Abortion-Clinic Manager Finds a Friend--and Then Himself

He was sweating, as usual, and finishing another cigarette when his bodyguard told him the Penn State football team was picketing outside his new abortion clinic.

This, he thought, I gotta see. Eric Harrah made his way down to the parking lot, bodyguard in tow because, as he was fond of saying about abortion opponents, “These people are crazy.”

At the bottom of the steps, blocking the entrance to State College Medical Associates, Harrah found no sign of a football team--just a soft-faced man in a Nittany Lion sweatshirt. The man motioned to him gently. Harrah got in his face.

“Get off my steps,” he screamed. Six-feet-four, 240 pounds and openly gay, Harrah often used his size and sexuality to intimidate.

But unlike so many others, this man didn’t buckle. And eventually Harrah tired of his own tirade.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, loudly and finally.

It was the question Steve Stupar had been waiting to hear.

“You prayed for me to be here,” he said, simply.

The words made the hair stand up on the back of Harrah’s neck. “Get out of here! I don’t want to see you again!”

“I’ll be here tomorrow, Eric, because God loves you and so do I.”

As promised, Stupar was there the next day. But Harrah didn’t explode. Somehow, Stupar’s very presence made him feel good. Sometimes he would peek outside just to see Stupar’s face.

Days later, Harrah poked his head out of his office and found Stupar staring at him. He motioned, and Stupar slowly made his way over.

For the first time an activist didn’t lecture, and for the first time Harrah didn’t erupt. The two men seemed to enjoy each other’s company.

They made plans to have lunch.

*

“Eric was a proclaiming homosexual, very loud, very brash,” Stupar says now. “Most people probably would have thought of him as the most wickedest man in town.”

Since the mid-1980s, Harrah had been one of the most active pro-choice people in the United States. Ever since a chance run-in with demonstrators outside a clinic in his home state of Delaware, Harrah had vigorously and flamboyantly promoted women’s right to choose.

Along the way, he helped open and run dozens of clinics on the East Coast and in the Midwest where 250,000 abortions were performed.

He earned financial success, was invited to presidential inaugurations, dined with celebrities.

When his clinics ran into trouble with the law--there were accusations that he didn’t operate strictly by the rules--he simply moved elsewhere: Delaware. New York. Tennessee. New Jersey. Louisiana. Canada. Connecticut.

Then last year a close friend, an abortion doctor from New Jersey, asked him to help open a clinic in Pennsylvania. Harrah at first turned him down. State College, home of Penn State, was a hotbed of anti-abortion sentiment, the closest clinic was 100 miles away, and previous efforts to offer abortions had failed.

But Harrah, at 29, was looking for a new challenge; there was big money to be made. So he went to State College.

It wasn’t easy. The landlord tried to evict the clinic, and the local community hospital had refused to grant a critical agreement required by the state. At one point, 1,000 protesters marched through downtown. A bomb threat closed the facility for an afternoon.

“The only way they’re going to get rid of me now is if they kill me,” Harrah told the local newspaper, the Centre Daily Times, more than a month before the clinic opened on Sept. 18, 1997.

But underneath his bravado, Harrah was a troubled man.

He had been reared in, and had turned away from, the Pentecostal faith. During a trip home in August, he argued with his mother and sister, who for the first time confronted him about his homosexuality and his profession. And for the first time in years, Harrah found himself praying.

“God,” he implored, “if what I am doing is so terrible, and if who I am is not who I should be, and if my whole life is so wrong, then send someone to show me the right way.”

Back in his apartment a few weeks before the clinic was to open, Harrah took a baleful look at his life. He was bored, he was depressed, he felt stuck in a dead-end town in the middle of nowhere. So he grabbed a handful of blue pain pills, the ones with the white stripe, and he spread them out on a plate.

“Enough is enough,” he thought. “Tonight is a good night to die.”

One pill, then two.

Suddenly the dog barked. Harrah looked down, and in Buddy’s eyes he thought he saw a plaintive question: “Who will take care of me?”

The pills went back in their containers.

*

Steve Stupar has always been religious. Back in 1979, when he played for the Penn State football team, he led the squad’s prayer meetings. Today he’s an elder at the State College Assembly of God, the Pentecostal congregation he attended as a student at Penn State.

But Stupar is no religious fanatic. He may quote verses from the Bible like some men quote football statistics, but when the headlines announcing the abortion clinic appeared, Stupar didn’t sign up to picket. He read the stories and just shook his head at the wild things this Eric Harrah said.

Until, he says, God spoke to him.

It happened in the living room, as Stupar was looking at a picture of Harrah in the paper. Words floated into his thoughts: “I’m going to use you to have an impact on this man. Be his friend.”

Two days later Stupar found himself standing outside the clinic, wearing his Penn State football sweatshirt, waiting for Eric Harrah. A few days after that, he was sitting at a table at McDonald’s, talking to him.

Harrah took one bite of a double cheeseburger and launched a half-hour monologue.

“Everything’s going our way,” he said. “It’s been so successful.”

He glorified his business, speaking of his victories and mocking his opponents.

Across the table Stupar was listening, but at the same time he was praying for the strength not to stand up and run from the barrage.

Finally, Harrah finished and Stupar began.

“You’re locked in a personal prison, a personal hell where you’re crying and you can’t get out. You don’t know how to get out. God has sent me with the keys to open your prison door and let you out. I can’t pull you out, I can’t drag you out, and I can’t force you out. It’s your decision.”

Harrah mumbled an excuse and ran from the restaurant.

Stupar was pleased. He knew he was getting somewhere.

Over the next month, the two met four, five times a week at restaurants. Sometimes Harrah went bowling with the Stupars and their children. Their conversations were exhaustive, sometimes going on for hours as they contemplated life, happiness, God.

One day Harrah asked Stupar to go with him to buy a Bible. The two drove to a quiet strip mall and walked through the aisles and aisles of choices. Stupar stopped in front of a green book.

“And we bought it. Eric loves dark forest green.”

But Harrah still had no intention of quitting his work at the clinic. And Stupar began to wonder if it would ever happen.

“When I was with him I knew it was possible,” Stupar says. “When I would get away from him and look at the situation . . . and I saw everything he was doing, I thought it actually was going to take a miracle.”

So one night near the end of October, at a surf-and-turf family-style restaurant, Stupar decided it was time. God, he says, provided him with three visions, and he shared them with Harrah, one after another.

“The name John keeps coming up. What does that name mean to you?” he asked Harrah.

Harrah immediately thought of his grandfather. His name was John, but that was no secret, and the name was common.

Stupar offered another vision. “I saw a girl in a plaid outfit and a white shirt.”

Harrah immediately saw his sister. The image was from a picture he had at home. But that could be a coincidence.

So Stupar pulled his last card.

“The Holy Spirit revealed to me a plate that had blue pills on it with white bands,” he said.

Harrah was staggered. He had not told anyone about his brush with suicide. Somehow, Stupar knew.

Two weeks later, Harrah prayed with the Rev. Paul Grabill of the Assembly of God for forgiveness, for the Lord to come into his life, for him to accept God as his savior. The next day, Nov. 2, Harrah took his first communion in 11 years.

He stood in the pews that morning and shook from head to toe as he praised God and shouted his name. Finally he felt relief.

Three days later, he resigned from the clinic.

*

The clinic--the one the old anti-religious Eric Harrah had opened by force of his own sheer will--is now one of the most successful he ever started. Close to 200 abortions are performed each month.

Harrah’s departure is not mourned by all abortion-rights activists, however.

“I’m pleased to see him go. We still do not consider it to be a safe clinic,” says Joanne Tosti-Vasey of Centre Countians for Choice.

To the other side, Harrah’s conversion is--well, a miracle.

“What happened with Steve and Eric is something beyond the five senses and we believe is just a marvelous intervention by God,” Grabill says.

Lounging on the couch in Grabill’s office on a rainy winter afternoon, Harrah reflects. Was he to blame for all those abortions at his clinics? “I didn’t make anyone go,” he says.

He sits up and laughs off the idea of explaining his metamorphosis. It should be obvious why it happened. It was God’s will. He feels sorry for those who don’t understand.

Someone asks about his sexuality. He’s still a homosexual, he says; he’s just not practicing. He talks about the money everyone made from abortion, the way he rationalized by saying he was helping young women. He preaches sexual responsibility.

And then Harrah stops. He reaches out and grabs a nearby hand.

“Now, what about saving you?”