Lawn signs line the street leading to Planned Parenthood in Aurora, Illinois.

Free help is just a phone call away. Your baby’s father has rights too. At three weeks your baby has a heartbeat.

Anti-abortion protesters stand in the vacant lot across the clinic, waiting with pamphlets in hand as cars drive into the parking lot. Whenever someone exits a vehicle, one of them steps out from the group to yell from about 100 feet away, as close as possible without passing the private property signs.

The protesters’ harangues compete with the elevator music blasting from speakers strategically placed by Planned Parenthood.

Let us help you. We don’t want to see you endure grief for the rest of your life. What happens in there cannot be undone.

It’s a Friday in November 2014, but it could be any day and any hour the Planned Parenthood clinic is open. That’s how strong the commitment of the anti-abortion community organized by Eric Scheidler is.

Scheidler is the executive director of The Pro-Life Action League, a nonprofit grassroots organization founded by his father, Joe Scheidler, 35 years ago. According to the League’s website, its mission is to “save unborn children through direct action”.

Eric is 6ft 3in tall, and thin. He’s a boyish 48 years old, and even at his most argumentative he maintains an energetic charm. He stands behind the others with his hands on his hips while they attempt to persuade clinic-goers from a distance. It’s cold outside, and his face is wrapped in a ski mask so that just his eyes show.

At one point, Scheidler’s assistant, Matt Yonke, calls to two women and a man walking into the clinic: “Women are taken from there in ambulances. Jesus loves you and your baby. Help is available.” Yonke has dark hair, a beard and glasses and appears much younger than his 34 years.

Eric Scheidler and Matt Yonke in front of the clinic. Photograph: Jenn Stanley

“Fuck you, loser. Get a life,” one of the women strikes back.

“I have one, thank you. A very nice life,” Matt says, his voice firm and calm. “But if you go in there, your baby won’t have a chance at life.”

“You’re pathetic,” she responds, her voice shaking. The man accompanying her puts his hand on the small of her back as they walk into the clinic.

Scheidler grew up in the movement and spent most of his time around protests and counter-protests. Many anti-abortion advocates still refer to his father as the godfather of the American pro-life movement, a nickname he gladly accepts.

After Roe v Wade, Joe, now 87 years old and still active as the League’s national director, saw a need for a leader and decided to fill the void. He carefully crafted his image: always a hat, a full beard and formal dress. He wears light-colored suits in the summer, darker in the winter.

“I just couldn’t live in a country where this injustice was happening. This murder,” he told me, his voice gravelly and strong.

Joe felt that the pro-life movement was lacking direction, and that a strong leader would pull people together. He looked toward historical leaders, and drew inspiration from unlikely sources, from Saul Alinsky to the Nazi party.

“The whole idea of Hitler going around with his people in [uniformed shirts] to make it look like there were lots of them. We did that,” Joe tells Eric and me during a conversation in the Pro-Life Action League’s Chicago headquarters. “We would have a group. We would keep going to different places and then people would say, ‘Oh they’re everywhere.’”

Eric laughs nervously. “Oh great, start talking to the reporter about the Nazis,” he says, but Joe is unfazed. He always knows what he’s saying and who he’s saying it to.

Eric is the oldest of Anne and Joe Scheidler’s seven children, and he was six years old when his father got heavily involved with pro-life activism. Joe was out of town a lot, and even when he was home, he was completely committed to the cause.

Joe says that in the 1980s, the Pro-Life Action League would collect garbage bins from clinics that were filled with the products of abortion. The Scheidler home on the north-west side of Chicago had a garage where a pathologist would test the remains before the League gave them “a proper burial”.

Some have accused the Pro-Life Action League of doctoring the photographs used in the group’s infamously graphic protest signs, but Joe maintains that they’re real and says they were taken in his garage. Eric grew up surrounded by these. During protests, he often carried a trashcan prop filled with dismembered baby dolls covered in red paint. Eric tells me that his father had been inspired after seeing a trashcan filled with the products of abortions. “He was struck because one of the fetuses looked like me as a baby,” Eric says.

By the time Eric was in high school, he preferred his father’s absence. The two didn’t get along, and Eric was beginning to question his family’s strict Catholic faith, creating distance between father and son. Eric enjoyed the man-of-the-house role, and resented Joe’s authoritarian presence when he was home. When Eric left Chicago to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he declared himself an atheist and began to distance himself from the family business.

Eric met the woman who is now his wife, April, at the University of Illinois. He describes his wife’s family as extremely liberal, feminist and pro-choice. At the time this was refreshing to Eric, since he was questioning his conservative upbringing. April says that when they first started dating, Eric wouldn’t tell her what his father did for a living. After he did, they hardly spoke about it. He was an atheist but he was still pro-life, and April was pro-choice. Eric had spent his life on the defensive about his pro-life upbringing, and his relationship with April seemed promising. He didn’t want to spoil it with arguing.

The Scheidlers didn’t like the match, and Joe was even less thrilled when, after four years of dating, Eric announced April was pregnant. It was Thanksgiving 1992 and Eric was 25. April was with her family for the holiday and neither had told anyone else about the pregnancy. But tensions were high that Thanksgiving, as Joe was questioning Eric’s lack of faith and Eric was openly resentful of Joe’s preoccupations during his childhood. Then Eric blurted it out. He said he was going to be a father, and he’d be a better father than Joe had been.

Joe was furious. “Then you’re going to marry that girl,” he said. “Because there won’t be any bastard children in this family.”

Eric did marry her, and a few months later their son Nate was born. April says the unplanned pregnancy was what first made her question her own pro-choice stance. “I started thinking about abortion differently because I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I could go have an abortion. I wouldn’t need Eric’s permission, I wouldn’t need anyone’s permission necessarily,’” April says. “That to me was really horrifying. I just thought, I can’t believe that women are allowed to do that. It just seemed so wrong.”

A year later, their second son, Sam, came along, and he was also a surprise. “I was crushed when I saw that pregnancy test. I feel sad about that, and guilty about it,” Eric says. “But then I started realizing that I had been using my own doubt to stop them from existence, and that was an injustice to them. Had the contraception not failed, they would not exist. Then Liza came along and that really got me thinking.”

Joe Scheidler. Photograph: Jenn Stanley

Liza is Eric and April’s oldest daughter, whose existence was the major catalyst in Eric’s re-entry into the church. He imagined her dating some day, and realized he didn’t want her having sex before marriage.

“I found myself concluding that the only fair way that some guy could ever sleep with my daughter would be if he promised to be faithful to her and to be devoted to her forever.”

At the time, Eric was working as an adjunct faculty member at colleges around Chicago, and April had left her job as a Montessori teacher to take care of the children. The two started a natural family planning class. Eric was beginning to feel uncomfortable about contraception, and April wanted to stop taking birth control because it was making her feel unwell, and she wanted something more natural. The family planning class was through a church group, and Eric started questioning his atheism.

“I thought, if they were right about contraception, maybe they were right about other things too, like the existence of God,” Eric says. April was skeptical of Eric’s new faith at first, but was happy to meet other mothers through the family planning class. They were still in their 20s and many of their friends didn’t have children yet.

“My wife converted after. She was at this time staying at home with our three children. So, since I lived there and we were married, I had the opportunity to evangelize her 24/7,” says Eric. April attributes the family planning class with making them closer as a couple. She soon converted to Catholicism.

Through the family planning group Eric met Steven Habisohn, who founded the Gift foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to spreading the word about traditional Christian marriage. Eric joined as assistant director in 1998, starting his full-time commitment to conservative Christian causes. He began giving more of his time to the Pro-Life Action League. In 2002, Eric became the League’s communications director. Then a Planned Parenthood clinic was built in Aurora, Illinois, where he lived. Eric was about to get a promotion.

The Pro-Life Action League has been calling Aurora “ground zero of the abortion debate” since Planned Parenthood opened there in 2007. Eric came up with the phrase and it caught on quickly with the local media.

“October 1, 2007 was one of the craziest days of my life,” Eric says. He was at the Kane County courthouse filing a libel suit against Planned Parenthood for an advertisement they put in the local paper, the Aurora Beacon, saying that the Scheidlers and the Pro-Life Action League had “a well-documented history of advocating violence against both persons and property as well as other related criminal activity”.

“And all of a sudden, everyone starts calling me. The local newspapers, stations, asking ‘what do you think about the mayor’s press conference?’ And I’m like, ‘what are you talking about?’”

Aurora’s mayor, Tom Weisner, announced that Planned Parenthood would receive their occupancy permit so it could open the next day. The news came as a surprise to Eric, who for months had been fighting the clinic’s opening.

Eric had first heard about the incoming Planned Parenthood that June. He had taken the week off from work to build a playhouse for his eight children. His two oldest boys, who at the time were 13 and 15, would go with him to the lumber yard every other day to pick up materials. It was Eric’s dream to build this house for his family, which had a skylight and rivaled a modest Manhattan apartment in size.

Eric believes that abortion is wrong even in the worst-case scenarios, like when a girl is raped by a family member

While he was outside working on the playhouse one day he got a phone call from his father asking if he’d heard anything about a Planned Parenthood being opened in Aurora. Eric said he hadn’t, but took down the address his father gave him, grabbed the camera that he’d had outside with him to document the progress of his playhouse, and rode his bicycle the five miles to get to the site. The building looked near complete but still needed landscaping. The only sign was for Gemini Office Developers, LLC.

A dissenting presence was brewing in Aurora before word of the Planned Parenthood clinic got out. Just a month earlier, Eric had held a demonstration outside a clinic that closed when its owner, an abortion provider named Aleksander Jakubowski, retired. About 100 Aurora residents rallied to say they did not want another abortion provider moving into the area.

When Eric found out for sure that the building labeled Gemini Office Develpers was owned by Planned Parenthood, he organized the town’s anti-abortion presence to hold a 40-day prayer vigil, marches and protests all designed to stop it from opening. He and the group filed lawsuits and zoning appeals. As far as Eric knew, nothing had been settled.

On 1 October 2007, Eric was shocked when he heard the news that Planned Parenthood would open. He and the other protesters argued that they had come into town under false pretenses and intentionally waited to announce themselves.

According to news reports from the time of the clinic’s opening, Planned Parenthood of Illinois never denied their intention to keep their presence quiet as long as possible in an effort to stave off their opposition. In an article the Daily Herald, Steve Trombley, the former CEO of Planned Parenthood/Chicago Area, said: “We certainly kept the building of this facility private in an effort not to alert our opposition, who have a history of criminal behavior. That is different than their allegation that we defrauded the city.”

But Eric remembers something more sinister. “They said they didn’t have the sign up yet because they didn’t know what it was going to say,” Eric told me. “Give me a break. They knew what it was going to say. It was going to say Planned Parenthood.”

During the Aurora controversy, Eric went from being communications director to executive director of the Pro-Life Action League. He hired an assistant, Matt Yonke, and moved into a permanent office in downtown Aurora.

“Eric’s the guy to call if there’s a Planned Parenthood coming to town or they’re having a fundraiser,” Matt tells me one day in their office in Aurora, the third space they’ve occupied since 2007. Though it’s just the two of them stationed in town, they say they outgrew their former offices. The reception area is open and bright, with a small seating area, a few chairs, coffee table with copies of the Pro-Life Action League newsletter. But the focal piece of the room is a director’s chair in front of a white backdrop, with studio lighting and a DSLR camera pointing toward it.

Eric uses this set-up to make informational videos for the Pro-Life Action League’s website. In many ways, the Pro-life Action League’s mission hasn’t changed much in the past 40 years. Eric and Joe both say that they’re more interested in educating and helping women than changing legislation; there are other groups for that. One of Eric’s instructional videos entitled, “How would Jesus talk to a woman at an abortion clinic?” urges “sidewalk counselors” to “offer help. Let her know she can talk to you. Warn her about people like her who have been hurt by abortion.”

Eric believes that abortion is wrong even in the worst-case scenarios, like when a young girl is raped by a family member, because the abortion could be more traumatizing to the girl than the rape. Still, he hesitates to answer these questions because he says he hates having to respond to hypotheticals. But these situations are far from abstract: recently, Paraguayan authorities ruled against allowing an abortion for a 10-year-old girl who was raped by her stepfather. Eric doesn’t think anything justifies “taking the life of a child”.

It’s been eight years since the Planned Parenthood opened in Aurora, but Eric is still fighting it, and now believes he has a real chance of shutting it down. The group has appealed against the zoning of Planned Parenthood as a for-profit medical center under Gemini Office Development, LLC, because they allege that Planned Parenthood filed their property taxes as a nonprofit, and the area is not zoned for a nonprofit health center.

“I think it’s a very strong case. Every time I read the briefs I’m really excited about it,” Eric says.

•••

There are no studio lights or cameras in the Pro-Life Action League’s Chicago headquarters. It’s dark, and the only light comes from the fluorescents on the ceiling. Joe keeps a guestbook on the front desk and asks visitors to sign every time they’re there. Though my visits have been spread out, my name appears twice in a row on the last page.

Two walk-in closets are filled floor to ceiling with videos, magazines and clips detailing the history of the Pro-Life Action League. Joe is amused by the negative press. He points to the title on an old videotape. “See? NOW [The National Organization of Women] calls me The Holy Terror,” he says, emphasizing the words as if he were telling a ghost story to children at a campfire.

There’s a large conference room in the back, where the staff meet once a month. I walk in at the end of a meeting. Joe and Anne sit at the head of a long oval table. Matt, John Jansen, the group’s youth outreach director, and Tom Cieszelka, a public relations consultant who often works with the group, are also there. Eric takes the lead in talking about the last item on the agenda: the newsletter. Should they switch from newspaper to glossy? Everyone chimes in.

Glossy it is. More modern.

As the meeting comes to a close, Anne walks around the table taking lunch orders as Eric and Joe tell me about the family’s early days in activism. “It’s hard to imagine a pro-life movement without Joe Scheidler,” Eric says. He always refers to his parents by their names while they’re at work. Eric makes a conscious effort to keep his activism from interfering with his home life. He completely unplugs during vacations and sets reminders on his phone for family time.

“Eric’s a much better father than I was,” Joe tells me.

What happened in Aurora gave Eric an opportunity to lead, like his father. He recalls one of the city council meetings regarding Planned Parenthood. Four hundred people showed up to voice their concerns about the new abortion clinic. It was a hot summer day, and he didn’t have time to change between his work outside the clinic and the meeting. He was exhausted.

“I addressed the group and I said something along the lines of, ‘Thanks for being here. I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep.’ And of all the things you ever taught me, I will never forget what you said that day,” Eric says, looking to his father.

“You pulled me aside after the meeting and you said, ‘Eric, never let them know you’re tired.”