Chris Kenning

@ckenning_cj

At dawn, protesters kneel on the concrete sidewalk holding crosses and rosaries, swaying, singing and praying aloud. Police cruiser lights flash on a corner near an Action Loan shop. Men stalk the sidewalk waving posters of bloody abortions, reading from Bibles and preaching damnation on portable loudspeakers.

Women, arriving for appointments, emerge warily from cars and are hustled briskly down the sidewalk by dozens of orange-vested escorts toward the EMW Women's Surgical Center. Their faces harden as protesters follow them, pushing religious tracts, offering adoption or calling them murderers.

Flanked by clinic escort Meg Stern on one side and protester Donna Durning on the other, one woman is converged upon by a scrum of shouting protesters as she reaches a white private property line painted on the concrete and lined with escorts before finally entering the mirrored glass doors of Kentucky’s last remaining abortion clinic.

“Please don’t murder your baby, ma’am,” someone yells. “You’ll feel guilty all your life!”

For decades, volunteer escorts and anti-abortion activists have faced off five days each week outside the Louisville clinic in a sidewalk skirmish that has become a fixture of America’s long-running war over abortion.

But now, many longtime anti-abortion activists say they’re more emboldened than in years after an increasingly successful conservative push for state-level abortion restrictions, legal challenges against groups like Planned Parenthood and the election of an anti-abortion U.S. administration that reinstated abortion-related funding bans for international aid groups and favors letting states decide whether to allow abortion.

Last year, state legislatures passed 50 laws restricting abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research group. And Kentucky’s new Republican-controlled legislature this year required that women be shown ultrasounds before an abortion and enacted a ban on abortions after 20 weeks.

And that came after Gov. Matt Bevin’s administration sued two other Kentucky clinics, EMW in Lexington and Planned Parenthood in Louisville, alleging they were operating without proper state licenses. EMW closed permanently; Planned Parenthood has suspended operations while its legal dispute is pending.

Related stories

Abortion foe hopes for Roe v. Wade reversal

Anti-abortion rally praises new Kentucky laws

Beshear blasts Bevin for 'alternative facts' on ultrasound law

“We’re definitely in the middle of a crisis of access in Kentucky,” said Amber Duke, a spokeswoman for the ACLU of Kentucky, which has challenged the ultrasound law. “We’re in a really scary climate on this issue right now.”

Kentucky, which had 17 clinics and hospitals providing abortions in the 1970s, is now one of seven states with just one abortion provider, which advocates say is forcing women to travel farther and incur more expense. Some may be deterred from getting care. Nationally, the number of such facilities has fallen from 2,434 in 1991 to 1,671 in 2014 as a result of years of restrictive state laws along with falling overall abortion rates and other factors, according to Guttmacher analysts.

For many of Louisville’s sidewalk faithful who have gathered on both sides of the clinic’s white line for years — nearly two decades each for Durning and Stern — the stakes have rarely felt higher.

“As pro-life people, we’re … excited to think that at some point this could actually end,” said Ed Harpring, a longtime clinic protester and coordinator of anti-abortion efforts at the Archdiocese of Louisville.

The veterans

Durning arrives shortly after 7 a.m. in her white Mercedes, which she parks curbside near the clinic on East Market Street. A statue of the Virgin Mary the size of an infant is buckled tightly into the backseat.

“She rides with me all the time. Unless I have customers who need the backseat,” said Durning, a realtor who shows homes for sale after she leaves the protest.

She is one of the elders among a diverse mix of dozens of protesters, who often include Catholics who pray in lines across the street, members of a Baptist church who wear their own yellow vests, young Christians from a Southern Indiana church who carry graphic posters and use loudspeakers, women who hold their babies on the sidewalk and men with signs reading “The Killing Place” and shout through clinic windows.

Durning, who grew up in Louisville parochial schools, each day counts women with a hand counter, tries to pass out anti-abortion tracts worn from holding them for few takers and speaks softly to try to change women’s minds. She said she is driven in part by a woman she knew who tried to commit suicide out of regret for an abortion early in life. To her and others, their protests amount to nothing short of trying to head off a murder.

“I’ve never been inside. But they can hear us when we speak through those windows. And there has been girls who have come out,” said Durning, who argues she has seen at least some women change their minds because of their presence.

In 2014, there were 3,530 abortions in Kentucky and 8,180 in Indiana, part of a total of 926,200 nationwide, according to Guttmacher data. But even as debate heats up, the U.S. abortion rate that year fell to its lowest level since 1973’s historic Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortions, dropping to 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age from 29.3 in 1981.

Story continues below the gallery

A mix of factors are at work, including a mounting number of state laws restricting abortions, better access to contraception and improvements in women’s reproductive health, said Guttmacher policy analyst Elizabeth Nash.

Durning said she tries to get along with the volunteer escorts she sees each day — who she calls “deathscorts” — but “they have training and they’re told not to talk to us.”

That includes Stern, 35, one of the longest-serving of what she said was nearly 200 escorts trained by a volunteer grassroots group not directly associated with the clinic. Stern worked in the restaurant industry and other jobs before devoting herself nearly full time to supporting abortion rights.

“I’ve known Donna for years,” Stern said one morning, sipping from a mug of coffee on a street corner as she kept an eye out for women needing an escort. “Some of them say good morning to us. Donna doesn’t." Some are more likely to say, ‘You’re going to hell," she said.

When Stern started coming out to the sidewalk in the late 1990s to help ensure women weren’t deterred by protesters, anti-abortion activists elsewhere in the country had been “doing things like chaining themselves to clinics, laying down in driveways. There had been clinics that were firebombed and doctors shot dead,” she said, such as Dr. Barnett Slepian in New York in 1998.

At that time, she said, “we were outnumbered. On a good Saturday there were six escorts. So we started organizing, creating trainings and outreach. Now there may be 20 escorts or more on an average Saturday.”

Over the years, she has watched the strategy of anti-abortion groups move from an outright ban to one of limiting access through restrictions such as requirements for counseling, waiting periods, limitations and regulations that make clinics more difficult to operate. Stern said the tense confrontational atmosphere is still emotionally draining, but it steeled her resolve to be a regular presence.

“It was being on the sidewalk, being exposed as an escort to the bullying and attacks, and watching the legislation pile up,” she said, including Kentucky’s “informed consent” law that requires women to discuss the risks and description of an abortion 24 hours before the procedure.

► ON THE GO? Download the CJ app for iPhone, Android and iPad

► FOLLOW US: Watch the latest featured video on YouTube

Four years ago, she helped create the Kentucky Health Justice Network's Abortion Fund Program to provide those struggling to access abortions with rides to appointments, gas money, overnight lodging, case manager, language interpreters. It’s not the only fund in Kentucky aimed at supporting women who need abortions. The A-Fund, supported by private donors, spent $47,000 last year for direct support for abortions, fund officials said. Such procedures can cost anywhere from $750 and much higher depending on when in the pregnancy it occurs.

“With Kentucky down to one clinic, people need to travel more. So we're training more volunteers for the increase in the numbers of calls we’re getting and distances people have to go,” Stern said.

Abortion debate heats up

Inside the clinic doors, Louisville EMW facility director Anne Ahola said it seems most of the protesters have little regard for the complicated circumstances women face from rape to being unable to care for a child to having medical problems that bar having a child.

“They aren’t just a bunch of floozies and fools. Having an abortion isn’t on anybody’s bucket list,” said Ahola, who once worked at Louisville’s Home of the Innocents for children and said she too is a Christian woman of faith and prayed before taking the position years ago.

She said the closures of other clinics has boosted demand for appointments, but she downplayed the impact of a new law requiring doctors show women ultrasounds.

“We’ve always done ultrasounds. Sometimes you can’t do the procedure because of medical issues. And sometimes it’s clear that for them it’s not the right thing. We’ll say, ‘Why don’t you go home and think about it? Because today isn’t your day’,” she said. “We don’t force anybody.’

Nash said harassment against abortion doctors on social media, at homes and offices has been increasing in recent years and “keeps people from entering the field at all." In Louisville, protesters parade the names of doctors on signs outside the clinic and make comments about the purported location of their homes. Nash said the last fatal incident involving the issue happened in 2015, when three people were shot dead at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

“To endure all the scrutiny and harassment, any physician who is willing is very committed to women’s health care,” Ahola said.

Back outside the clinic, Stern said the growing threat to access to abortions had attracted more volunteer escorts. On one cold Saturday morning, that included volunteers Julie Redman, 52, and her daughter, Ricki Redman, 22.

►READ MORE: Sen. McConnell hears it from Louisville protesters

►READ MORE: Solar industry fears for its future in Kentucky

“I haven’t done this before,” Julie Redman said. “Trump, that’s what got our attention. We’re afraid we’re going to lose rights if we didn’t get out there, and this is a very important right as a woman to have.”

According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, 57 percent of Americans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 39 percent said it should be illegal in all or most cases.

Opposition to abortion got new fuel in 2015 when an undercover video surfaced purportedly showing that Planned Parenthood officials were illegally selling fetal tissue of aborted babies. The video was later found to have been manipulated, but it still sparked a national outcry.

Joseph Spurgeon, a member of a Southern Indiana church who is a regular outside the clinic, stood on a recent day next to a blue Ford parked on the curb. Inside was a woman and a friend who were waiting for an appointment. Spurgeon held a sign showing an abortion as he urged her from a loudspeaker not to have an abortion. His said such protests may help more people adopt his view that abortions amount to murder.

Spurgeon said he doesn’t feel that he’s harassing women because he believes he’s saving lives as a “last-ditch effort. This is goal-line defense, like in football.”

He said he doesn’t think the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion needs to be overturned even if President Donald Trump gets the chance to appoint more justices during his term, so long as states continue to push laws that lead to the eventual “criminalization” of abortion.

Between 2010 and 2016, states enacted 338 new abortion restrictions. Last year, however, the Supreme Court struck down Texas abortion laws that would have shut down many clinics by adding regulatory requirements, but it didn't end the push for such laws.

“At the end of the day, a woman’s health is what should be driving these decisions — not a political agenda," said Duke of the ACLU of Kentucky. “Abortion is going to happen. We want abortion that is legal to remain legal so we don’t have people dying in back alleys.”

By 9:15 a.m. on a recent Saturday, the two sides were taking off their vests and heading home. The women had all made it into the clinic, and the police cars were pulling away.

Durning had tried to change the mind of a boyfriend of a client standing outside who responded, “Choice. That’s part of being an American, isn’t it?” Durning packed up her brochures and sign and was getting ready to meet other anti-abortion activists for breakfast. But, she said, she’d be back the next weekday.

“I’ve been coming here five days a week for 20 years,” said Durning, who believes her side now has the wind at its back. “Things are looking up.”

Reporter Chris Kenning can be reached at ckenning@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4697.