Cleveland’s Echo on the Edge of Darkness and Light: “Love Will End Abortion”

Just steps from Preterm, Ohio’s blue-ribbon winner each year for most murdered babies, the scene outside resembles a kindly pop-up country fair. Slices of pepperoni pizza, snack bags, racks of sharp-looking maternity wear, shiny new toys, rosaries, and Miraculous Medals circulate like borrowed cups of sugar—passed hand to hand among white volunteers and their black friends outside LaRonde Apartments, a seven-story public housing project in a high-crime area of east Cleveland.

Preterm’s misfortune is that it shares its public space with blacks and whites who have gathered as one, transforming the scene outside Cleveland’s most notorious abortuary into something like a pre-Lenten Brazilian carnival. The unlikely family brims with cheer and falls easily into conversation—trading backslaps, talking Browns football, debating whether Jordan or LeBron is the greatest, and praising their Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, side by side. During Advent, they huddle close to sing Christmas carols that rise like incense and carry with the winds off Lake Erie and into the shadow of death.

Curious daily commuters have grown used to glancing out their car windows and seeing what paradoxically seems a portrait of Bethlehem peace settling over the scene of Cleveland’s most sorrowful address: 12000 Shaker Boulevard, where as many as one hundred babies in the womb die each week.

In the architecture of miracles, and their confluence with incomprehensibility, providence, and precise arrangements in time, it can be imagined that dozens, if not hundreds of babies are alive because of an unconventional approach a handful of sidewalk counselors and 40 Days for Life-ers took five years ago in the shot-and-beer city.

Those passersby with supernatural vision know that something is being set right in front of Preterm—a divine re-ordering, where it is the demons that are harassed, where unlikely friends have joined as allies against the powers of darkness to drive them back into the abyss.

“We just try to do it like Jesus or Francis of Assisi would,” said Tully Flynn. “And this has made us friends with the neighbors, who’ve heard about the parties.”

Showers of Love

Under cloudy skies at Benedictine High School last weekend, an enormous baby shower was thrown for a woman named Mylia. Nearly one hundred people—a wide mix of monks, students, sidewalk volunteers, Mylia’s family and friends, and neighbors from the Shaker Boulevard community—gathered to honor Mylia’s decision to become the primary caretaker for her troubled sister’s five young children, ages 5, 4, 3, 2, and just two months old.

More than one hundred gifts were claimed from the registry set up for the family. New beds have been purchased and provided by the Christ Child Society, and the Knights of Columbus have added their own generous contributions. A new bouncy chair and Pack ‘N Play, children’s and baby clothes, and other necessities have already made it into Mylia’s suddenly crowded small home.

“Tense hearts will never change until they see the face of Christ,” Tully Flynn said.

Women in troubled pregnancies, considering terminating the life of their child, will only be moved by love. Christ-like sacrifice convinces pregnant women that there is hope, that there are people who will see them through, and that there is a way forward.

Most of the black folks who live in the LaRonde Apartments have come to regard the sidewalk counselors, Rosary pray-ers, and volunteers outside their next-door neighbor abortuary as benevolent soldiers in the fight against the evil waged on the most vulnerable members of their community. 

Over these past several years, they’ve had a bird’s-eye view from their bright green balconies of sidewalk counselors who swallow up wailing teenage girls in their arms—the pregnant girls from their community—in waves of maternal and paternal love. When counselors meet the eyes of a travailed young pregnant woman—one who awakened that morning urged to abort her child, they often say something like this: “If you give your child a chance, I will be there for you.”

“I want to be there when your child is born. And when your baby is home, if you let me, I’d like to help you with whatever comes your way—good or bad, for as long as you’d like.

This is the echo and elegant street music of Shaker Boulevard—the poetry of minds waking, malevolence breaking, and of Satan quaking—because yet another young woman has been loved into changing her mind. Thereafter, in the days, months, and even years that follow, young black mothers forge close friendships with the white adults who cared enough to save their child’s life. They visit zoos and farmer’s markets and attend ball games and museums, where they take turns pushing the stroller.

The heart of it is this: the reason the black community has come to regard Flynn, his wife Catherine, and the other volunteers as kin is because of the unspoken blood oath they’ve taken to not only stick up for their young girls but also to stay by their sides for as long as friendship and love allows.

Indomitable Love

Year after year, LaRonde residents have been stirred to tears after eavesdropping on agonized mothers’ last-minute changes of heart. They know these miracles come from God and the poured-out love of volunteers who return each Friday to the Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood in subfreezing temperatures, driving rain, windstorms, and summer heat. Until the Armageddon meteor comes, the 40-Day-for-Lifers, Tully, Catherine, good ol’ Fred, and others from the community will continue to greet expectant mothers with love and storehouses of assistance from their racks of sharp-cut maternity dresses, stylish winter coats, and bright summer wear. There are baby wipes, jumbo boxes of diapers, knitted caps for newborn heads, and stacks of boxes of hot pizza.

And when they cannot reach the heart or mind of a woman crossing Preterm’s threshold, they turn instead to the Mother of God, pleading through the Mysteries of the Rosary for the protection of both mother and child from the demons within. When she emerges again, the volunteers search her face, studying the nooks and crannies of her eyes—hoping. Some days, one woman will begin to walk toward them, and in that instant choirs of angels seem to break into song.

Throughout the year, Ohio’s No. 1 abortion center sees a decline because the volunteers outside Preterm know that prayer, fasting, and relentless acts of tender love cut open paths to ease the tension and convince women that they—and their children—will be cherished to the very end, by God and by themselves.

Accordingly, this sorrowful place on Shaker Boulevard has come to be known as a place of miracles, like a spigot of graces that cannot be turned off.

Six or so years ago, after attending Mass, Flynn and his wife reflected on the second reading—Paul’s Letter to the Romans (12:16–21)—and its call to confront evil and injustice with kindness and charity. They then began showing up at Pretermwith a few extra pairs of gloves, winter caps, a box of diapers, and some clothing, which they hung from the branch of a tree. Over time, tension outside eased, and tenants from the apartment complex next door began drifting their way.

“The folks next door saw that we were the good guys, not just out to pray Rosaries and harass women,” Flynn said.

It’s funny. On those TV crime dramas, once a year you’ll see that episode with the proverbial seven white men outside the abortion clinic with signs and bullhorns, berating women and yelling “You’re killing your kid!”

I imagine it’s that scene that plays out in the minds of some of the women heading in. There’s a psychological and spiritual impact; a woman is braced for angry people getting out of her car…Then she sees something like the face of Christ with people wanting to truly help her, people promising to be there for her for as long as she’d like—and all of a sudden, some of these women begin to change their mind.

The Efficacy of Prayer Against Evil

Cleveland’s Letter to the Romans sidewalk mantra of “fighting evil with good” has paid off countless times, inside and outside the clinic. In fact, four years ago, Preterm’s customarily hard-edged security guard mysteriously approached a few volunteers to tell them in confidence: “You would be very surprised at how many women change their minds in there.”

“Man, that was a huge admission against her interest! And it certainly put a huge bounce in our step,” Flynn said.

We increased our presence, our prayers and Rosaries, and added to our pop-up store…a high school just recently donated one hundred free pizzas; these are the graces—a joy-filled pizza party in the heart of darkness, where disparate communities have come together as one in the face of evil.

Recently, a woman named Annie, from LaRonde Apartments, joined a sidewalk volunteer to counsel a pregnant teenager who had been weeping into the counselor’s arms. “I was in the exact same situation at your age, and I didn’t know what to do. But I kept my baby and it was the greatest decision I’ve ever made,” Annie told the teenager. “But my niece just decided to kill her baby, and now she tells me every day that she regrets it.”

The 15-year-old kept her child.

These moments of grace have so often scattered the unseen, black, flapping wings along Shaker Boulevard—but none arrived with such beauty or completeness as Shay’s. A few years ago, after seeing the pop-up store of complimentary baby goods and clothing and friendly volunteers outside of the clinic, Shay had a change of heart and decided to keep her child. The teenager and her mother told Flynn that she wanted to get an ultrasound the following week. But after three successive attempts to reach her failed—including drives out to her apartment—the volunteers worried that she followed through with her abortion.

Then, one day, Shay made contact.

Flynn quickly found a mobile ultrasound clinic in a mall parking lot—it was the lone ultrasound machine available that weekend. When Shay saw her child in her womb on the imaging screen, she broke down in tears, wailing over and over again, “My baby is so beautiful.”

After her daughter, Londyn, was born, a baby shower party was thrown in Shay’s honor at a local Catholic parish. Two years later, Shay is attending Mass with her sister at a Franciscan Catholic church. She crosses her arms against her chest when she approaches in the communion line and has told Flynn that she wants to become Catholic.

“We see Shay, her sister, and Londyn every other week or so for Mass. We go to the zoo, art museums, get lunch—whatever,” Flynn said. “And why not? Shay and Londyn have become like family—and families hang out together.”