A few days ago, Eleanor McCullen was home when the telephone rang. It was a woman she had met outside an abortion clinic 18 years ago. The woman explained that she was looking through her daughter’s baby book and underneath the picture of her then three-month-old was Eleanor’s business card, which simply says, “Hope, help, and love.” Her daughter Rose is graduating from high school and headed to college. The mother called to thank McCullen for being there that morning to assure her that she did not have to have an abortion: “I want to thank you for being there that day. . . . Rose is the joy of our life.”
McCullen is a sidewalk counselor who has spent over two decades outside Planned Parenthood in Boston. She testified at the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Jackson wrote an amicus brief against the free-speech rights of McCullen, the lead plaintiff in a buffer-zone case the Supreme Court heard in 2014. McCullen and free speech won that day. So did love. I was there for the oral arguments. After they were done, McCullen lovingly stood on the steps of the Court and implored Americans to be better to women and children.
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