Anti-abortion activists with the White Rose Resistance protested the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood this weekend. Sean Bateman, the lead organizer of the Colorado chapter of White Rose Resistance, was joined by congregants from Emmaus Road Reformed Baptist Church and Nor’wood Bible Church Saturday morning.
Colorado Springs, the second largest city in Colorado and once dubbed the “evangelical Vatican,” is home to Focus on the Family and a number of prominent megachurches who ostensibly oppose abortion, but Bateman spoke to a relatively small crowd. “I ran the math this week in the state of Colorado,” he told the crowd of approximately 30 people gathered on the sidewalk of Centennial Boulevard. “We killed more than 300 babies every single week. And if I went to a church and told them, ‘Hey, there’s gonna be a school shooting next week, you could stop it.’ You know, there’d be guys getting all armored up, getting their body armor out. ‘Oh, we’re gonna stop the school shooting.’ But if we go to a church and say, ‘Hey, you said abortion is murder, there’s going to be 300 babies in your state that are murdered this week. What are you going to do about it?’ Everybody’s really busy all of a sudden.”
Bateman told Colorado Times Recorder that he wasn’t surprised. “The huge organizations, New Life and those huge churches, generally speaking, do not want anything to do with something that could make them unpopular,” he said. “So if there’s something that — you’re out here and people are gonna be cussing you out or calling the church and saying, ‘Oh, I’m gonna stop my donations,’ a lot of those big churches don’t want anything do with it. So almost every church I’ve worked with out here and kind of across the state is less than 200 people, and, you know, they’re bringing a quarter, a third of their church out here anytime that they show up and being faithful. The huge organizations usually don’t do anything.”
As abortion has become a winning electoral issue in Colorado and across the nation, Evangelical spending for anti-abortion activism has flagged. In 2024, Right to Know Colorado, the anti-abortion issue committee opposing Amendment 79, received the largest support from the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver, which contributed $225,000 to the issue committee. Archbishop Samuel Aquila made an individual contribution of $10,000, as did lawyer and radio host Dan Caplis. In addition to Right to Know, the Vote No on 79 issue committee, led by Scott Shamblin of Colorado Right to Life, also worked to oppose Colorado’s ballot measure. Vote No on 79 received $15,000 from Andrew Wommack’s Truth and Liberty Coalition and $1,000 from Rep. Stephanie Luck (R-Penrose). By comparison, anti-abortion supporters of Amendment 48, the 2008 attempt to pass “personhood,” raised over $400,000.
Efforts to repeal or limit abortion in Colorado through ballot initiatives have consistently failed to gather enough signatures to make it onto the ballot. This year, Initiative 283, an effort to repeal Amendment 79, was the latest anti-abortion measure to fail to gather enough signatures.
Bateman is undeterred, despite the shouted profanities and rude gestures from passing motorists. “I think there is a path forward,” he said. “The problem that I think the pro-life movement has had is that path forward is going to be long and difficult and it’s not going to be simple things like just asking a legislator to fix everything for us. It’s going to require regular people and moms and dads and families doing grassroots mobilization. It’s gonna require talking to the culture and changing people’s hearts and minds and that takes a long time and a lot of people aren’t willing to put that work in. But I think that we’ve seen many similar situations where there were laws that were just so set in place like, ‘oh you can never get rid of slavery in the South, or you could never get rid of segregation,’ or you know different things like that where we’ve gotten over things like that before. Nothing in a democratic society is really set in stone like that so there’s still hope.”
The persistence and intensity of groups like White Rose Resistance leads to concern from abortion providers targeted by their activism. For much of the summer, Bateman’s group has focused on RISE Collective in Boulder, one of the few clinics in the country that offer abortion in the third trimester of pregnancy. Social media posts from Bateman, describing the day the clinic performs abortions as “kill day,” were construed as a threat by RISE staff. When the Boulder Police Department officers responded, they were photographed praying with the members of White Rose Resistance.
“The threats to providers and clinics are real,” said Dani Newsum, Cobalt’s director of strategic partnerships, in a press release in response to the incident. “In the case of the RISE Collective in Boulder, they are escalating daily. National anti-abortion extremists, including ones pardoned by Trump, are showing up. There are reports the clinic is being scoped out outside of operating hours, which is extremely dangerous.”
Anti-abortion rhetoric, like Bateman’s comparison of stopping a school shooting to protesting abortion clinics, is particularly alarming to abortion providers who are aware of the history of violence against their profession. On Nov. 27, 2015, the site of Saturday’s White Rose Resistance protest was the site of a mass shooting. Robert Dear killed three people, including a police officer, and injured nine others. Dear was never found mentally competent, and died in custody last year while in the process of being civilly committed.
“White Rose- we have a very strict no violence policy,” said Bateman. “We’re following the laws, like beyond even, ‘Oh, we won’t physically assault someone.’ I won’t stand in that driveway because that’s illegal. And I’m not going to break the law in as much as it’s physically possible for me to. We’re very strict on that. I think honestly, the fact that they’re so touchy about it, it’s telling in more ways than one. There have been terrible incidents that have happened in the past, which we openly condemn, but I think it’s also — a lot of the language that they get upset about is when I’m calling them out for killing and murder. And then they try to twist it into saying that somehow I’m going to kill and murder, right? I think that it is kind of showing that they know it’s bad when people call them out on what it is that they do, and that’s part of why they get so offended.”
Last year, physician and author Dr. Shelley Sella, who spent her career offering third trimester abortion care, visited Colorado to discuss her book, Beyond Limits: Stories of Third Trimester Abortion Care. She worked under Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas physician who provided abortion services late in pregnancy and who 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.
“I think once Roe was put in effect, I think there was a little time where there wasn’t the stigma and vilification of providers, clinics, and patients seeking abortions,” said Sella. “By the time I started practicing, it was already under siege, under attack. Dr. Tiller had been under attack for many, many years before I started working with him. I mean, I think the climate just got worse, certainly in Wichita, and culminated in his assassination.”
According to research by the National Abortion Federation, Colorado abortion providers reported trespassing and protests outside their clinics in 2023 and 2024. Of the 17 Colorado abortion providers that participated, 65% experienced at least one incident of trespassing, 53% reported protestors outside, 24% experienced an incident of obstruction, and 18% received threats.
Sella said the reality of abortion care is the opposite of what anti-abortion activists attempt to portray. “I met Dr. Tiller at a conference, and I was, again, very taken by his approach to caring for patients,” she said. “His concern for their physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being, that really spoke to me. And third trimester abortion care is not quick. It takes place over several days. It’s an induction delivery of a stillborn. And so that time allowed me and the staff to really care for people and their families and their partners and to. And that I found very, very compelling. The ability to truly care for people as they’re going through this process.”
Activists like Bateman see their efforts to oppose abortion policy and clinics as an outgrowth of their Christian faith. “There’s forgiveness for everything,” said Bateman. “We’re out here because we love people and we want people to find Christ. I don’t stand out here because I hate the abortionists. I stand out here because I want the abortionist to have new life, and I know that they don’t have a great life right now. Largely — I can tell just by my interactions with them — I’ve never seen someone who’s super pro-choice who’s very happy, and we care about them. We want them to find Jesus and there’s forgiveness no matter how far you’ve gone.”
