By Victor Greto
It probably ought to go without saying that Sue Bullock loves children and is “naturally pro-life.”
But not because, growing up in Plainfield, N.J., she longed for a bigger family than her four brothers and sisters. Even that she looked with envy upon the family across the street who had 18 children.
Nor is it necessarily because the New Castle woman has given birth to eight children, and received the news last week she will be giving birth to another.
It’s more than that, she said. “I just wanted to have whatever kids God gave me.”
And, like many others across the country, she’s determined that every other woman should, too.
Along with hundreds of other Delawareans and thousands across the country, Bullock’s four oldest children attended the pro-life rally in Washington, D.C., marking the 32nd anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.
Although she began attending the rally more than 20 years ago, Bullock hasn’t gone for several years.
“Because I’m usually pregnant or have small kids, and it might be freezing on that day,” she said. This year will be no different.
It will be freezing, but her children are looking forward to going, including her oldest daughter, Mary von Duke, now married and living in North Carolina. She drove up to join her family yesterday and will ride down with three younger siblings on Monday.
“I feel obligated to go,” von Duke said. “I feel obligated in the way that I know the truth, and I should be telling other people the truth.”
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Some are looking for compromise.
“Our society needs to provide a framework to support pluralism and the right to privacy and for people to make decisions based on their conscience and their own sense of what’s right for them in their health and lives,” said Suzanne Cohen, vice president for public affairs for Planned Parenthood.
The tangled issue of “when life begins” has many interpretations, she said. “It’s not an area where the law should be making that determination.”
Teresa Chambers begs to differ. Quiet and unassuming, she is as determined as the staunchest defender from either side of the issue.
“I’m just your average person who thinks abortion is wrong,” she said. “I’m not the kind of person who bombs clinics.”
Chambers said she’s not trying to take away choices from anyone. For her, the argument for choice ended at conception.
“We’re fighting for the right of a person because we think they’re a person,” she said of the fetus. “People can decide whether or not to have a child, but once you’re pregnant, it’s a baby.”
It is perhaps at the point before conception that both sides may work together, said Sharon Kaplan, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood.
“The real solution for us is prevention and access to comprehensive health care, and that’s one thing where both sides can agree,” she said. “The way to reduce abortions is through family planning and by giving teens the tools to delay their decisions to become sexually active.”
Some pro-life advocates do agree, but others do not.
Bullock and her daughter, von Duke, both said that artificial contraception is as morally wrong as abortion.
“I don’t think there is a compromise,” von Duke said. “It’s life or death: What’s there to compromise about on that? I would not be satisfied politically until both abortion and contraception were banned.”
Both mother and daughter stand tight with their Catholic heritage and teaching on both abortion and contraception.
“We’re not using birth control, we’re not planning,” said von Duke, 19, of herself and her new husband. “Whatever God gives us, we’ll take.”
But Kaplan and other pro-choice people will not relent their own moral high ground.
“It is moral to save women’s lives and be concerned about their health and fertility,” Kaplan said. “It is moral to help a rape victim who is now pregnant to not be forced to have the child. It is not moral to kill doctors, bomb health facilities, burn buildings. It is immoral to block people from medical care.”
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Chambers said their views on abortion evolved slowly over the past three decades.
Although she said she never liked the 1973 Roe V. Wade court decision that legalized abortion, Chambers did not begin contributing to pro-life groups until the mid-1980s. “It may have been because I became a mother myself,” said Chambers, whose first of two children was born in 1979.
“I love children and I feel it’s the ultimate child abuse to abort one,” she said. “Someone needs to speak out for people who can’t speak for themselves.”
Scott Spencer of Wilmington will be meeting with Sen. Tom Carper’s staff the day of the rally.
Like other pro-life advocates, Spencer said he had not been active in the movement for much of his life. But “through prayer and reflection, I understood that I could have a say in this issue,” he said.
He began to think historically, he said.
“The reflection I had was we all live in different points of history,” he said. “I was thinking at the time, what would happen if I lived during the time of slavery? It occurred to me that this is an issue that is taking millions of lives and changing the course of our history because of the people who aren’t born.”
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For Judy Mellen, she knew very early how she felt about a woman’s right to choose.
She didn’t see it happen. She heard it, from the kitchen of her family’s home in Brooklyn, just after World War II began and her father had been called up to serve.
A child of five or six, she wasn’t sure what was going on, but felt and heard the whispers, the noises, the presence of the doctor.
“I didn’t know what was happening,” said Mellen, more than six decades later, of aurally witnessing her mother getting an illegal abortion on their kitchen table. “I remember wondering why my pediatrician was there.”
She herself chose to have an abortion nearly 30 years later, in a state — Delaware — that only allowed abortions if it was proven to be medically necessary. She went to a psychiatrist, who provided her with the excuse.
“I had to pay the psychiatrist,” she said, “and I thought at the time that if I didn’t have the money, I’d have to have a back-alley abortion.”
It was just a couple of years before the landmark 1973 Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
When Mellen walked in the “March for Women’s Lives” in Washington D.C. with more than 500 other Delawareans, including her daughter and grandaughter, she continued a life dedicated to fighting for a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion.
She also walked past dozens of other Delawareans as determined as she and arguing just the opposite: that when it comes to abortion, that’s the one choice no one should ever have.
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Moira Sheridan, president of Delaware Right to Life, also will be in Washington, after having carpooled with other like-minded supporters, to make sure her voice is heard.
“If you believe like I do that abortion is taking a human life, you cannot do nothing. You must do something. You must educate people about the inhumanity and stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves,” she said.
Sheridan, 45, the youngest of eight children who became an aunt at 13, attended Catholic schools her entire life. Her views on abortion, she said, are “intuitive: that abortion was the taking of a human life.” Her passion for the issue, she said, became fired by the 1973 Supreme Court decision.
“My upbringing is part and parcel of who I am, so it’s going to affect me, and the Catholic Church’s strong stand on pro-life issues is going to help how I feel,” she said.
The reasoned determination of those on both sides of the abortion debate reflect lifetimes of experiences. Some see the issue with an exacting moral clarity. Others see a choice for or against abortion as ambiguous, focusing more on the dignity of a woman’s right to choose for herself what to do with her body.
“They say we are terrorists,” said Kate Haney, a 22-year-old senior at the University of Delaware. She helped stage a rally on campus Tuesday to get students to go to Sunday’s march. “But people become terrorists because they don’t have a choice, and we’re for choice. Abortion is not pretty nor gentle. But not giving women a choice is bigger than the act of abortion.”
For Haney and unlike Mellen, abortion always has been legal. She wants to keep it that way.
“I can plan my career, and I can choose to focus on my career,” she said. “I’m sitting here because of the women who fought for me. I owe it to the women before and after me.”
Just a few yards away from Haney sat Megan Burgess, 21, president of the Prolife Vanguard, a group of about 20 UD students. She held a sign calling the “March for Women’s Lives,” an “oxymoron.”
“Some see me as a lunatic when I talk about the effects of abortion on women,” she said. “That I’m against women’s rights. They think the woman is more valuable than the child, but they should try to save both. We don’t have a stand on who’s more valuable.”
Burgess, the oldest of five, grew up in a “pro-life household” in Wilmington: her parents held pro-life meetings in their home.
“I remember hearing pro-life stuff when I was in 2nd grade,” she said. “They always instructed me that babies are viable at conception.”
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Shakira Martinez, 25, a single mother of two, is proud of her decision to have her two children, but simultaneously argues that the right to choose for everyone is as important.
A native of Puerto Rico, her family moved to Philadelphia when she was 6 years old, and soon after moved to Delaware, where she attended A.I. Dupont High School. She became pregnant at 17 with her first child, Karina. At 22, she became pregnant again and spent a week wrestling about whether or not to have the child.
By that time, she was working for Planned Parenthood in downtown Wilmington.
One morning, as she left for work, Karina looked up at her and said, “Have a good day.”
“There was no choice after that,” Martinez said; she decided then to have her next child, Miusoti.
There is no contradiction between the choices she made to have her children — “If I never had my children, I never could have experienced the joy” — and her work at Planned Parenthood, she said.
“Choice is a gift of freedom,” she said. “How can we want to fight for freedom and not for choice?” She will be going to the march with Karina.
Mellen said her decision to have an abortion more than 30 years ago was one of the most serious decisions she’s ever made.
“I made the decision because I felt that to be a good parent of my two children I needed to be a happy person, and I wasn’t going to be if I had to have a third child,” she said. “It was the right thing for us to do in those circumstances.”