With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions

The Lonely Crusade of Karen Graham

106 One of the most intriguing people I’ve met through the years, even among those who were serious about their faith, was Karen Graham, an anti­ abortion activist in North Carolina. Graham was one of the leaders in the movement—one of those, in fact, on the radical edge. She had joined a group called Operation Rescue, whose primary tactic at the time was blockading the doors of abortion clinics and forcing the police to drag them away. As I began to write about this movement, and thus began to interview Graham, it soon became clear that she was as out of step with the true believers around her as she was with the values of society at large. This is the story of one young woman and her leap of faith and the disillusionment that followed. The Lonely Crusade of Karen Graham Karen Graham stood before the grave, running her hands through her wind-blown hair. It was her first time back since the day of the funeral. She folded her arms across her faded t-shirt, then squatted and stared at the grave some more. It was a warm spring day at Belmont Abbey, with the smell of honeysuckle on the breeze, and a cloud bank moving in from the west. Graham was nearly alone in the Catholic cemetery, and she said it was hard to know how to feel—hard even to remember the day of the funeral. Was it sunny? Cold? How big was the crowd? The details were receding now in her mind, but even in her current state of depression, it was easy to remember what had happened just before. Starting in the summer of 1992, Graham was a member of a grisly expedition. She had clearly emerged in the previous four years as her city’s most talked-about pro-life radical, and was regarded by some as an important national leader in Operation Rescue. Privately at least, she had always acknowledged the complications of abortion—how it was a reflection of the conflicting values of the culture and the private desperation of individual women. But she also thought it was simple at its core: These were babies being killed in the clinics, tiny human beings with fingers, toes, and a heart—and perhaps more terrible in a great many cases, the ability to feel pain “Amazing Grace” 107 as they were being ripped apart. She knew that many people didn’t see it that way, but she was also convinced that if they did—if they could somehow see the evidence for themselves—then the pressure would build for abortion to stop. That was essentially her article of faith, and if it was wrong, what hope was there anyway? So in the summer of 1992, she set out to prove it. She and several other people from the movement began sifting through the contents of plastic bags they had found in the dumpster of an abortion clinic in Charlotte, the city where she lived. She says they made seven expeditions in all, and on every one their discoveries were appalling. They found discarded medical waste—bloody sheets and suction bags, and inside the bags there were pieces of tissue, many of them recognizable as human. One night in August, she took two reporters on the expedition with her. They found a human hand in one bag—a right hand, two and a half inches from elbow to fingertip. The thumb was distinct from the other four fingers. The fingernails were tiny. They also found a left foot and a hand with a broken forearm and a right foot torn and severed at the ankle. The reporters wrote the story in two different papers—the Charlotte Observer and Creative Loafing—and Graham was expectant, hoping that at last her message was clear. But the operators of the clinic fought back, suggesting that Graham and other pro-life zealots had planted the material in the dumpster themselves. She tried to argue that the charge was absurd. As the reporters who wrote the original stories could attest, these weren’t body parts taken from a jar. The blood from the abortions was not yet dry. “We couldn’t have planted this material,” she said, “unless we performed the abortions ourselves.” But it seemed that almost nobody believed her, and the story quickly died with no apparent change in the public attitude. For Graham it was a startling moment of truth—evidence of the power...