The war brewing on State Street

Meanwhile, in far-off New Haven
    By Ben Smith

"Good morning. Are you planning to kill your baby?"

Outside Women's Health Services on State Street on Thurs., Sept. 24, a 72-year-old man held up his end of a six-year-old struggle. Between the promises, threats, and insults he directed at the clinic's patients, full-time protester Stanley Scott gladly told me about giving his life to the fight against legal abortion. Even with angry shouts and color photos of dismembered fetuses, Stanley doesn't save as many women as he'd like to. But there's no doubt that the cause has saved Stanley.

Stanley has been waging his war since the Roe v. Wade decision in January 1973, which he calls "the blackest day of my life." By his own account, Roe v. Wade gave the shy tollbooth clerk the mission he'd always lacked. Lonely and unmarried, the ninth of 10 children, Stanley found his startling voice and conviction the day after the court's decision. Since retiring and finding a target in Women's Health Services, the protest has become his "main purpose for life."

And after 25 years in the business, Stanley has mastered the tactics of protest. He knows the clinic's routine of counseling and blood work on Thursday, abortions on Friday, and so he concentrates his attention on Thursdays--both "more advantageous" and "more appropriate," he said. (Stanley spends the rest of the week outside a Bridgeport clinic.) This year Stanley gained a prop, an empty baby carriage left suggestively next to the entrance to the clinic parking lot. From time to time, he announces that the volunteer clinic escort "doesn't want you to hear me, so she's saying whatever comes into her head."

Stanley often begins by telling patients that "many women bleed to death." To young women who come alone, he adds that abortion will make you infertile and "who wants to marry a woman who can't have children."

Stanley's voice gains an angry, lecturing tone when he talks about sex. "You foolish woman! You made your decision when you enjoyed the sex with your lover," he shouted once. Stanley has been explaining through the bullhorn that he has never married, and that since he condemns extramarital sex, he has endured a lifetime of abstinence. If he did it, he argues, so can you.

The Roman Catholic doctrine behind his protest comes out most often in the remark, "That's not your baby, it's God's baby." But Stanley also has some less orthodox beliefs. The late 20th century, he told me, is "a time of mercy that God is giving us.... If we haven't eradicated abortion and homosexuality--have you heard of Sodom and Gomorrah?"

Stanley's other occasional appeal is to race. He carries "literature" about abortion as "black genocide" and explains to African-American patients that they have been duped. When an Asian-American man ventured forth for two cups of coffee, Stanley got out an incomplete sentence about "your people in China."

Personally, Stanley is grateful for a cup of coffee, happy to talk about his beliefs, his legal battles against the Bridgeport clinic, and his causes. When I referred to his "silver tongue," he replied without false modesty, "I don't have much of a vocabulary, and I'm not that intelligent. This has been a learning experience for me." And Stanley is utterly earnest in the battle for what he sees as Christian morality: he just began boycotting the Dunkin' Donuts across the street for its support of The Howard Stern Show, and he invited me to join him in New York to demonstrate against Terence McNally's play "Corpus Christi."

When asked about his effectiveness, Stanley remembers one woman who thanked him for talking her out of an abortion; he said that he once took another woman into his Fairfield home and helped her raise her child. But Laura Wagner, who runs Women's Health Services for the Hill Health Center, says that the clinic has seen no decline in patients over the course of Stanley's tenure. In fact, Stanley is a poster boy for clinic access legislation--old, male, and angry, visibly removed from women's everyday realities, he's the Left's picture of the Christian Right.

But the protests have changed Stanley profoundly. For more than half his life, by his own account, Stanley worked a series of low-paying, low-prestige jobs. "I was very self-conscious and lacked confidence in myself," he said. He lived with his mother. He had trouble speaking to people. Now, he said, "I live, sleep, and breathe" the pro-life cause. "Through this, I feel more mature." Even his bachelorhood is justified--it "gives me more time to devote" to the cause.

Last Thursday, Stanley worked with Moira Hambleton, a mother and grandmother from a local church. Moira spent most of the time pacing quietly and fingering a rosary. "Stan and I work well together. He does most of the talking and I try to concentrate on my praying," she said. "He's like a bulldog." She called him "an inspiration." She deferred to her partner, apologizing for interruptions and seconding his points. Fight it as he may, Roe v. Wade is the best thing that ever happened to Stanley Scott.

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