Saturday mornings.

State records have revealed that fourteen “live births” took place at Midtown Hospital in 1980, 1981 and 1982, indicating that babies survived abortion procedures that took place during the second trimester of pregnancy, According to death certificates, the maximum time a baby lived was thirteen hours, five minutes.

Then in August 1984, it was revealed that Midtown Hospital was using a new abortion technique, injecting an adult dose of the drug dioxin into the heart of the infant in the womb, killing the infant before delivery. The technique was explained in a conference sponsored by the Emory University Family Planning Program at Grady Memorial Hospital and was reported at that time to have been used approximately 600 times at Midtown Hospital.

Scheidler, who had been invited to come to Atlanta by a group of families involved in pro-life efforts, said that he was already familiar with Midtown Hospital because of the publicity involving the “live births.”

While the demonstrators gathered in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church in Atlanta, he instructed them in chants and songs, including a modification of Beatle John Lennon’s song “All we are saying is give life a chance.” The demonstration proceeded from First Baptist along Peachtree Street, past gaping teens and young adults who were camped outside the Fox Theater in an early morning ticket line and onto Ponce de Leon. Once outside Midtown Hospital, the demonstrators circled the block several times and then snaked back and forth in front of the clinic for more than an hour. Scheidler and demonstration organizers huddled with police several times, particularly as police objected to the chants and singing in an area posted as a hospital zone. “This is not a hospital,” retorted Scheidler. “I’d love to test that in court.” After the march, he said that his own activity had begun in the late 1970s when the Senator Birch Bayh, a prominent abortion rights legislator, was chosen to receive a commencement honor at St. Joseph’s Catholic College. “My uncle taught there, another uncle has a scholarship there in his name,” said Scheidler, and he found himself emotionally tied to a college that was about to honor a man who had just been honored by the National Abortion Rights Action League. After exhausting other avenues of protest unsuccessfully, Scheidler said, he climbed into the bleachers on graduation day with a bullhorn. “I was scared to death,” he said.

When he tried to talk, the crowd booed, so he started to call out cheers. Each one got a rousing response, until he called out a cheer for abortionists. The stadium fell silent, he said. At the end of the event, he said, “I wasn’t arrested, I wasn’t locked up, but I was ready to be” to change prevailing abortion laws.

Several of those interviewed in the gathering later were thoughtful about ignoring the “no trespassing” signs. Steve Bowman, a member of Chalcedon Presbyterian Church who came to the march with his wife and two young daughters, said he was “strengthened by coming down and marching” with other demonstrators, but did not attribute particular importance to crossing the property line.

Dave Rawlins of Christ Presbyterian Church in Marietta said, after a moment’s reflection, that the action was “a way for us to realize that God’s law has a higher place in our minds and our hearts than man’s law.”

But he emphasized that the “tough work” of changing public attitudes about abortion would not be accomplished quickly, but “day in, day out with individual Christians giving up their tennis time and their golf time to go down to the clinics and talk to these ladies and ask them if they know what they’re doing.”

Abortion will stop “when people are continually reminded of what they’re doing,” he said, adding that public awareness about abortion is still very limited and ignorance prevails.

“There are still people in the United States who think they’re aborting a blob of tissue,” he observed. “It’s hard to believe...We still really haven’t gotten (information) to the masses of people that those are babies” being aborted.