The endless protest

July 30, 2010 Our Stories 3 Comments  E-mail This Post

Colin Hudson has been protesting at abortion clinics for 22 years. Chuck Collins and Francis Bampzman are relative newcomers who’ve been doing it for several years now. Typically, they spend half the morning outside the Third Ward Planned Parenthood office on North Jackson Street and then picket the Affiliated Medical Clinic on North Farwell Avenue for the second half of the morning.

Hudson holds a three-by-five foot graphic poster of an aborted baby’s severed head while he cites scripture. A young girl walks into Planned Parenthood, quietly taking the brochure about adoption that Hudson hands her. Collins stands to the right with a seven-foot, white cross. Tiny white baby shoes dangle by their laces from the center of the cross, and a sign made from wood in his basement leans against his leg. In stark black letters against a white background, it reads, “Jesus Hates Abortion.” Bampzman holds a small dark blue prayer book in his wrinkled hands, his head bowed and eyes closed in prayer.

chuck collins stands outside Planned Parenthood on Jackson Street in Milwaukee (photos by Sarah J. Worthman)

The men do not yell or rant about how these girls are “evil” as some abortion protestors have done in other venues. They simply pass out brochures and pray for the girls as they enter the clinic. In between their Planned Parenthood and Affiliated pickets, the three men usually stop at McDonald’s for a cup of coffee together.

Collins spent most of his life on the south side of Chicago, working for a printing company until he retired last September. He has been married for 23 years, has one daughter and five grandchildren. He now lives in Kenosha.

“I’ve been called the ‘N’ word (he is African American), spit at and had a few cigarettes thrown at me. At 63, I’ve heard it all,” recalls Collins. One time in particular, he remembers a man coming out of Planned Parenthood and throwing a cup of water in his face. “You’ll always see me wearing sunglasses now, even if it’s cloudy. I’m thankful that it was only water in that cup.”

Bampzman is 78 years old and also retired, with plenty of free time to protest. “It’s nothing more than commonsense; you don’t kill babies,” he says.

Each has a reason, a story for why they protest. Hudson’s is the longest. He has been arrested over 30 times for non-violent abortion protests all over the United States.

His first time in jail

Hudson, 62, grew up in Ashville, N.C. His older brother got his girlfriend pregnant just before he was sent to Vietnam. The brother did not marry his pregnant girlfriend until the baby was four years old, and because of this, Hudson and his brother became estranged. Today, they still do not speak.

colin hudson

Hudson had worried that his brother and girlfriend might have been tempted to have an abortion. That seems to have been the beginning of this thinking about this issue. He earned a living in a John Deere tractor business with his father. Hudson went to Atlanta, Ga. for a tractor symposium for what was supposed to be a one week trip.

“I heard about the abortion protesting going on down there and said, I’ll go work at the meeting during the day and check out the protest at night,” he recalls.

It was the 1988 Democratic National Convention, and Hudson was among those protestors who were arrested and jailed.

“I met a guy who was a Cajun from Louisiana,” remembers Hudson. “His name was Chris and he looked just like my brother. He told me about his girlfriend that he brought to Atlanta to have an abortion, and he felt terrible about it. Then he snapped right in front of me. He got down on the floor like he was praying or weeping, so I got down there with him, trying to be like a brother to him. Then, suddenly, he says, ‘I can run through a wall!’ and he ran head first, bashing his head into it.”

Chris was taken to a mental hospital. The experience seemed to change Hudson. He returned home after serving three weeks in jail, and his father dropped Hudson from their tractor business.

“It was a relief because then I could give my attention to what I felt was more important. I hoped they would see it harmoniously so I could do both, but they didn’t see it that way,” says Hudson.

He continued to protest, getting arrested five times in North Carolina, twice in Georgia, once in North Dakota and again in South Carolina. He says he stopped counting after the thirtieth arrest.

In the spring of 1991, he found himself actually inside a clinic. “We had kryptonite bicycle locks, the u-shaped ones. We’d lock our necks together, our feet, arms and we were all tangled up right around the three rooms where they did the killing, all 24 of us,” remembers Hudson. “It took 11 hours for the police and fire department to break us apart. They said we looked like a plate of spaghetti.”

In 1994, abortion protestors were successfully cited with racketeering charges, and many of Hudson’s co-protestors began to fade back into their regular lives. The Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) laws were designed to prosecute the mafia and other organized crime efforts, but in NOW vs. Scheidler, the Supreme Court ruled that the RICO Act could also be applied to non-monetary actions.

Because of that case, many protestors were asked to sign a document promising never to blockade an entrance to an abortion clinic in return for having their charges dropped. Hudson says many signed it, but he would not.

“I understand because they had families. So they’re not traitors. I had no family or children. I didn’t have to keep a roof over someone’s head, clothes on their back or food in their stomachs,” says Hudson.

A Familial Hardship

In his 22 years devoted to protesting, Hudson has worked at various jobs, doing handyman work and other odd jobs. Because of his protesting, his relationship with his family is now very estranged. He still talks with his 95-year-old father daily but won’t be attending a family reunion coming up in October. “They say if I promise ahead of time not to talk about it, I’m invited, but I can’t promise that so I won’t go,” Hudson says.

When asked about his feelings regarding Hudson’s protesting, his brother responded, “My brother is an idiot. My advice is to not engage him.”

Today, Hudson is retired. Abortion protests are his only occupation.  He was 25 years old when the Supreme Court, in the 1973 decision Roe v. Wade, made abortion legal.  Every day he starts the morning at Planned Parenthood, praying for the women who enter the clinics and hoping that one day abortion will be illegal again.