Agenda forms around debate: Abortion fuels new direction, old division in Valley
Cecilia Vigil has witnessed strength in numbers. Chris Nunn has, too. Yet they stand on the opposite ends of an uneven distribution, by all outward appearances.
Vigil was among a small gathering of pro-choice advocates lost in an avalanche of pro-life demonstrators amassed at El Centro City Hall nearly two weeks ago. Besides her and her four friends, what Vigil estimates was fewer than two dozen other like-minded individuals who had never met before linked up over social media to support each other at the March 3 meeting.
And they would need it. Nunn was one of the principal figures in mobilizing that pro-life movement in numbers unlike anything seen in this area in years. Maybe ever. He and other members of the church-driven Imperial Valley Coalition for Life had been able to draw somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 mostly peaceful pro-life demonstrators to City Hall.
“We had realized we were definitely outnumbered,” Vigil, of El Centro, said.
“We weren’t exactly in a safe zone,” she explained, adding there were some dicey moments with how she and her friends were being treated. But she understood it goes with the territory, and she met many pro-lifers that night who understood where she was coming from.
The abortion debate in the Imperial Valley is at an unprecedented peak today, sparked by Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest’s new clinic being built in El Centro that required a state-mandated transfer agreement between the women’s health organization and El Centro Regional Medical Center to perform abortions there, one part among scores of other services and educational outreach Planned Parenthood will and does provide.
That agreement has been signed, and, legally speaking, it’s not clear whether it can be undone without litigation.
So the debate will rage on from the perspective of Nunn, whose group has already promised to show up to every City Council meeting until the council takes responsibility for the actions of the city-owned hospital, its appointed board and its administration.
No one knows what that responsibility will look like, but in finding out, the Imperial Valley Coalition for Life has the numbers to press its point in what has so far been a show of strength and coordination.
Nunn recognizes it might be too late to stop abortions in the Valley, but what the last few weeks have shown him and others is that there is an opportunity to flex some faith-based muscle across the board, directing the coalition’s new-found strength into a wide-ranging social and political agenda throughout Imperial County.
“The abortion issue is the trigger that began this groundswell,” said Nunn, co-pastor along with Walter Colace of Christ Community Church in El Centro. “This is something our faith-based community needed to do regardless of the issues at hand.”
The Coalition for Life will continue to take its fight to the City Council, but at the same time has formed 15 subcommittees directed toward different social and political aims. There is the Pastors’ Council that will convene once a month to fast and pray. There will be educational arms, to train young women as “sidewalk counselors” once abortion procedures begin. There is a post-abortive subcommittee for the counseling of young women.
There will also be a voter registration committee, Nunn said, to make sure all of those who signed the coalition’s petition can back that with votes. And an election committee to find faith-based candidates who support the values of the coalition to run for offices all over the Valley.
And there will be money for candidates and elections, too, through a political action committee, although Nunn said that is separate from what the coalition is doing.
“We’re trying to focus on the social issues that affect the community,” he said. “The PAC is going to focus on the more political issues.”
Nunn recognizes that this is grassroots political organizing in a way that hasn’t happened here before.
Rebecca Moore sees it as a microcosm of the way the so-called conservative Religious Right movement operates, a kind of homegrown version of what came out of the 1980s and 1990s from growing fundamentalist and evangelical churches across the country.
“At that time, the Republican Party and conservative political operatives, and other activists saw an opportunity in the abortion issues, sex education, school prayer, to mobilize certain constituencies. Not just around that specific social issue, but to get them involved in political activities,” said Moore, a professor in religious studies at San Diego State University and an expert in American religious movements.
“What we’re seeing is nothing new, broadly speaking,” she said, “although it appears it might be new in Imperial County.”
Nunn believes it is what the faith-based community needs and wants. In fact, he sees what the coalition is doing as responding to what the majority of the community has already said it wants regarding pro-life issues. He said the evidence was in November 2008’s Proposition 4 “Parental Notification” initiative.
While voters in the state defeated the initiative 52 percent to 48 percent against a 48-hour waiting period for minors seeking abortions, Imperial County voters cast their ballots in favor of the measure 70.8 percent to 25.37 percent.
Nunn said that was a mandate for life. “That is how we get our justification,” he said.
Mathematically, that 70.8 percent represented 28,195 registered voters, just 17.2 percent of 2008’s county population of 163,093.
Moore warned to be careful when movements such as the Imperial Valley Coalition for Life claim to represent the interests of the entire faith-based or Christian community. She pointed to the independent Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project surveys that reveal some wide differences in whether abortion should be legal among the self-professed religious or faith-based.
For instance, even Catholics in America find themselves almost evenly split in their assessment, with 48 percent believing abortion should be legal in most or all cases. That sampling size is among 8,000 Catholics polled.
Mainline Christians, made up of United Methodists, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, among others, polled believe that abortion should be legal all the time or most of the time at a rate of 62 percent.
Pastor Ron Griffen of First United Methodist Church in El Centro doesn’t believe the Coalition for Life represents all the faith-based community; his church isn’t part of its membership.
Griffen sees this idea that the coalition speaks for the faith-based community as a “hubristic way of thinking” and not Christ-like at all.
“Make sure everybody believes what they believe … that’s not freedom of religion,” he said.
Access to abortion, like access to food, health care, education; they are all salvos in a war against the poor in this world, Griffen explained, and Christian teachings in Acts 2:42 says “how we’re supposed to pool resources to help those in need,” he added.
Abortion fits in, he said, because it’s the poor who are the first to be affected when those rights are lost.
“Some of us will have to back down with what we keep demanding for ourselves when we have so much to begin with,” Griffen said.
Meanwhile, Vigil, who is 26, has to reconcile her Christianity with her desire for a women’s right to choose at a time when there is little organized support around her.
“I’m Christian; I was holding up a sign that said, ‘Christian and Pro-Choice,’” she said. “We were not pro-abortion, we were there for pro-choice, for options.”
Vigil sees the lack of organized support and presence around the pro-choice side, and she wonders whether it is because of intimidation or isolation, or some other reason; it’s not for lack of support, she said.
John Evans, a sociology professor at University of California, San Diego, and an expert on “political debates about contentious social issues,” said that lack of support is the nature of the beast.
“It’s very hard to organize around a political issue that gets people out to do something,” Evans said. “It’s just that there is already this existing social set-up that churches all have in place.”
Evans said it’s been his experience that it’s difficult to mobilize people over legal rights in the same numbers as mobilizing people around a moral issue, “around the promise that you are saving lives,” he said.
Vigil thinks that could be changing for young people, though. Of the roughly 25 people she met up with to march to the City Council meeting March 3, she found 20 of them through a Facebook page set up to gather pro-choice support.
“For the upcoming generations, it’s very much social media-driven,” Vigil said, and that will even the playing field, and strengthen the disparity in cohesive, large-scale support, she said.
Photo by Alejandro Davila.
On the Web:
http://religions.pewforum.org/comparisons
http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/comparison-Views%20About%20Abortion.pdf
This story originally appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, March 15, 2015.