UPDATE: Pro-life Groups, Clergy Protest Late-Term Abortion Doc In Germantown

UPDATE: Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Jenny Blasdell, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland, issued a joint statement reaffirming the organizations' support for Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who today begins providing care for women at a Germantown, Maryland-based reproductive-health services center.

"After Dr. George Tiller was brutally murdered inside his Kansas church in 2009, Dr. LeRoy Carhart stepped up his commitment to provide care to women who face severe health- or life-threatening complications in their pregnancies.  Dr. Carhart's courageous decision to continue serving women and their families after Dr. Tiller's murder made him the top target of anti-choice groups. These groups organized protests outside his Nebraska-based clinic and used the legislative process to make it more difficult for the women and families he served to access the care he provides in that state. As Dr. Carhart begins his practice in Maryland, we stand behind him and his staff as they provide care to women and families who often are in heart-breaking situations. It is disappointing and outrageous that these patients will have to endure anti-choice harassment outside the health center in order to access the care they need. We are confident that the people of Maryland will support Dr. Carhart and the women he serves. Marylanders will oppose any efforts to make their state the home of the anti-choice threats and intimidation like we have seen in Kansas and Nebraska."

ORIGINAL STORY:

The names of both Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King were invoked this morning alongside graphic images of aborted fetuses on a sidewalk in Germantown.

"We have to make sure Maryland doesn't become the late-term abortion capitol of the United States," said Rev. Patrick Mahoney, president of the Christian Defense Coalition, which organized the protest outside the Germantown Reproductive Health Services clinic. 

The peaceful protest was likened to speeches and protests by the civil rights leaders.

The Germantown protest was in response to Dr. LeRoy Carhart, one of only a handful of doctors in the country who perform late-term abortions, moving his practice to the Germantown clinic.

He declined a request for an interview with Patch.

"We won't stop until LeRoy Carhart stops killing viable, innocent children in this state," Mahoney said.

About a dozen religious leaders and anti-abortion activists from Montgomery County and around the region spoke at the protest, including Kelly Stauffer, who told of how she received an abortion from Dr. George Tiller when she was 14 years old.

Her health and her baby's health were not in question, she said, and Tiller said the "compelling reason" to perform the abortion was Stauffer's age.

"I think today the compelling reason [Tiller performed the abortion] was the $3,000 that my family paid to murder my child," she said.

Tiller was gunned down by an anti-abortion activist last year in Nebraska.

He was also a friend and colleague of Carhart.

The Washington Post reported Monday that Carhart announced in November that "he planned to open new clinics in Iowa and the Washington area because Nebraska had implemented a law that made it illegal to perform abortions beyond the 20th week of a pregnancy."

Mahoney said protesters would be present every day outside the clinic until the nearby businesses pressured Carhart to leave the area.

Emily Kadar was one of about half a dozen counter-protesters at the event. She was representing the Feminist Majority Foundation of Arlington, VA.

"We all came out today to support Dr. Carhart and to thank him on behalf of the thousands of women he's helped, particularly young women," she said, holding a sign demanding that the clinic stay open. "What he does is a vital service for American women."

Dr. Olga Fairfax, a counselor from Wheaton, has been protestesting abortion clinics for more than 30 years.

"I am deploring this monster, Carhart," she said. "We want his heart changed from stone to flesh... We don't want Carhart in Maryland, we don't want him in any of the other 49 states. He is an absolute frankenstein monster with blood on his hands and dead babies on his conscience."

Police presence was heavy, with about a dozen uniformed county officers there to keep the peace.