

Love him or hate him, but the guy lives his gig.Īnd because he takes abortion as seriously as the rest of us often only pretend to, he frequently asks hard and uncomfortable questions. .įor my pro-life readers, here, I’m handing the mic over to Randall Terry, who I asked to jot down some hard questions for those who say they want to make abortion illegal, but who often give short shrift to what it will actually mean for a society in which all those unwanted children might be born. (He once filmed a music video featuring a firing squad in Obama masks executing baby dolls with paintball guns to the strains of Alice Cooper’s “Dead Babies.”) But because Randall puts his money where his mouth is: another time, he not only talked a prostitute out of having an abortion in front of an abortion clinic, but he later adopted two of her children. But I’ve always had grudging respect for him, and not just because I have a soft spot for eccentric screwballs. He’s probably not yours, even if you’re pro-life. His enemies – he had them on both sides – accused him of many things, but never of being too subtle. Terry was always a cross between an angry Old Testament prophet and a rodeo clown/court jester. He’d led a movement that saw 70,000 arrests in abortion protests in what were, up until that time, the largest civil disobedience efforts since the civil rights protests of the sixties.

Here’s Labash, a pro-lifer, asking hard questions of his fellow travelers:Īlmost exactly a decade ago, when I was still at The Weekly Standard, I did a lengthy profile of Terry, who was then in the middle of an election caper too complicated to recount here, but who was once known as America’s foremost pro-life agitator, having headed Operation Rescue. My buddy Matt Labash has written the most provocative Roe/Dobbs piece I’ve seen because he (a) talked to anti-abortion nutter Randall Terry and (b) sets out to challenge both sides to assess their priors.
