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This week, Downtown became the arena for a showdown between pro-choice New Mexicans and an out-of-town pro-life group.
Protesters gathered at Civic Plaza on Tuesday afternoon to bring attention to the alleged actions and intentions of the group Operation Rescue, a pro-life organization currently headquartered in Kansas.
Katie Stone, one of the organizers for the rally, said protesters aimed to “raise awareness as to who Operation Rescue is.”
Stone said Operation Rescue had gone to numerous places in Albuquerque to harass individuals, including the New Mexico Holocaust & Intolerance Museum, UNM, a birthing center in which a woman was giving birth and the residential properties of two different doctors.
“They printed postcards with pictures of doctors and their addresses and labeled them ‘killers’ and distributed those at the University of New Mexico,” she said. “They went … to the residence of two different doctors, but one in particular that they went to, his family was inside, and they harassed him for hours.”
Mary Lou Singleton, a midwife and family nurse practitioner who helped to organize the pro-choice rally, said being “raised in the anti-choice movement” had shaped her thoughts about how dangerous Operation Rescue was before it came to Albuquerque.
“I was horrified when I learned they were coming to my town,” she said.
Singleton said as a midwife, the group’s presence in Albuquerque became a personal attack to her after Operation Rescue allegedly began protesting at Dar a Luz, a local birthing center, last Saturday.
“They went to the home of one of my backup physicians, a man who has served me. He has served the women of this community, and has served midwives, and is such a healer to this community,” she said. “And they terrorized his private home.”
But Cheryl Sullenger, a senior policy adviser for Operation Rescue, said her organization was not involved with the recent pro-life initiatives in the city. She said Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, a pro-life organization, organized the movements.
She said Operation Rescue is not affiliated with Survivors.
“We’ve worked with the Survivors from time to time, but we don’t have any official affiliation,” she said.
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According to Survivors’ website, Jeff White, the founder of the organization, used to be the national tactical director for Operation Rescue. But he left the group in 1998 and then founded Survivors, according to the site.
Sullenger said nobody in Operation Rescue had directly participated in the protests held in the city in the past weeks.
“Somebody else was organizing all that,” she said. “There was really no need to send anyone there. There was another organization that organized those protests. The whole other part was some other organization.”
