Voice of Choice: Turning the Tables on Anti-Choice Bullies (VIDEO)

Todd Stave

On Friday night, Rachel Maddow had a great couple of segments on a new tactic being embraced by those who stand for reproductive rights for women. Over the decades since Roe v. Wade became law, we’ve seen an emboldened anti-choice movement spawn everything from bullies to assassins. They have made no secret about their intentions, issuing “Wanted” posters for abortion providers that include private information such as home addresses, phone numbers and more, which have resulted in “unwanted contact from strangers,” and they’ve had no qualms in using intimidation as a means to frighten and harass women’s rights supporters.

Up until now, there hasn’t been a lot of pushback against these tactics, until they messed with the wrong guy in Maryland.

Last month, a group of protesters stationed themselves outside a middle school where the daughter of Todd Stave, a real estate developer and owner of a property that leases space to an abortion clinic headed by Dr. LeRoy Carhart, attends classes. The protesters posted a website with Stave’s personal contact information and urged supporters to contact Stave and pressure him to cancel the lease of the clinic and close it down permanently. Stave received many phone calls and emails from anti-abortion activists, who felt it was their right to harass him and his family in the name of their cause.

Well, turnabout is fair play, and once opened, a door can be stepped through in either direction, and Stave decided the time had come to turn the tables on the intimidation and its adherents and to respond in like manner.

“After the back to school night protest at his child’s middle school, a number of people asked Mr. Stave what they could do to support him, what they could do to help him, how they could help him fight back against this type of harassment. Here’s something, he told them, Mr. Stave started taking down the names and phone numbers of the people who called him to protest his decision to lease space to Dr. Carhart’s clinic. When people asked how they could help him, he asked those volunteers to call the people back who had been calling him, to thank them for their thoughts and to tell them that, no, he would not be shutting Dr. Carhart down; he couldn’t legally, even if he wanted to, and besides, he didn’t want to. He supports women’s rights.”

Stave began a website called Voice of Choice, where people can volunteer to “make calls, send emails, or help in counter-protests” after being targeted at his daughter’s middle school:

Voice of Choice came to be when a father on the periphery of the abortion debate was dragged into the fray by an organized virtual mob of protesters calling him, emailing him and showing up at his daughter’s school. They were misguided and misinformed. Not only were these protesters acting on erroneous information, their unsavory efforts to blackball this parent within his community fell on deaf ears.

The protestors’ actions could only be called bullying. In response, hundreds of concerned community members leapt to this father’s defense by reaching out peacefully and individually to each of the protesters, most of whom regretted their thoughtless, mob-mentality accusations and aspersions.

But this was only one incident. There are so many more examples of anti-abortion arguments being bull-dozed through our communities with little to no organized response from the other side. Voice of Choice can be the voice of reason, building a grass-roots platform for unpolarized, pro-choice social action.

Needless to say, those who have no problem dishing this sort of thing out, have HUGE problems when they’re on the receiving end of “unwanted contact from strangers,” as Rachel found out from her interview with Todd Stave, himself the son of an abortion provider, whose father’s clinic was fire-bombed in the 80s.

“We […] made the list of the people who called and emailed me, and said, alright, we’re going to call these people back, and just as politely as they’ve contacted me, we’re going to go back to them and say, ‘we thank you for your thoughts, thank you for your prayers, we’ve heard your please, and no, we’re not going to do anything about it.’ Those twenty people in my circle of friends have circles of their own and within a matter of two days, five thousand people had contacted me from all over the world. I got calls from Europe, I got calls from Canada, I got calls from all over the country, from people begging, please, let me help you fight back, let me help you in your effort to stop this harassment, stop this intimidation, stop this bullying. And most of the people that we responded to have, in the days after that, sent me another email saying, ‘please take me off your list.’”

I guess it’s not so fun when the harassers become the harassees, and this is the kind of action that the pro-choice movement needs: people who are willing to stand up to the bullies and turn their tactics of intimidation and blatant harassment against them.

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