Wichita, Kansas, is no stranger to anti-abortion activism. In 2009, Dr. George Tiller, a physician who provided abortion services late in pregnancy, was assassinated by anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, where Tiller was serving as an usher. Dubbed “Tiller the baby killer” by U.S. Rep. Robert Dornan (R-CA) and demonized by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Tiller was targeted with violence throughout his career. In 1986 Tiller’s clinic was firebombed, and in 1993 he was shot five times by anti-abortion extremist Shelly Shannon.
Last month, Dr. Scott Stringfield, medical director of the anti-abortion center Choices Medical Clinic located directly south of Wichita’s Trust Women clinic, which provides abortion services, referenced the 9/11 hijackers during a March for Life event in Topeka. According to The Wichita Eagle, Stringfield called the 9/11 attack “a heinous act” but told March for Life attendees “you have to look at one thing. They (the terrorists) were principled. They were willing to die for what they believed in.”
When the approximately 300 abortion abolitionists arrived in Wichita for Free the States’ “Abolition Now” conference last Wednesday, local reproductive health workers grew concerned.
“This particular crop of folks is very intense,” said Zack Gingrich-Gaylord, the communications director for Trust Women, on Saturday after three days of focused anti-abortion activism from the abortion abolitionists. “I guess ultimately things have been pretty even for the most part, but it just feels like there’s the potential in the moment for — it just feels unpredictable. It’s been just an intense, intense week and buildup to this sort of thing.”
While the tactics of abortion abolitionists are concerning — graphic signs featuring dismembered fetuses, direct conversations centered on their firmly held religious belief that abortion is murder, and mass gatherings outside of clinics like Trust Women — theirs is an explicitly nonviolent movement. During the conference, organizer T. Russell Hunter unveiled the “Norman Statement,” a collection of guiding principles and tenets for the abortion abolition movement.
Article XI of the statement states, “We affirm that civil government alone is instructed by God to systematically wield the sword against the evil-doer. We affirm that God’s kingdom is advanced by the spiritual means of proclaiming the truth of God’s Word plainly to the consciences of men, calling them to repentance and to the keeping of all that He has commanded. We affirm that the Church has not been given a sword but a prophetic voice with which they must, among other things, exhort the magistrate to establish justice and not bear the sword in vain. We deny that vigilante violence would accomplish anything for the cause of preborn children. We deny that the weapons of our warfare against societal evils like abortion are carnal in nature.”
Of the original, anti-slavery abolitionists of the 19th century, the abortion abolitionists draw their inspiration more from pacifist William Lloyd Garrison than firebrand John Brown.
“I think the dumbest, dumbest thing in the world is killing an abortionist,” says Hunter. “It’s just dumb on every level and it’s immoral. When we say the state is to bear the sword, not the church, not the individual Christian. Whenever a guy kills an abortionist or blows up an abortion clinic or whatever, he’s saying, ‘Listen, I can’t do the harder thing and trying to get the culture to repent. I can’t do the harder thing and try to get these massive churches to do what’s right, and I’m fed up and no one’s going to do things, so I’m going to I’m going to go shoot an abortionist.’ The abortionists, as bad as they are, they are not the real problem.”
Hunter hopes that his movement will lead others away from violence. “To me, John Brown stopped being an abolitionist [when he turned to violence],” says Hunter. “If I can persuade pro-lifers to become abolitionists, the culture to start seeing child sacrifice for what it is, and get us to repent peacefully, we can forestall whatever judgment would come. I can seek to forestall the John Browns.”
To that end, Hunter and the abortion abolitionists engaged in four days of nonviolent anti-abortion activism throughout Wichita.
The first day began with what Hunter called “seeding the culture” by “littering for the Lord” — distributing handbills on cars in parking lots, placing red yard signs that read “Bleeding Kansas” and include a QR code to the group’s website, and placing stickers on street signs.
“How many of you got the cops called on you?” Hunter asked that evening when the abortion abolitionists reconvened at Wichita’s Hilton Garden Inn for the evening session comprised of prayer and anti-abortion sermons.
The Wichita Police Department blotter shows one confirmed call for service regarding flyers left on cars, but Wichita residents took to Facebook and Reddit to express outrage over the widespread distribution of anti-abortion literature.
“At Costco on my lunch break someone left a really gross anti-abortion leaflet on my car (and many others) with a picture of a fetus with no skin — intestines and brain showing,” wrote one Wichita resident. “Really graphic and totally inappropriate to leave in my car door handle where a child could find it.”
The second day’s activism consisted of a nearly four-mile march through Wichita, from the conference hotel to the Trust Women clinic. Abortion abolitionists marched on both sides of Wichita’s main thoroughfare, distributing handbills and attempting to engage residents in conversation.
The route of the march brought them past Wichita East High School, where a student confronted the marchers, telling them about the abortion she had at age 16. Before another student came to walk her away, visibly distraught, from the marchers, Hunter told her abortion was murder.
When the marchers arrived at Trust Women, they were joined by a box truck, its sides emblazoned with a giant image of a decapitated fetus, and signage comparing the abortion to the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Activism outside of clinics — which the abortion abolitionists refer to as “abortion mills” or “abortuaries” — is a main focus of anti-abortion activism, which forces many clinics to adopt protective measures such as armed security and extra-tall privacy fencing. The abortion abolitionists stood outside the fence of the Trust Women clinic, reading from the Bible and imploring patients not to “murder their baby” while two Wichita PD vehicles sat in the parking lot and the clinic’s security guard ensured vehicles had a clear path into and out of the clinic.
“These moms know that what they’re doing is shameful,” said Jesse Watkins, a pastor at Friendship Southern Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina. “They know that it’s wrong. A lot of the moms who were going there were going because they didn’t feel like they had any other option. Our church started connecting with other ministries in the area to help these moms who do choose life, and it’s really amazing. In the past seven years that we’ve been going to the abortion clinic, there’s been 3,000 mothers who’ve chosen life and had their babies. We try to connect with these moms. We’re trying to give them resources and help them, and that’s been a real blessing for us.”
Abortion advocates decry the harm they see as a result of anti-abortion movements and legislation. “We’re undergoing a massive Turnaway Study right now,” says Gingrich-Gaylord. “There are so many people who are unable to access any kind of reproductive health care right now. Even before Dobbs, 90% of the counties in America didn’t have access to an abortion provider, so we’re already kind of here. It’s even fewer now. We’re going to be seeing what lack of access, what the inability to to get essential health care, looks like in the next few years for so many different people. It kind of goes back to the outside the clinic, inside the clinic, just the callous nature of this movement. I always wonder, if they could just spend a day in the clinic and just see the kindness and compassion and the empathy of people working there, it’s very difficult to maintain the things that they say if you just have that experience of seeing how people are.”
On the third day of the conference, the abortion abolitionists flooded the Wichita State University campus, branching out from Gardner Plaza in the center of campus and taking positions with signs and handbills outside of Rhatigan Student Center.
Claire Kennard, a 21-year-old WSU student, had an emotional reaction to the presence of the abortion abolitionists on campus. “I was walking to the [student center] and I was shaking and my heart was beating out of my chest,” she said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m having an anxiety attack.’ I walked back out of here with my friends who I love very much, and they were protecting me, but especially with the graphic images and the following behind and getting in our faces with pamphlets. It’s like a slap in the face to everything I’ve experienced and everything I’ve been through. No one knows how many people have been through this before, and it feels like they’re not listening at all. They have this very set-in-stone mindset that’s not going to change, no matter how many people share their very real human stories and experiences.”
Kennard took part in a heated exchange with one of the abortion abolitionists. “I felt the need to tell him that I have experienced four sexual assaults in my lifetime,” she said. “He just didn’t take that as anything significant. He took it as me being a terrible person for putting my life ahead of a fetus, and that’s not how it should be.”
The evangelical Christians who comprise the abortion abolition movement acknowledge the impact their brand of activism has on people. “I think what’s most often the case, whenever you get a very visceral response, that’s a person who is hurting, who someone has probably not cared for them,” says Dusty Deevers, the pastor of Grace Community Church in Elgin, Oklahoma. “Clearly they’ve probably been mistreated in various ways and someone has not presented the Gospel to them. Maybe they have. Maybe they’ve rejected it, but whenever we’re here and they have that response, what we can offer them is something that they don’t yet have. We offer them the Gospel. We tell them that Jesus saves sinners like us and that instead of having that internal war from the conscience, you can have peace there instead of all that hostility. Unfortunately, this is real. [Abortion] is really happening 8,000 times a day in Kansas and around a million times a year in the United States.”
By the fourth and final day of the conference, media attention and public outcry had drawn counter protesters to Wichita to confront the abortion abolitionists.
Members of the Kansas City Grotto, an independent Satanic sect, not affiliated with The Satanic Temple, but similar in ideology, confronted members of Colorado Right to Life Saturday morning at the Wichita Riverwalk, carrying signs reading “Hail Satan” and “F*ck Christian Nationalism,” as well as signs using problematic coat hanger imagery. Satanists, mostly those affiliated with The Satanic Temple, have become increasingly involved in reproductive justice activism, much to the chagrin of reproductive justice activists.
“As reproductive rights advocates here in Wichita we don’t have a whole lot of interaction with Satanists, but when we do, we’re not asked,” says Gingrich-Gaylord. “We just want to be included in that decision-making because there are some problematic imagery that we’re trying to move away from, like the coat hanger. We want the movement to progress and we want people to come along with it, and everybody’s got a different role. I think where my impression that people have any kind of problems with Satanists coming along is just that we’d like to be included a little bit more in their decision-making process.”
The Satanists spent hours taunting and haranguing the abortion abolitionists, and their children, as they attempted to give people handbills and engage in conversations with passers-by. “We’ve made a circle around these dickheads so that they can’t harass everybody else at the park today,” said Danielle Summers, a Satanist with the Kansas City Grotto. “I’m not going to let them bully people. I’m not going to let them bully people if this is what they want. Perfect, but they’ve been harassing people all week and nobody’s been opposing them.”
After the members of Colorado Right to Life left the park, another group of abortion abolitionists was accosted by protesters, damaging his camera and injuring his hand. The abortion abolitionists have come to expect this response. “I do think that violence will be done against us before it’ll be us doing violence against them,” says Hunter.
While the abortion abolitionists may come across as harsh to those in secular culture, they endeavor to hold themselves to the same standard. Theirs is not the flashy, populist Christianity of Sean Feucht, in skinny jeans in cowboy boots, or the smug faux-intellectualism of Eric Metaxas. In a sermon that quoted Puritan Christian Jonathan Edwards, Deevers exhorted the abortion abolitionists to be mindful of their own sins as they take part in this week of activism.
“We’re proclaiming ‘abolish abortion,’ but over here — abolish pornography in my life?” Deevers said. “Abolish lust? Abolish me not leading my home, God? Abolish the fact that I have not led in family worship in my family for years? Abolish that in my life, God. What do you need to cry out to Him to abolish in your life with the same kind of zeal that you proclaim ‘abolish abortion?’ Get rid of this great evil, but there’s a great evil that’s proximal to you. It’s proximal to me. Oh, don’t be duplicitous. Let us not be hypocrites, calling our nation to repent but we’ve got our little petty sins that we like to go back and nurture every now and then because they give us comfort. That comfort is a banquet in the grave, friends.”
This is Part Two of a multi-part series on the abortion abolition movement. Read Part One here. Read Part Three here.
