An ex-anti-abortion evangelist on life as a pro-choice 'traitor'
(a LONG, interesting read)
An ex-anti-abortion evangelist on life as a pro-choice ‘traitor’
American Reverend Rob Schenck made a name for himself denouncing ‘baby killers’. Then he changed his mind.
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Reverend Rob Schenck, right, with former US President George W Bush at a fundraising event in 2002 [Courtesy of Rob Schenck]
By Tyler Hicks
Published On 7 Jul 20237 Jul 2023
The dentist was worried. During the checkup, he’d noticed the kind of significant damage often caused by years of gnashing and grinding one’s teeth. “Are you experiencing any stress?” he asked his patient. “Yes,” said Reverend Rob Schenck. “A little bit.”
Shortly after this visit to the dentist late last year, Schenck, a 64-year-old evangelical minister who lives in Washington, DC, opened his email and discovered multiple messages: some confused, most critical. The reverend doesn’t try to hide his email address, so most days his inbox fills with messages dripping with vitriol.
“When I hear from the right, it’s usually to call me some form of ‘traitor,’” he says. “The other side is a little skeptical of my late-in-life conversion.” It happens in person, too, nearly every time Schenck makes a speech or public appearance. One woman, for example, told him, “You did a whole lot of damage. You did a lot of bad stuff. You hurt a lot of people.”
Once a famous anti-abortion activist, Schenck (pronounced “Shank”) is now openly pro-choice and highly critical of the role he played in ending national abortion rights in the United States. It’s a remarkable heel turn for someone who worked to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 United States Supreme Court ruling that enshrined the right to an abortion. As a staunchly conservative evangelical leader, Schenck personally befriended and lobbied judges who sat on the court, and was part of a group that paid “Jane Roe” roughly half a million dollars to say she had changed her view on reproductive rights. Roe, whose real name was Norma McCorvey, challenged abortion law in what would become a landmark win for abortion rights. Then, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, she claimed that she had changed her stance on the procedure, before confessing that she was lying.
The reverend also trained “thousands” of protesters to block the doors to abortion clinics. In one infamous incident in July 1992, Schenck was arrested for, as he puts it, “thrusting an aborted foetus” at presidential candidate Bill Clinton. Schenck and his associates approached Clinton and presented the foetus — procured illegally from a pathologist in Tulsa, Oklahoma — while faking interest in an autograph. Like many of his other stunts, it led to Schenck being arrested.
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https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/7/7/an-ex-anti-abortion-evangelist-on-life-as-a-pro-choice-traitor