Decades before end of Roe v. Wade, Brevard was near center of explosive abortion battle
To Bruce Cadle, the anti-abortion protests in Brevard County throughout the 1990s were like being in church: mostly singing and praying, he recalled.
But most gatherings in holy places don't also have people waving signs, barricading doors or shouting "Mommy, don't kill me!"
"It really was like a church service," said Cadle, one-time state director of the national anti-abortion activist network Operation Rescue. "Just sometimes there were folks getting arrested in the background."
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Sue Idtensohn remembers protests, too, outside her Titusville home when she was CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando. Protesters picketed in front of her house, and told her neighbors she murdered babies.
No matter which side of the abortion debate you're on, those kinds of memories — the singing, the shouts, the not-so-veiled threats — stick with you.
Even before the Supreme Court’s historic and controversial reversal of Roe v. Wade came down just after 10 a.m. Friday, many Brevard residents found their thoughts drifting back decades, to a time when the county found itself near the center of an explosive nationwide battle over abortions.
Back to when Melbourne had an abortion clinic that made national headlines, one that drew protests in which activists chained themselves by their necks to its doors; where potential abortions were thwarted and hundreds were arrested in the process.
The local protests' impact spread far beyond the Space Coast, leading to the Supreme Court in 1994 and a decision affecting the free speech rights of abortion clinic protesters.
The only thing the opposing sides have in common: vivid memories of the anger and anguish that boiled over in Brevard back when Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land.
The Aware Woman Clinic
The Aware Women Clinic for Choice in Melbourne, just south of Post Road off U.S. 1, opened in 1981 after relocating from Cocoa Beach, and would operate until 1999.
It was owned by Patricia Baird-Windle, who also owned clinics in Port St. Lucie and West Palm Beach. Abortions — about 65,000 of them before she retired — counted for about a third of the clinics' services, which also included check-ups and contraception.
From its inception, Baird-Windle and her clinic were the target of protests, threats and lawsuits. The protests, which could attract hundreds, were often the subject of national media attention, in large part because of Operation Rescue.
The militant group — known for physically disrupting abortion clinic operations, which it called "rescues" — gained national notoriety in 1988 after mounting a coordinated blockade of abortion clinics in Atlanta during the Democratic National Convention.
Two years later, encouraged by the strong anti-abortion movement in Brevard, Operation Rescue selected Melbourne as one of about a dozen cities across the U.S. to focus its "rescue" operations.
"We were one of the places that Operation Rescue kind of started a local group and then the leaders came," said Cadle, who also led the group's Brevard branch, Operation Goliath.
"Randall Terry was the founder of Operation Rescue, and he would come and stay in our house and speak at our rallies. And the next day, he'd be on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' as a guest."
Life, death and bicycle locks
The national atmosphere surrounding abortion in the early 1990s was marked by anger and fear, amplified by media reports of clinic bombings, arsons and other violence. In 1993, a doctor who had earlier been featured on an Operation Rescue wanted-poster-style handout and a clinic escort were shot to death during a protest in Pensacola.
On the advice of a federal marshal, Baird-Windle told FLORIDA TODAY in 1999, she bought a gun.
Cadle, now a pastor at Fresh Start Church in Melbourne, is adamant that Operation Rescue had nothing to do with any of that.
"Anytime there would be anything in the news about violence, ... we would speak out against it," Cadle said. "Because even though we're opposed to those doctors, we believe their life is valuable too."
Still, in its protests of the Melbourne clinic, some of its tactics seemed to breach a line other anti-abortion groups were reluctant to cross.
FLORIDA TODAY regularly covered the unrest.
Operation Rescue protestors and their allies would block doors and driveways, barring entry to the clinic. In one incident, 18 protesters were arrested after chaining their necks to the clinic's front doors with bicycle locks, which police had to remove with an angle grinder.
Activists would trace license plates to find the home addresses of doctors and nurses, where they would picket, ring neighbors' doorbells and hand them literature that labeled the workers "baby killers." Sometimes the fliers had details about an employee's family members.
Cadle maintains that the efforts were not to threaten, harass or intimidate, but to let people know what their neighbors and loved ones were doing.
"We believe that doctors that do abortions are murderers, that they're killing little innocent children," he said. "I would want to know if the person living next to me, if that's what they did for a living."
The brazen tactics overshadowed some of the group's more positive activities, he said. Its much-maligned "sidewalk counseling" also included offers of free ultrasounds, prenatal checkups, free medical care and a place to stay for women who had nowhere else to go.
But the other activities were important, he said, even if some found them distasteful.
"If you believed someone was about to be killed, wouldn't you go do what you could to stop it?" Cadle said. "We knew where 30 children a week were going to be killed, right here in our town."
"I never saw it as a political issue. I literally saw this as life and death."
Taking very different sides
Longtime Titusville resident Sue Idtensohn became CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Orlando in 1998.
She never took the rights afforded by Roe for granted, she said: She'd seen too much in the years before.
But she remembers staffers talking about the potential for a post-Roe world and some saying, "I don't really think that's going to happen. That's settled law."
"And I said, 'I think we're getting too comfortable,'" she said. "I mean, it only takes a couple of Supreme Court justices to throw it out the window."
The protesters were a constant concern, a vociferous and threatening presence for women seeking treatment. There were bomb scares. Fear of what was in the mail, when the U.S. saw a string of anthrax letter attacks that targeted news media and two senators in the weeks following 9-11.
"They would picket my Orlando clinic every single day, without exception, and then they would picket my house here in Titusville," Idtensohn said.
"The FBI and the CIA in Orlando would alert me and say 'Hey, by the way, John Smith just got out of prison and we know that he has threatened you. And so we'll make sure you get home tonight and we'll put an alert out, make sure your family is safe.'"
Idtensohn is matter-of-fact about the demise of Roe v. Wade: She's sad.
"The kinds of things I fought for, in terms of inequality, because we had autonomy for 50 years ... I think that this decision is going to irreparably change our country," she said.
"Not only the fact that a woman will not have access to reproductive health care, but the kinds of ripple effect that it's going to bring forward."
She still feels like she stood then — and stands now — on the right side of history.
"When you stop to think of what that decision meant, it meant that women could have autonomy. That they could make decisions so they could finish their education, not have an unexpected pregnancy ... That they could go on and have the kind of life that they wanted to complete," Idtensohn said.
"For 50 years, women have been able to decide for themselves and with their doctor and with their partners, whether now's the time to bring a child into the world. To take that away, take away their decision-making ability? To me, it's just unconscionable."
In the same city where picketers surrounded Itdtensohn's home years ago is the headquarters of Priests for Life, an international anti-abortion ministry that moved to Brevard in 2017.
Its national director, Father Frank Pavone, has a much different take on the matter of choice.
"That's the irony of the phrase 'freedom of choice,'" he said. "Most people that are getting abortions are getting them because they feel they have no freedom, no choice."
The end of Roe v. Wade will turn control of abortion rights over to the states. In places where abortion is banned outright, he said, it could actually be a good thing for women struggling with the possibility of motherhood.
"We help people from across the nation and around the world who have had abortions, and they suffer in various ways as a result. There's a lot of despair. There's a lot of isolation," Pavone said.
"They didn't know that following the procedure they would experience things like a tremendous decline in their self-esteem, difficulty in later relationships and later parenting. ... All of these dynamics are impacted by abortion, and a lot of them have told us they found this out only later, when it was too late," he said.
"We see this as protection for children and their families."
A beastly affair
The frequent protests and counter-protests at Aware Woman could be a beastly affair.
Kevin Fain, a retired Melbourne Police Department sergeant, recalls when he and colleagues on the force had to work shifts at the clinic, either because of what was expected there or for overtime.
Fain always hated the assignment, he said, because of the "intense, ugly emotions it brought out of people."
"The photos of abortions, the things they would call the clients … just toxic," he said. "Eye-witnessing the shenanigans of both sides was mind-blowing."
It was tough for him to reconcile what was happening inside the clinic.
"I really didn't like the issue, but just watching some of the women walking in, some of the verbal abuse they were subjected to and seeing how they were emotionally distraught about it, going in as well as coming out ... it was hard," Fain said.
"But then having to be, you know, that middle person, trying to maintain some type of order, even though it goes against my personal convictions ... just the mental jostling, as far as what you're dealing with."
So Fain worked to steer clear of the issue — until, he said, he decided he needed the clinic's services.
He took a girlfriend for an abortion, trying to hide his face, he said, as they entered.
But after the procedure, he and his "co-conspirator," he said, "just cried ... because in that instant we knew we did something horribly wrong."
Now a father and grandfather, he hates the memory of that day — one, he said, that "changed everything for me."
"We claim to be a Christian nation," he said. "And so, I think we have to have those values, and to have those values, we should be pro-life."
Supreme Court weighs in
Protesters flouted frequent injunctions to back off the Melbourne clinic and its workers, a fact that often brought them into conflict with police and resulted in hundreds of arrests over the years.
One order by a state court in 1993 created a 36-foot buffer zone around the clinic and a 300-foot buffer zone around patients approaching the clinic and the homes of staff, among other restrictions.
The injunction faced a First Amendment challenge from Operation Rescue, eventually reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down parts of the order and upheld others, including letting stand the 36-foot buffer zone at the clinic entrance.
The case, Madsen v. Women's Health Center Inc., was the first of several cases that took up the issue of the rights of abortion clinic protesters.
Its new standard for court-ordered restrictions on free speech — that injunctions "burden no more speech than necessary to serve a significant government interest" — had a lasting impact on case law, even if not the protests themselves.
"People were still willing to be arrested for violating it," Cadle said. "I don't think it really had any effect. I think people just kept doing what they believed was the right thing to do."
Asked for his thoughts about the end of Roe v. Wade, 30 years after he spent nearly every waking moment working to end abortion in Brevard County, Cadle said he was "thrilled."
"I'm glad it's overturned," he said. "I believe it's a great thing because more children, more lives will be saved as a result."
The end of an era
The Aware Woman Clinic for Choice closed in 1999. Patricia Baird-Windle was 64 years old.
Brevard had an abortion clinic for a few years after that. Baird-Windle signed ownership over to a clinic operator out of Orlando, who moved the clinic down the road to Suntree. It moved again to Cocoa in 2001 before closing for good in 2007.
Several factors played into Baird-Windle's decision to sign over management of her clinics, she said: a road-widening project that forced her to sell her clinic property; dogged protests and lawsuits by anti-abortion activists; and her own health problems.
In August 1999, Pam Platt, former FLORIDA TODAY editorial page editor, interviewed Baird-Windle.
Platt asked the mother of five and grandmother of four: "Despite all the things you've spoken of and been through, would you do it again? And why, knowing the kind of pain it has brought you?"
"There have been many times I have tried to look at the social change and the moral components of the social change and have wondered whether all of it has been as it should be," Baird-Windle said.
"That doesn't mean I would stop abortion. It does mean I would like a lot of social programs to prevent it, to make it easier on women, to make it better for women. That answer I gave made it look like I have a totally amoral view of it, and that's far from (the truth).
At "the very crucible of the sacrament of abortion work," Baird-Windle told Platt, "is the sentence in a letter written to me by a woman when I retired, and that is some women have an abortion out of love for the baby."
"That's the point," she said. "They've had an abortion out of love for the children they already have and are having a hard time feeding. They love what they are getting from their education and they know they can't stop it to give themselves the right life. It's all at once enormously complex and extremely simple."
The Supreme Court's reversal of long-standing law reminds Platt of lyrics from "There is a Mountain," a 1960s song by Donovan: "First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is."
"Patricia always seemed to know there would be a mountain again, when it came to abortion access in the United States," Platt said Friday.
"There was a mountain when abortion was illegal in the U.S. For a brief 50 years after Roe, there was no mountain ... a time when it was legal and available to more than those who could afford to travel long distances for this medical service — although with all the restrictions in the past dozen or so years in the U.S., the service was virtually non-existent in some states. And now we may be climbing that mountain for safe abortion access again. I wish more people had listened to Patricia when more could have been done to demonstrate that women’s rights are human rights and family rights."
Britt Kennerly is community issues columnist for FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Kennerly at bkennerly@floridatoday.com. Twitter: @bybrittkennerly Facebook: /bybrittkennerly.
Eric Rogers is a watchdog reporter for FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Rogers @esrogers@floridatoday.com.Twitter: @EricRogersFT.
FLORIDA TODAY's Bailey Gallion contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Roe v. Wade: Explosive battle over abortion waged in Brevard decades ago
