The Original Sacred Assemblies for the Unborn (SAU), 1989-1991 (Part 1)

When “Operation Rescue” hit the national scene in 1988, it advocated a strategy of vigilante physical blockade of abortion centers. I argue elsewhere that is was unbiblical. For here, let me address how we sought to best protect the unborn in such a context during that season, where as many as 200 women walked away from their abortion appointments by their own informed choice.

In the spring of 1989, I initiated a Christian witness at New England’s largest abortion center, Preterm, in Brookline, Massachusetts, adjacent to Boston, which later I called the Sacred Assemblies for the Unborn (SAU). Preterm was then performing about 10,000 abortions a year. Over a two-year period we maintained a weekly presence on Saturday mornings. Usually we had from a dozen to three dozen people; on a number of occasions we had 50 or more, and several occasions we had large turnouts, including our first time on June 3, 1989, with some 225 participating. Activists from the Boston chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) were also there for the first nine months in equal numbers, but afterward called it off because, according to one of their leaders, we “were persuading too many of them.”