Pro-life in the Big Apple

The Planned Parenthood center in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood is almost unnoticeable. The quaint brick building is on a quiet street (with the honorary street name “Margaret Sanger Square”) and has a modest brass-lettered sign. But last fall the abortion center was identifiable, because every day for 40 days several people stood across the street praying.

Jill Gadwood, who lives in the neighborhood and attends a Catholic church there, organized the prayer vigil—Manhattan’s very first 40 Days for Life event, a sign of growing pro-life activism in the city. Last year Gadwood was looking for a way to get involved in the city’s pro-life movement and emailed the organizers of 40 Days for Life, a national network for prayer and fasting over abortion. They told her they didn’t have any events in Manhattan, but would she like to start one there?

So the 30-year-old lawyer and mother of two organized a vigil that eventually drew 200 volunteers to pray outside the Planned Parenthood center for 40 days.

Planned Parenthood had security guards standing at the entrance to the abortion center, across the street from the praying volunteers. The volunteers said most passersby made negative comments to them, sometimes hurling curse words, but they received encouragement every once in a while. Several post-abortive women approached the praying volunteers to talk as well.

Gadwood said over the 40 days, seven women turned around from entering the abortion center, and she counts five babies who survived, including twins. She arrived at that number from pregnant women who told the volunteers they had changed their minds and from women who accepted a referral to Sisters of Life, a Catholic religious order that helps women through everything from crisis pregnancies to immigration issues. One woman couldn’t have her scheduled abortion because she had eaten breakfast, which she saw as a sign. She left and asked the sidewalk counselors for help, and they took her to Sisters of Life.

The prayer group’s guidelines, in an effort to keep a prayerful atmosphere instead of a protest atmosphere, forbid signs or images. Gadwood instructed volunteers not to approach women or staff entering or leaving the center and to obey any police orders.

Gadwood’s goal was to have people praying outside the center for 13 hours each day, even on weekends. She estimates they had someone for about 80 percent of that time, an achievement among busy Manhattanites. Beginning on Feb. 10, the volunteers began another 40-day vigil.

“Whenever my 2-year-old needs a nap, I drop him in a carrier and go out there and pray,” she said this past fall, when she was still on maternity leave. “We’re out there all the time.”

Gadwood said volunteers also saw an ambulance arrive at the abortion center and take a woman away on a stretcher. Typically six or seven women go into this Planned Parenthood center an hour, but foot traffic was down toward the end of the first vigil: On one morning, Gadwood said, they saw only two or three enter.

New York City has a sky-high abortion rate, though the figures have declined over the last few years. As of 2013, 37 percent of pregnancies here ended in abortions, according to the Princeton, N.J.–based Chiaroscuro Foundation, which calculates the rate based on the city’s public abortion data.

Chiaroscuro has published reports on the city’s abortion rate since 2011, and in 2014 its political action committee put $200,000 into five New York state Senate races, winning all five. The Republican gains in that election definitively ended New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s effort to pass a bill expanding the legality of abortion in the state. Elections aside, Chiaroscuro’s President Greg Pfundstein, a Catholic, believes the city’s Christian institutions are getting more organized on pro-life activism. The movement has largely been local and grassroots.

“It’s a very large number who are supporters and personally pro-life, but the activists have been disjointed, atomized in various ways,” Pfundstein said. “Now … the institutions take it more seriously.”

Protestant churches in Manhattan tend to focus less on the activist side of the movement and more on doing behind-the-scenes work, like counseling, adoption, and pregnancy support. Evangelical churches like Redeemer Presbyterian Church are big supporters of Avail NYC, a pro-life pregnancy center in midtown. Evangelical churches in the other boroughs–Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Brooklyn–are more involved with outspoken activism.

Paul Horrocks, a longtime New Yorker, takes the outspoken approach. He heads up NYC Loves Life, a 2-year-old group that reaches out to Protestant churches to educate them about abortion rates in the city and encourage them to bring up the issue. Horrocks promoted the 40 Days for Life event among Protestants in the city.

“I have become more aware of a remnant that is really passionate about this,” he said. “I’m optimistic that that remnant can grow.”

Before Gadwood organized the prayer vigil, Sean Dening had been taking his lunch break the last four years to go pray by himself outside the Planned Parenthood headquarters nearby. Now he was thrilled to find other pro-lifers to pray with.

“This is the abortion capital,” said Dening. “Something is happening.”