A six-foot-tall condom stands beside his wife on one side of Providence Road. Across four lanes stands a priest and a woman dressed in black from head to toe. It’s 11 a.m. Saturday morning, and Columbia’s Planned Parenthood rally is in full swing.
This rally drew more than 100 people to protest for one side or the other. At the core are two groups. On the pro-life side is 40 Days For Life, a national organization whose Columbia chapter was founded in 2008 by Kathy Forck, the woman dressed in black to mourn the lost lives of aborted babies. On the pro-choice side is the Guild of Silly Heathens, a self-proclaimed “reactive organization” that formed in response to 40 Days For Life’s protests. It expresses support for Planned Parenthood by way of silly costumes such as a juggler in a kilt and Mr. Safety, the aforementioned condom named. Renee Maxwell, the founder of the guild, was dressed in a homemade vulva costume that, according to her, the pro-life protestors have reported to the police for indecency at least three times.
“We really believe that by now it’s impossible to have a rational discussion about reproductive justice and women’s health care,” Maxwell said. “The bottom line is, if facts and evidence really counted for anything at all, we wouldn’t need to have this debate anymore.”
On the anti-abortion side, the rally was the first annual National Day of Protest at Planned Parenthood. It will be held on the fourth Saturday of April ever year “until Planned Parenthood goes away,” according to Forck. For 40 Days of Life, the rally is a way to show support for women who may feel pressured into getting abortions and provide another option.
“We care about the moms,” Forck said. “We are women too. And I know that Planned Parenthood talks about health care, but to me abortion is not health care.”
For the Planned Parenthood supporters, the rally had a different theme: the #ShameOnSchaefer painted on several signs indicated protests against Kurt Schaefer, the Republican Senator from Columbia who has become a prominent figure in the anti-abortion fight in Missouri.
Missouri’s Planned Parenthood has been a “hub of activity” recently, according to Kristin Metcalf-Wilson, the lead clinician and assistant vice president of services for Planned Parenthood in Kansas and mid-Missouri.
In September, former Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin suspended a Planned Parenthood physician’s admitting privileges at University Hospital. He did so under pressure from Republican lawmakers such as Schaefer.
Last week, the St. Louis Planned Parenthood came to an agreement with the Missouri Senate that stemmed from months of refusal by the clinic to release patient medical records. Mary Kogut, the Planned Parenthood regional director, faced the contempt measure that could have resulted in fines or jail time for refusing to turn over documents. The bill was sponsored by Senator Schaefer.
Schaefer was in Columbia the night before, but he was unable to be present at the rally as he was a speaker for the National Day of Protest at St. Louis’s clinic.