Recently, after a too-expensive trip to the Strand bookstore on 12th Street, I was making my way to the subway when I noticed a protest going on two blocks away in Union Square Park. This is standard: Union Square is one of New York City’s unofficially designated places of public speech, like Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park.

Several men and women dressed in white shirts and pants—with red paint splashed on their crotches and down their legs—stood in a line, holding signs and passing a microphone so each could speak his or her mind. After a while, the voices sorted themselves out in a unified chant:
“Without this basic right, women can’t be free. Abortion on demand and without apology.”

Apparently, I’d come towards the end of the protest, for pretty soon everyone started packing up. But some protestors remained, standing around in little groups talking and exchanging fliers. I lingered, too, swaying back and forth on the balls of my feet, eventually drifting into the orbit of two middle-aged women and a man—members of my parents’ generation.

Irresolution must have been written on my face. One of the women—petite, short hair—noticed me and said, “You look like you’re thinking you want to do more, that this isn’t enough.”

“Well, I—at first I couldn’t tell which side the protest was on,” I explained. “With the pants and the paint . . . I mean, it could’ve gone either way.”

“Yeah, some college students here earlier had the same reaction,” said the guy, who was gray-haired and good natured-looking. Under his arm he had a bundle of copies of Revolution, the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Party which, along with a group called Stop Patriarchy, had helped organize the protest. He and the other two were wearing RCP tee-shirts—the woman who hadn’t spoken yet had beautiful white hair pulled into a relaxed chignon.

…

“The thing is,” I explained to the RCP members, “—well, I’m pro-life, and I didn’t grow up that way, and I guess I was just kind of hoping to talk to some people, face to face, without the hostility that you get on the internet or whatever. I try not to get involved in internet debates about abortion because it gets so acrimonious . . . but I feel like we ought to be able to talk about this.”

Read the article “Beyond the Abortion Wars: A Book Review” on humanlifereview.com.