Mother's day 2022

Here's my mother, Martha Roberts Sidway Adams, in 1993. tending her flowers. I have better pictures, but this seemed the appropriate one this year. She would have been 84 when I snapped this.

The year before, Buffalo NY, the city she identified deeply with despite its many problems, had been the target of the fanatical anti-abortion crusaders who called themselves Operation Rescue (OR). 

In 1991 OR took its campaign of mass protest and clinic blockades to Wichita, Kansas where they snarled that city for most of the summer and accumulated over 2600 arrests.

To OR's leaders, Buffalo -- a working class, very Catholic city, with an anti-abortion mayor --  looked like a great site to replicate its Wichita antics for the spring of 1992. But Buffalo proved unexpectedly resistant.

The shock troops of resistance to OR were the young lefty clinic defenders, of course. But older, comfortable, WASP Republican women -- like my mother -- were horrified by the anti-abortion crusaders. They supported women in need of the clinics with public declarations of disgust with the invasion and with cash.

It took OR leaders only a couple of weeks to choose to retreat with their tails between their legs. Buffalo did not welcome OR, though access to abortion remained a contested right.

Mother was so proud of being a tiny part of civic resistance to the anti-abortionists. She completely believed that pregnancy had to be up to the women. We seldom agreed politically, but in 1992 the right to abortion was something we had in common. She never wavered on this.

Takes me back ...