"Amen," cries the crowd.
In the meantime, says Foreman, "Maybe you need to get your tubes repaired to have more children to be fruitful for the kingdom of God!"
Wild applause.
I take a break in the church lobby. It's filled with smiling people and tables, one of which overflows with bloody photos of mutilated dead babies. The photo captions call them fetuses, but some of the bodies are as well-formed as toddlers. One child is headless - clearly stillborn, not an aborted fetus. Another is a boy with what could be a green twine of intestines spilling from his body. Nearby are those rubber fetuses, 50 cents apiece. There are CDs, too, with the songs "Crying for You, Baby" and "If My Momma Could See Me Now." And there are the $15 T-shirts the crowd has been told to buy for the coming protest. "If you make peaceful revolution impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable," the shirts say, quoting John F. Kennedy.
"Do you think there will be violence at the blockade?" I ask Nicole Burns, 22, who is selling the goods. Burns is proudly breastfeeding.
"Only if the pro-aborts are going to be there," Burns says. I've been to 30 rescues since 1989," she says, "and at one of them these pro-aborts started hollering at people, and this one man he took a cross and was doing disgusting things to people with it. It was horrible, just horrible to see how violent and ugly they were."
"Are you pro-life or pro-murder?" a voice says. Busted, I think to myself.
"Those aren't the words I use," I turn to say.
"That means you're pro-murder, right?" A man's blue eyes burn into mine; he's my height and brings his face dangerously near. "Do you know what babies look like after saline abortions? Do you know how it burns them?" he says.
"I don't want to talk," I tell him.
"Let me show you something beautiful," the blue-eyed man smiles.
"I'm not interested," I say.
"It's a picture of a hand," he says. And immediately I know what it will be: a mutaled baby.
"No," I tell him.
"It's not ugly. Really," the man says. It's beautiful. It's just a hand."
"Hey," I tell him. "No means no."
"But it's just a hand."
"I don't want to see the picture," I say. But in my head I've already seen it. A tiny hand, reaching into space, and in my head, I'm in Seattle and I'm in the car - and I can't believe this rally is getting to me -and it's many years ago, and a lover drives me to an abortion clinic, and the man and I have never spoken of it, in fact, have rarely spoken again...
"I'm leaving," I tell Mr. Blue Eyes.
"You just can't stand to face the truth," he hisses at me, and his spits sprays my face. I wipe my cheek with my hand, and I walk out, walk fast into the parking lot. But I still haven't found out where the goddamned demonstration is.
I keep wiping my face, although the spit is long gone, and walk back inside, past the German shepherds asleep and twitching on the pavement.
It is nearly 10 p.m. "The press has gone home," Jeff White announces inside the chapel - there are chuckles from the crowd - "so here's where we're going tomorrow," White says. He announces the place: Family Planning Associates, Magnolia Avenue, Riverside. His words are barely airborne and I'm gone.
Continued...
