This content is imported from Third party. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Boston, a woman in an oversize sweatshirt makes a beeline for the entrance, her head down, walking shoulder to shoulder with a male companion. Dozens of demonstrators stand a few feet away, praying, singing, and holding signs that display newborn babies or gory fetal heads. One demonstrator, Evelyn, wearing a "Choose Life" hat and carrying a fistful of anti-abortion pamphlets, approaches the woman: "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

The woman picks up speed, and responds with a curt, "Nope."

"There's help available," Evelyn calls out.

"Honestly," the woman replies, "I'm having a miscarriage right now, so I really don't feel like talking to you."

She disappears behind the clinic doors.

"That's usually what they say," says Ruth, another demonstrator who watched the exchange (both Ruth and Evelyn declined to give their last names). "The new abortion mentality is no more of the 'choice' word. The thing is to claim that abortion is just a miscarriage."

Ruth and Evelyn call themselves "sidewalk counselors," not protesters. "We're not here to harass anybody — that's not our nature," Evelyn says. "We're just here to help the girls, to counsel them."

Evelyn, a self-identified sidewalk counselor, tries to hand women anti-abortion fliers outside the Planned Parenthood in Boston. Melanie Rieders

Marty Walz, president and chief executive officer of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, confirms that the clinic does assist women who miscarry. "I can't even imagine how the protesters don't understand the level of cruelty to a woman like that," she says.

"All they're doing is scaring our patients. Including patients who are coming in for birth control, who don't want to have an unintended pregnancy."

"I would never call them counselors," Pia, a Boston woman who goes to Planned Parenthood for her annual exams and to get contraception, says. "I'd call them sidewalk terrorists."

Abortion accounts for just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's services, but the organization remains the largest abortion provider in a country where doctors are often intimidated, harassed, or constrained by increasingly restrictive state laws from performing abortions. Planned Parenthood also provides a range of family planning options, including IUDs, birth control pills, condoms, and sterilizations; does annual exams, Pap smears, cervical cancer screenings, STI testing, and breast exams; and makes referrals for mammograms.

Yet even in Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the nation, abortion clinics are ideological and sometimes physical battlegrounds. In 1994, John Salvi walked into two clinics in Brookline and opened fire, killing two people and injuring five others. Since the 1970s, anti-abortion activists across the country have committed thousands of acts of violence, including eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 181 arsons, and 1,495 acts of vandalism. To stave off these attacks, President Clinton signed the Free Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act in 1994, which prohibited anyone from threatening or forcibly interfering with people entering a reproductive health care facility or intentionally damaging a clinic. Several states, including Massachusetts, also passed buffer zone laws, which created zones around clinic entrances in which no demonstrator, pro-life or pro-choice, was allowed to stand.

Two decades after Salvi's shooting spree, sidewalk counselor Eleanor McCullen, who regularly stands outside the Boston Planned Parenthood pleading with women not to enter, won a case in the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the constitutionality of Massachusetts's 35-foot buffer zone.The Court struck down the law in June, and demonstrators can now walk right up to the clinic doors and have more leeway to interact with patients. In the aftermath of the court's decision, Massachusetts passed a new, less aggressive buffer zone regulation: If a demonstrator blocks a clinic entrance, acts violently, or threatens patients, the clinic can call the police, who may order the demonstrator to stay 25 feet away from the clinic for the next eight hours or until the facility closes. That's an option Walz says she's had to resort to several times since the demise of the 35-foot zone.

Even with the 35-foot buffer zone gone, many demonstrators stand behind a police barricade so they don't block the sidewalk and violate the new law. Melanie Rieders

In its opinion in McCullen v. Coakley, the buffer zone case, the Supreme Court majority agreed with Ruth and Evelyn's claims that they are as genuinely concerned with the well-being of women as with life inside the womb.

"Petitioners are not protesters," Supreme Court Justice John Roberts wrote. "They seek not merely to express their opposition to abortion, but to inform women of various alternatives and to provide help in pursuing them. Petitioners believe that they can accomplish this objective only through personal, caring, consensual conversations."

The people who work inside the clinic and those who stand outside it claim to want the same thing: healthy, happy women and families. Yet they can't seem to find any common ground about how to get there. That's perhaps because debate about abortion itself is simply the visible tip of a pair of broader, and inherently conflicting, ideologies. Underneath the pro-life and pro-choice monikers are two sets of beliefs not just about abortion or even when life begins, but about how a society should function.

Different Definitions of "Help"

"We offer real help!"

A middle-aged woman yells at a car pulling into the parking lot of the Planned Parenthood in Worcester, Massachusetts. She waves a pamphlet; the car's windows stay up.

"God loves you!" yells an elderly man from the sidewalk. "Jesus died for our sins! You should have nothing to do with this place, killing our babies. We can offer you real help with a problem pregnancy. It's the ultimate child abuse center!"

Inside the clinic, Deb Fenton, regional director of Central and Western Massachusetts Planned Parenthood, peers out the window, looking for one of the regular protesters who shows up in an Angel of Death costume. "Is the Grim Reaper out there today?" she asks.

It's 9 a.m. on a Friday.

Anti-abortion activists in both Boston and Worcester insist that they, and not Planned Parenthood, truly care about women, intervening to save them from what they say are the physical and emotional traumas of abortion.

"The longer you come here and the longer you stand here, you see [abortion] is not helping women," Nancy Clark, the woman handing out pamphlets, says. "This is hurting women. It is making us second-class."

Chris Toloczko, left, and Nancy Clark try to get women to walk away from the Worcester Planned Parenthood. Melanie Rieders

While there is no evidence that abortion leads to negative long-term mental health consequences — the majority of women who have abortions report positive feelings afterward — some women seeking abortions do experience negative feelings because of the demonstrators outside clinics. According to one study, "Our data suggest that the negative emotional experiences abortion rights opponents ascribe to abortion may instead largely be the product of procedures necessitated by opponents' actions."

Clark testified in the buffer zone case that "close personal communication" in a "kind, gentle voice" was her preferred method of approaching women, and that "speaking in a raised voice, shouting or yelling is counterproductive." Or as the Supreme Court, which itself has a buffer zone of more than 200 feet, said in its opinion, "It is easier to ignore a strained voice or a waving hand than a direct greeting or an outstretched arm."

The Worcester Planned Parenthood sits on a private, fenced-in corner lot, and the buffer zone meant Clark had to stand on the opposite side of the road; now, she can hand pamphlets to cars as they pull in or come right up to the fence. Sometimes, like on this particular day, she stands on the far side of the street anyway, but she likes having options. "Instead of yelling from here," she says, gesturing across the street to the clinic, "I get to yell from over there."

[embed_gallery gid=4401 type="simple"]

Clark, a 52-year-old mother of nine with the clipped efficiency of a high school soccer coach, says abortion lets men treat women as disposable objects, getting what they want sexually without committing to marriage and procreation. She believes that an increasingly sexually permissive culture, including reliance on abortion and birth control, means, "Men are winning because of the way women are giving themselves away."

Like Clark, Marty Walz is in her early 50s. Before she worked at Planned Parenthood, Walz was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and helped write the state's buffer zone law. She says leaving reproductive decision-making up to women is precisely what women need in order to be equal players in society.

"If we want to have rights to be in school and to work and determine our own success, we have to be able to determine our health care, and whether and when to have children," she says.

Marty Walz observes the demonstrators through the second-floor window of the Boston Planned Parenthood. Melanie Rieders

On any given day, there may be dozens of demonstrators at the Planned Parenthood center in Boston. On this Saturday, there are more than 70. Most are older white people, standing behind a police barricade, praying and singing, often clutching rosaries. A few Hispanic families with small children and babies in strollers wave "Life Counts" signs. One demonstrator, wearing a sign with a grisly photograph of a fetal head held with forceps, chants, "Thou shalt not murder! Your fetus will shed blood!" A man in a floppy rain hat and sunglasses snaps photos of the clinic escorts and patients, a common tactic intended to shame them. A few elderly sidewalk counselors press their faces to the ears of women heading toward the clinic doors, imploring them to reconsider, then raising their voices to a shout as the women dart away. "There's help for you, honey," Evelyn cries to a patient. "Your baby doesn't have to die today! You're already a mother!"

Evelyn says what women really want and need is assistance with their unintended pregnancies, not to make those pregnancies go away.

"We're not here just for the baby," she says. "We're here for the mothers too."

Cosmopolitan.com spoke with nearly a dozen self-identified sidewalk counselors. None of them had any educational background or credentials in psychology, therapy, counseling, or mental health, but Clark, Evelyn, and many other demonstrators agree with the Supreme Court that they are "sidewalk counselors," not protesters. Evelyn mentions there's a tape you can watch to learn how to sidewalk counsel, although she doesn't know much else about it, and Ruth, who comes to the Boston clinic at least every Saturday, says she learned sidewalk counseling by watching other counselors.

"I consider my profession having been a mother and a grandmother," Ruth says, adding that her children agree with her values: two of her daughters got pregnant out of wedlock, one in high school, and both placed their children for adoption. "You don't have to have a degree in caring and loving."

A Society That Changed Too Rapidly

According to Planned Parenthood, women want options — to be a mother now, to be a mother later, to never be a mother at all — so that they can also pursue other things they value, including having careers and sex lives.

"It's so core to who we are as women to have autonomy and to be able to make our own decisions about our own bodies and our own lives," Walz says.

For the demonstrators, those options are distractions. They say reproductive choice is bad for women, leading to a social devaluation of motherhood — being a mother is now just one choice among many, not a sacred and definitional calling.

"The fullness of being a woman is being a mother," Father Andrew Beauregard, a Franciscan monk who comes to pray the rosary outside the Boston Planned Parenthood, says. "For a woman to say that she has to have control over her body or over herself in such a way that she can't be a mother really speaks to a degradation towards women."

Father Andrew Beauregard, far right, and other demonstrators pray outside the Boston clinic. Melanie Rieders

And because the devaluing of life and motherhood is a broader societal problem, outlawing abortion alone won't fix it. Demonstrators say the culture needs to revert to a time when women were less selfish and prioritized having a family.

"Girls that want to have their careers, their education, they want to have this and that, the latest fashions, or go to this, or get a car, and they also want to have children? That's a pretty hard thing to do," Ruth says. "Usually it's the children come first — that's how society has changed. Children have become a throwaway."

Outside the Worcester clinic, demonstrator Fred Delouis, who is in his 80s and has been protesting abortion for more than 30 years, wears a sandwich board sign with a bloodied fetal head and the words "STOP ABORTION" on the front, and an image of a fetus in utero on the back. He also points to social change as destructive.

"Society was great before they had abortions," he says. "Because there wasn't as much evil in the world. They weren't murdering God's babies, which is the most important thing."

Abortion existed across the globe, including in the United States, well before Roe v. Wade. And around the world, outlawing abortion does little to lower the abortion rate.

But Delouis says Roe was an abomination; he also believes the birth control pill is murder.

Nancy Clark stands across the street from Delouis with Chris Toloczko, an 80-year-old woman with a sign bearing an image of the Virgin Mary. The women are trying to persuade women to go to a crisis pregnancy center instead. There are roughly 2,500 such centers across the United States (compared to 1,800 abortion clinics), and they are almost all affiliated with anti-abortion activism. While they offer resources such as diapers and formula for pregnant women, they do not offer formal health care services beyond pregnancy tests and basic ultrasounds, and are known to lie to and mislead women.

Abortion opponents encourage women to go to crisis pregnancy centers, which offer women diapers and baby food. Melanie Rieders

Toloczko too believes modern society is bad for women. But she and Clark can't seem to decide whether women who end their pregnancies are dupes, victimized by both their loved ones and an increasingly secular culture, or demons, heartlessly choosing themselves over their babies.

Toloczko says Jesus Christ was an advocate for women, and they "gained more and more dignity" as Christianity spread. "But we're at a point now where women are objects, really."

"Selfish objects," Clark interjects. "When the womb of a mother has become the most dangerous place to be, I don't know what women have gained. This is not empowering women."

Toloczko continues, "When [journalists] were talking about the Middle East, they talked about the rooms of torture. We have the wombs of torture."

"Just so she can get on with her selfish life," Clark says, shaking her head. She quickly adds, "Not always though. Lots of the women I see coming in here, someone is pushing them."

Like Delouis, Clark and Toloczko believe that a decline in religiosity is the root problem — not just because secularism paved the way for abortion rights, but because it undermined the foundation of a more wholesome, and now bygone, America.

"[Women] had equality," Delouis says about the 1950s, before Supreme Court cases legalized contraception and abortion. "But they had to be obedient to their husbands. That's where equality comes: where the mother stayed home and raised the children in God's light, and the husband worked, and everything was great. When I grew up, there were no problems."

Fred Delouis, outside the Worcester Planned Parenthood, says he believes both birth control and abortion are murder. Melanie Rieders

Both pro-choice feminists and pro-life conservatives point to the birth control pill and, later, legal abortion, as ushering in enormous social shifts — which one group says led to increased equality, the other to the destruction of the traditional family.

Walz says Planned Parenthood provides women with a variety of birth control options, including methods like the IUD that have extremely low failure rates, that enable them to pursue things like higher education, successful careers, and families when they're financially and emotionally ready. Planned Parenthood, she maintains, is more in the business of preventing abortions than providing them.

"We're very proud of the incredible forms of birth control we offer to women," she says. "Shouldn't the protesters be encouraging that?"

Pro-life activists like Clark say no, that promoting birth control is part of the same cultural problem that leads to abortion. She believes the best way to lower the abortion rate is to teach young women to save sex for marriage.

"Abstinence," Clark says. "It's possible. I taught my daughters abstinence. It doesn't mean I've been successful with my first two, but I have three more to go. You hold your breath."

And after marriage, Toloczko adds, natural family planning is the best option to space out births. Clark agrees, although she notes its lack of popularity.

"You can't even get Catholics to use it," she says. "It does work though. Of course, I have nine kids."

Winning One Woman at a Time

The demise of the 35-foot buffer zone won't usher in the kinds of wholesale cultural changes demonstrators say are necessary to prevent abortion. But one-by-one persuasion requires close contact, and now, they can walk next to a woman until the moment she vanishes behind the clinic doors. Walz says she has no problem with women turning around if they change their minds, but she objects to manipulation and harassment and the demonstrators' belief that they know what a woman needs better than the woman herself.

Demonstrators pray, sing, and approach women outside the Boston Planned Parenthood. Melanie Rieders

For their part, the demonstrators who show up here week after week say they're part of an effort to fix a broken culture, one woman walking away from Planned Parenthood at a time.

At the Boston clinic, Wilson Mejia and Juan Pablo claim to have accomplished just that: They say they had a "save" the week before, when they convinced a man to get his girlfriend to leave the clinic. Several people outside Planned Parenthood boasted of such "saves"; a few mentioned getting invites to first birthday parties. In the McCullen opinion, even the Supreme Court lauded the counselors' self-proclaimed success in persuading women to cancel their abortions. But none of the demonstrators who spoke with Cosmopolitan.com seemed to know much about the women they counseled beyond the fact that they left the clinic.

Recounting their "save," Meija and Pablo say the woman was going to terminate because her boyfriend had another girlfriend and had also fathered children with other women. But, they say, the boyfriend didn't want the abortion from the beginning and after he promised he would support the baby, she came out of the clinic crying, and they walked away together.

"We saw them together," Pablo says. "That's the most great thing — to see them together as a family."

Are they still in touch with this family?

"No, no," Mejia says. "We don't know anything about them."

Follow Jill on Twitter.

Photos by Melanie Rieders. Follow Melanie on Instagram.

Editor's Note: This article is an original report from senior political reporter Jill Filipovic. Cosmopolitan.com is aware of what the url says, but it is not an advertorial.

Jill Filipovic senior political writer Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io