Fire and Knowledge

From Salon:

We’re used to seeing videos of anti-abortion activists spewing venom in front of women’s clinics, but rarely do we get to see the tables turned. Thanks to Aaron Gouveia,  now we do.

He and his 16-weeks-pregnant wife went to a women’s clinic in Brookline, Mass. for an abortion after discovering that their baby had a congenital deformity with no chance for survival. On their way in, they were confronted by images of dismembered fetuses and two women yelling, “You’re killing your unborn baby!” Enraged, Gouveia decided to confront the protesters while his wife was in surgery, and he caught the whole interaction on his cellphone.

It’s really despicable for these protestors to yell at people who are already having one of their worst days ever. It’s even more infuriating that they think what they are doing is loving.

Here’s the video:

The husband also wrote an essay about this at The Good Men Project. He says:

“You’re killing your unborn baby!”

That’s what they yelled at me and my wife on the worst day of our lives. As we entered the women’s health center on an otherwise perfect summer morning in Brookline, two women we had never met decided to pile onto the nightmare we had been living for three weeks. These “Christians” verbally accosted us—judged us—as we steeled ourselves for the horror of making the unimaginable, but necessary, decision to end our pregnancy at 16 weeks.

After extensive testing at a renowned Boston hospital three weeks earlier, we were told our baby had Sirenomelia. Otherwise known as Mermaid Syndrome, it’s a rare (one in every 100,000 pregnancies) congenital deformity in which the legs are fused together. Worse than that, our baby had no bladder or kidneys. Our doctors told us there was zero chance for survival.

Very sad. People have no right to judge people who must make these terrible decisions.