Outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on Saturday, a small group of anti-abortion activists held a makeshift rally, celebrating the overturning of Roe v. Wade while surrounded — and vastly outnumbered — by abortion rights protesters chanting to drown them out. From behind a small lectern, hung with a poster of an embryo and the words, “Forceps off my body,” members of the anti-abortion group attempted to address the crowd, as they struggled to be heard from the one speaker they’d set up.
It was all part of their weeklong training to become the next “marines of the pro-life movement,” AJ Hurley, founder of the anti-abortion group Survivors (also known as Survivors of the abortion holocaust) told BuzzFeed News.
Buoyed by the leaked draft opinion in the weeks before the Supreme Court voted to end the federal right to an abortion in the US, young men and women from around the country were gathering in the nation’s capital for a crash course in anti-abortion activism.
“The reason I came out today is because we’ve got a training for young people,” Randall Terry, the founder of anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, told BuzzFeed News on Saturday..
Terry, who is helping Hurley’s organization, said that due to his age he was on a “mission” to “train young people how to carry on this fight.”
“This is on-the-job training,” he said, referring to the anti-abortion activists rallying and, in some cases, confronting abortion rights protesters in heated arguments outside the Supreme Court on Saturday. “This is the first day of a post-Roe world.”
He emphasized the importance of “confrontational rhetoric” and “aggression” in what he was teaching future anti-abortion advocates.
“I want these kids to feel the heat, the pressure, the tension of having an event with their picture [against] the backdrop of the Supreme Court,” Terry said.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ellievhall/anti-abortion-training-activists-roe-protests