‘Abortion Is Oppression’: Progressive Pro-Lifers Protest Outside Supreme Court

Washington, D.C. — “Abortion is violence! (Abortion is oppression!)”

“Pro-choice, that’s a lie! (Babies never choose to die)”

“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Roe v. Wade has got to go! (Hey, hey, ho, ho, Roe v. Wade has got to go!)”

The shouts echoing around the block on Capitol Hill on Sunday morning came not from conservative pro-lifers, but from a bullhorn wielded by Terrisa Bukovinac, the founder and executive director of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), and fellow members of the group.

Online, PAAU describes its mission thus: “To mobilize grassroots anti-abortion activists for direct action, educate the public about the exploitative influence of the Abortion Industrial Complex through an anti-capitalist lens, advocate for pregnant people, and connect abortion vulnerable communities with life-saving resources.”

On Sunday, the PAAU contingent comprised the only meaningful counter-protest to the crowd of pro-choicers listening to speaker after speaker denounce the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization written by Justice Samuel Alito. If it’s ultimately adopted, it would overturn the holdings of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey and allow state legislatures to pass meaningful restrictions on abortion for the first time in nearly 50 years.

The PAAUers were loud. Just as loud, if not louder, than the pro-choice orators speaking from at an elevated podium. They were also infuriating to the audience, eliciting a number of curses, as well as more physical responses from their counterparts.

One large man pushed Bukovinac’s bullhorn back into her face on Sunday. A woman charged her and shoved a sign in her face.

It was not the first time that someone had gotten physical with the group since the Alito draft leaked last Monday.

“We’ve all been through a lot, every single one of us,” one of the protesters, Avery Fae, told National Review.

“I was picked up by some random pro-choice dude the first night we got here, he just kind of tackled me and grabbed my sign. . . . I was just kind of in the air swinging for a moment. It was it was pretty intense,” said Fae, who noted that all of the members of the group had been punched and had fluids thrown on them.

“I still have a little bit of hearing loss that probably some of us do too from people blaring their megaphone sirens in our ear and hitting us on the head with them. We were mobbed, and a lot of us fell, and we were almost trampled,” added Fae, before calling it “an amazing experience, because it really just reinforces what we’re here to do. Like, we are here to fight against violence. These people use violence on their platform in their activism, and we are here to be the antithesis of that.”

PAAU launched this past October 1 with an event on the steps of the Supreme Court, and has been”raising hell ever since,” according to Bukovinac. She said that, over the past week, it has been “nonstop” for her and her group.

“It’s very important that we celebrate this moment, there have been so many activists that have worked so many years before us and all the years that we put in we have to celebrate this milestone and encourage these justices,” continued Bukovinac. “We are going to hold the line for the movement.”

Bukovinac experienced a kind of Benjamin Button–like relationship between her faith and her stance on abortion.

“I was a pro-choice Christian. But as I lost my faith, and I became an atheist, it made me rethink my entire moral compass. And I no longer believed in heaven, life after death, or this idea that God would right all the wrongs in the end so it made abortion seem much more of an urgent issue to me,” Bukovinac told National Review, before going on to lament the “oppression that the unborn are facing.”

Herb Geraghty, another PAAU protester, said that he had been pro-choice because it was the “default position” among those interested in social justice, but had reversed himself after researching arguments to defend that default. Once he was convinced of the scientific consensus that a unique life exists at the moment of conception, Geraghty said he couldn’t “imagine saying that I’m a supporter of human rights or social justice” while being in favor of the legality of abortion.

While still a young organization (not even a year old), PAAU has already made a name for itself within the mostly conservative pro-life movement. Last month, Bukovinac obtained the remains of 115 children who had died in abortion procedures performed at the Washington Surgi-Clinic. Five of the bodies were viable, even almost fully developed, raising questions over whether they had been illegally aborted or left to die after being born.

In an interview with The Pillar, Bukovinac called the experience “shattering,” and described the ghastly scene. PAAU has called for autopsies to be performed and an investigation to be launched. Lauren Handy, another member of PAAU’s leadership, was arrested in connection with the group’s advocacy at Washington Surgi-Clinic.

When Republicans on Capitol Hill sent D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser a letter demanding an explanation for why no investigation into the clinic was being conducted, Bowser responded by referring the lawmakers to the Department of Justice and claiming that Handy had been arrested for “extremist anti-abortion activity.”

While PAAU is anything but apologetic in its approach to advocacy, Fae said that the last week had led to “some good conversations” with pro-choice protesters because they “look a little different than the typical pro-lifers, and we come at it from a different angle.”

Fae described a strategy of “find[ing]common ground” on values like equality and feminism, and then “explain[ing] the pro-life position in those terms.”

Kristin Monahan, an anarcho-communist, expanded on the link between progressive values and the pro-life movement.

“It’s the mass killing of the most vulnerable the most defenseless, the most voiceless and helpless,” said Monahan. “And that’s traditionally stuff that progressives support, just tearing down systems of oppression against those types of groups.”