Abortion Protest Sparks Confrontation

Suzanne Cully, a middle-age woman wearing a white shirt, black slacks and a fanny pack, pulls her gold Acura into the parking lot of Southwestern Women’s Options, a late-term abortion clinic in Albuquerque that has been targeted for a daily protest vigil by Bud Shaver, whose sidewalk ministry “is to help Moms choose life for their babies.”

She tells Shaver that she’s driven past his protest before but never stopped to speak her mind, and the two take up an argument that is as well-worn as a river stone: Is abortion right or wrong?

Will anyone win this debate? Will minds be changed? Or will the volume edge up until static drowns out reason? I think we all can predict where this is headed.

Shaver recalls the discussion as civil and respectful. But after a few minutes, something changes. Shaver says Cully begins to kick and punch him. He says she pulls his hat off his head and his sunglasses off his face and cuts his head with her car keys.

Because he spends his time protesting outside abortion clinics, where it’s always nice to document your conflicts, Shaver has a video camera on standby in a bag strapped across his chest. He pulls it out and hits “record.”

By now, the video of this tussle, or at least the one minute and 37 seconds Shaver has released, has been embedded in anti-abortion, conservative and Christian websites and aired on Albuquerque TV stations.

The video shows mostly shoes and grappling shadows on the sidewalk. At one point, Cully yells, “I am sick of you guys! I am sick of you! You have no idea how much hurt you people put out there!”

Shaver repeats “Ma’am” over and over while his fellow protesters dial 911, shout out the license plate number and yell at her to stop. One screams at Cully, “You are full of guilt!”

As Cully heads toward her car and Shaver keeps taping, she approaches him and says, “Don’t you (expletive) take my picture, you (expletive).”

It’s hard to watch someone lose it so completely, yet it’s hard to look away.

The video, viewed many thousands of times on YouTube, is a Rorschach test for where you fall on the abortion debate. It either shows a man of faith and compassion being attacked for his belief that abortion is a moral wrong. Or it shows a middle-age woman driven to snap by relentless protest against a procedure that is legal.

We don’t know what was going through Cully’s mind when she decided to pull into the parking lot July 5 and engage in debate on a hot sidewalk on one of the most polarizing issues of our time. She hasn’t responded to requests to talk about the confrontation.

Cully, 54, will have to say something when she appears in Metropolitan Court on Aug. 4 to face charges of battery and aggravated battery, misdemeanors that together carry up to a year and a half in jail and $1,500 in fines.

Shaver, a former intern of the Wichita, Kan.-based Operation Rescue, has been driving Operation Rescue’s “Truth Truck” — a rolling billboard covered in bloody red fetus photos — to Southwestern Women’s Options for months now. He stands most days under a tree on the public sidewalk, holding signs with similar images.

Shaver is 32, excitable and earnest, with tattoos on both sides of his neck. He routinely approaches women entering the clinic and tells them, “If you are pregnant, you are a mother” or “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

He told me he would welcome another chance to talk to Cully to take up the discussion they were having before it turned sour. He would like to see if he could bring her around to his point of view or see if she could challenge his position. He also told me he closed the cut on his head with Super Glue.

In Roe v. Wade, the nation’s highest court supposedly settled abortion law, although you wouldn’t know it 38 years later by the gantlet of abuse women often walk to exercise that legal right.

First Amendment law is pretty settled, too. Bud Shaver has every right to stand on the sidewalk outside an abortion clinic and say life begins at conception and that women who get abortions are baby killers. Suzanne Cully has every right to stop and tell him abortion is legal and he’s hurtful and wrong.

We now have videotaped evidence of where exercising those rights on the sidewalk outside an abortion clinic in the middle of a hot July day can lead — to the criminal docket of Metro Court and to a rallying of the troops on YouTube.

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie Linthicum at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal