ABORTION PROTESTS IN THE SOUTHLAND : Some Serve Conscience Without Media Fanfare

Marguerite Stoughton paced the sidewalk at a Cypress family planning clinic, saying her rosary and carrying a sign reading, “Babies Are Torn Limb From Limb Inside This Building.” She was alone.

Nearby, in the clinic’s parking lot, Patti Headland-Wauson stood with a few friends, determined to shield any woman who arrived for an appointment.

That was the scene Friday at the Family Planning Associates clinic in Cypress. It was strikingly different from the day before, when hundreds of anti-abortion protesters and counter-demonstrators had descended on the clinic to play out another brief but clamorous battle in their war for the nation’s attention.

Stoughton and Headland-Wauson also are engaged in a conflict over abortion, a protracted one, waged by armies of as few as one, two or three people, and far from the television news cameras.

Long before Operation Rescue arrived in Southern California, Stoughton and Headland-Wauson were among small bands of people from both sides of the abortion issue who have for years given up at least one day a week to take up stations at the clinic or at others in the area.

They seek no glory, they say, and rarely receive any. It is unusual for them to see even one news reporter. The only satisfaction they get is in knowing that they are doing what their respective consciences dictate.

The scene around the Cypress clinic Friday was what they usually see: a few pedestrians, and the arrival about every 15 minutes of a clinic patient.

Stoughton, a soft-spoken grandmother of eight and clerical worker who lives in Garden Grove, said she was doing housework in her home Friday morning, thinking about what she called “the brouhaha” the day before, when the urge to grab her picket sign and go to the Cypress clinic hit her.

“It struck me that just because (Operation Rescue) was here, it didn’t mean they’ve stopped giving abortions,” she said, as she walked bareheaded in the mid-morning sun. “I was hoping someone else would be here, too, but that’s all right. If all we have is one, one is enough.”

On the lapel of her shirt, she was wearing a gold-colored pin showing the soles of two tiny feet that Stoughton said are the actual size of those of a 10-week-old fetus.

Stoughton said she began coming to the clinic to pray and to carry her signs about a year ago, after she learned of a nationwide group of Catholic activists called Shield of Roses. Cypress Police Lt. Robert Bandurraga said members of the group have been picketing the clinic for as long as 10 years, usually on Thursdays and Saturdays. Stoughton devotes every Saturday to the group.

Occasionally some member of Shield of Roses, in Stoughton’s words, “gets a little carried away” and does something that triggers an arrest, such as violating an injunction that prohibits more than two protesters at a time on the clinic parking lot. Most of the time, she said, “we just pray on the sidewalk and tell the women not to kill their babies.”

Headland-Wauson also spends every Saturday working at clinics in the region. She paints a different pictures of Shield of Roses’ activities.

“They rush up to the women as they get out of their cars, and if they are told to go away they start shouting that they are murderers,” she said.

Headland-Wauson, the mother of two teen-age children, is a member of United Network, which she described as a tiny grass-roots group that is based in her home city of Anaheim.

She said she began acting as a volunteer escort for clinic patients about five years ago. Her husband, Martin, began doing the same work six months ago. His permanent station is at the Cypress clinic. She moves around from site to site. Both of them are helping to organize the counterdemonstrations against Operation Rescue’s Southern California campaign.

At one point Friday, workers at the Cypress clinic, some in surgical gowns, came out and gave Headland-Wauson and her friends a round of applause.

A few minutes later, around the corner, a passer-by walked up to Stoughton and shook her hand. “Stick in there,” he said.