Approximately 50 anti-abortion activists from the Colorado chapter of the White Rose Resistance rallied in front of the RISE Collective clinic in Boulder on Saturday.
RISE Collective, composed of former employees of the Boulder Abortion Clinic, opened its doors and began providing abortions. RISE picks up where Dr. Warren Hern, the founder of the Boulder Abortion Clinic who retired after fifty years of practice in April, left off — as one of the few clinics in the nation offering abortions later in pregnancy. RISE offers abortions to patients who are up to 34 weeks pregnant, and this has led anti-abortion activists in Colorado to focus on the clinic, holding numerous protests and seeking to get the clinic evicted from its current location.
Abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy account for 1% of all abortions in the United States. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “These abortions receive a disproportionate amount of attention in the news, policy and the law, and discussions on this topic are often fraught with misinformation; for example, intense public discussions have been sparked after several policymakers have theorized about abortions occurring ‘moments before birth’ or even ‘after birth.’ In reality, these scenarios do not occur, nor are they legal in the U.S. Discussion of this topic is further obscured due to the terms sometimes used to describe abortions later in pregnancy — including ‘late-term,’ ‘post-viability,’ ‘partial birth,’ ‘dismemberment’ and ‘born-alive’ abortions — despite many medical professionals criticizing and opposing their use.”
RISE was closed Saturday, as part of its normal operating schedule, but that did not dissuade the members of the White Rose Resistance.
“Why are we out here today?” asked Sean Bateman, an organizer with White Rose. “Well, we’re out here because this is a spiritual battle and while spiritual realities have physical realities connected to them. The first thing we need to get right is the spiritual battle, and while we’re maybe not saving a baby today directly … this clinic needs to know that there are people who know what they’re doing, that there are people who will not stand idly by while they murder children, and we need to confess before God our own culpability in the fact that a clinic like this is open right now.”
Colorado’s legislature and voters have consistently and overwhelmingly supported the right to abortion throughout the duration of a pregnancy, which has led to claims from anti-abortion advocates and Republican legislators — like Douglas County Commissioner Kevin Van Winkle — of “post-natal” abortions.
Bateman assigned blame for the current abortion landscape in Colorado not just to Democrats and abortion advocates, but to apathetic Christians and conservatives. “As we stand here in front of this clinic, which has already probably killed dozens of people, we don’t get to say we don’t know who shed this blood,” he said. “We don’t get to say our eyes did not see it, because we do know. We know that this is happening. We know who’s doing it. The only ways our eyes don’t see it is because we close them shut and pretend like it’s not happening. It’s not a very good legal defense. The blood of these children is not only on the hands of the abortionists who literally have their blood on their hands. It’s not only on the hands of people like Cobalt Group which are funding these abortions, but it is on each and every one of our hands because we have stood idly by and did nothing while our society praised and worshiped child sacrifice. So before we go and try to take any high ground and tell these people they need to stop, we need to first set ourselves right for the Lord, and that’s what we’re gonna do here first. We need to confess our own apathy. We need to repent for our state.”
Bateman was joined by national White Rose organizer A.J. Hurley, who was arrested in 2022 for stalking and harassing a San Francisco doctor and defacing a statue. Hurley explained his personal connection to one of the signs featuring the remains of a 34-week-old.
“What if Protestants and other Christians just showed up at an abortion clinic for two hours once a week?” he asked. “One hour once a weekend. It is so sad to me that America has forgotten about what we’re fighting. So four years ago — this is a baby, dated at 34 weeks. That was found outside of an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C., and I took that photo. Four of my friends … acquired a medical waste box, and inside that box was 115 murdered children at a clinic like this one that is an all-trimester clinic.”
Like Bateman, Hurley also critiqued American Christians. “Christianity that is comfortable is not a Christianity,” he said. “American Christianity — rampant in Protestantism particularly — is a Christianity that is safe, that costs you nothing, that is TED Talks on Sunday morning and weak, woke Gospels that don’t care about true justice. They will LARP about Black Lives Matter, and then ignore the fact that 40% of Black brothers and sisters in the womb every day are being murdered and literally lynched in the womb.”
This weekend’s event comes just weeks after national White Rose leader Seth Gruber headlined the “Last Stand Festival” at BRAVE Church in Englewood. The event featured a host of national anti-abortion activists and speakers, as well as Colorado gubernatorial candidate Victor Marx. Bateman said White Rose groups across Colorado, which includes three new chapters, will be holding similar rallies this summer. Meanwhile, activists are working to collect signatures for initiative 283, which would repeal Amendment 79, which enshrined the right to abortion in the Colorado Constitution. The measure was introduced by Angela Eicher and Faye Barnhart of Brush, who have consistently submitted anti-abortion ballot measures during election years. Faye and Eicher’s previous measures have failed to gather enough signatures to make the ballot.
