By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times –
JACKSON, Miss. — It was a Wednesday morning in front of the last abortion clinic in Mississippi. C. Roy McMillan was camped outside, as he almost always is.
He tapped on the car window of a woman who had just been inside the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Knock knock. “Ma’am?” he petitioned sharply, in his croaky Mississippi drawl. The woman, an African American, declined to acknowledge him. “Ma’am?”
Still nothing.
So McMillan, 69 and white, yelled the words he has yelled at thousands of women — words that this self-professed civil rights advocate employs to link the great struggle of his state’s past with what he sees as the great struggle of its present:
“Mommy, Mommy — I have a dream!” he shouted, assuming the voice of the woman’s unborn child. “Please don’t cut my dream short like they did for Dr. King!”
Two days earlier, on April 16, Republican Gov. Phil Bryant had signed a bill imposing regulations on the clinic that the owner said might put her out of business. If the clinic indeed goes under, Mississippi will become the first state to have achieved a de facto ban on elective abortions. Every other private obstetrician here is either morally opposed to the procedure or too scared of people like McMillan to perform it.
Despite the signing, the patients kept coming. So McMillan kept coming as well. On this Wednesday, he arrived in his pickup truck, accompanied by Bruce Stuckey, 44, a big, mild-mannered man who plays piano at the Open Door Mennonite Church.
Stuckey, an African-American, took up a position by the iron fence on one side of the clinic, where, with his gentle voice, he hoped to offer patients last-minute “sidewalk counseling.”
McMillan set out signs decorated with photos — one of a healthy baby, another of a dead fetus — and unfolded a chair at the corner of busy North State Street and the quiet side street where patients turn to reach the clinic parking lot.
This was a consultation day. Tomorrow, after the mandated 24-hour waiting period, abortions would be performed.
“This week, they’ll kill 50 people,” McMillan said.
It was sunny, but he wore a rain slicker. A sprinkler in the yard of the office building next door always seems to be on when he is protesting.
If McMillan wants to tap on patients’ car windows to spread his message, he knows being on that corner is his only choice. A federal judge has permanently barred him from going within 50 feet of the clinic.
According to court documents, the injunction was the result, in part, of McMillan’s statements to one of the clinic’s former doctors.
“Your days are numbered,” McMillan told him.
And: “You may die today.”
And: “Are you prepared to meet your maker?”
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Mississippi’s anti-abortion forces have been among the most effective in the nation, lobbying for laws and creating a climate that helped whittle the number of providers from 14 in 1981, to one today.
State laws mandate parental consent for minors and an ultrasound. They prohibit state tax dollars from funding abortion and school nurses from discussing it. Drivers, for an extra $31, may have a “Choose Life” license plate that benefits anti-abortion counseling clinics.
Now, with the new law, doctors at the clinic must have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Clinic owner Diane Derzis has said that will be difficult because many of her doctors fear harassment and live out of state.
Few have advocated for an end to abortion as long, and with as much intensity, as McMillan. Yet some allies disagree with his tactics. Before the trial of Michael Griffin — the activist convicted of murdering abortion provider David Gunn in Pensacola, Fla., in 1993 — McMillan signed a statement calling for Griffin’s acquittal. The statement also justified the use of lethal force to protect an unborn child.
Terri Herring, Mississippi’s leading anti-abortion lobbyist, credits McMillan with spurring her interest in the abortion fight. She worries, though, that his shock tactics are not representative of mainstream Mississippians.
Roy “is not what we want as a poster child!!” she wrote in an email. “But he has been faithful for years. … Roy is the father of the Mississippi movement. He is either loved or hated, but often misunderstood.
“Did he tell you that he was left as an infant on the doorstep of a church?”
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McMillan wears glasses, a stubbly white beard and close-cropped white hair. Being outdoors lends his face an eternally pinkish hue. When he is not yelling at abortion patients, his demeanor is not so much pious as argumentative, even mischievous. He can also be thoughtful and reflective.
A conversation with him might touch on his heroes — the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John Adams among them — or veer into the moral lessons absorbed from his father, a newspaper editor in Kosciusko, Miss., who was liberal enough on race matters to have others burn crosses in his yard.
But this Southern Baptist turned Roman Catholic will also tell you that driving his activism was his abandonment on the doorstep of that Baptist church, in Alexandria, La., in 1943. He had been left naked, tucked in a shoe box. He was adopted by the kindly couple from Kosciusko.
That is why he comes, day in and day out, in the heat, and rain and cold.
“It’s simple,” he said of his biological mother. “I’ve often thought that if abortion had been legal in 1942, she probably would have aborted me.”
He attended the University of Mississippi, where he studied journalism and sided against the segregationists. He says he was arrested twice in civil rights demonstrations. “Growing up in the South in the ’60s, I saw that civil disobedience got news,” he said. “Gandhi, Dr. King — they all drew attention.”
After a stint in New York City, he returned home in the 1980s, smarting from a divorce and doing communications work for an insurance company. Abortion was becoming a central theme for conservative American Protestants, and when McMillan’s Baptist church took up the cause, he did too.
Soon he ran across Beverly Ann Smith. She was an obstetrician/gynecologist from Tennessee who arrived in Jackson in the mid-’70s and helped open Mississippi’s first abortion clinic. A year later, she had a religious awakening and abandoned the work.
McMillan saw her debate a clinic owner on television and persuaded her to take her redemption story to church pulpits and fellowship halls. She and McMillan started the group Pro-Life Mississippi in 1982. They were married a year later.
Now known as Beverly McMillan, she kept her practice. McMillan quit his job to focus on protesting. He was then free to decline to pay court-ordered fines, or to seek bail. He’s been arrested, by his count, more than 70 times for trespassing and similar infractions. He figures he’s spent 31/2 months in jail.
“I don’t pay bails,” he said. “Why? Because a baby is dying.”
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The National Abortion Foundation, in 2010, documented the violence directed at abortion providers from 1977 through 2009 in the U.S. and Canada: eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 41 bombings, 175 arsons and 100 attacks with butyric acid. None of this is his style, McMillan says.
His position on killing abortion providers can seem muddled: “I wouldn’t condemn someone who did. But I can’t condone it.”
He added that he could never do such a thing himself. “I’m scared of the repercussions,” McMillan said. “I’d much prefer women were talked out of abortion.”
He believes he has saved thousands of babies by talking. Some of the children born after his interventions are as close as grandchildren, he says. He’s taking a few on a Florida vacation in June.
When he sees a man accompanying a woman to the clinic, he might challenge his masculinity. You don’t carry a purse, he’ll say. You don’t wear earrings. Be a real man. Save her baby.
Around 9:30 a.m. a woman in a Honda Civic rolled past McMillan.
“Female!” he yelled to the other counselors.
As the woman walked from car to clinic, Stuckey chatted her up from the other side of the fence.
“Excuse me, ma’am. Are you OK? Ma’am, we want to help you any way we can. Please help us love your baby.”
At lunchtime, a man walked up to confront McMillan. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt with a quote from George Fox, a 17th century Quaker.
“Y’all aren’t going to like this, but you’re going to get an earful,” the man said.
The two men argued in the middle of North State Street, squabbling about when life begins.
On it went, with references to Frankenstein’s monster, the dead at Dachau, vasectomies, the sterilization of dogs, the ethical dilemmas posed by patients in comas, the history of slavery in the South, and whether your fingernails should be considered alive.
The street filled with lunchtime traffic, and the sprinkler went on watering the folding chair.
