Emma Craig was outside the Beverly Hills Medical Center on Wilshire Boulevard, spoiling for a fight. Armed with a bullhorn, sidewalk chalk and “giant photos of dead babies,” the Bay Area art teacher and antiabortion activist had arrived with her confederates last summer to pray and protest against a clinic seeking to expand its services to California amid a flurry of national restrictions on reproductive care. Construction on the DuPont Clinic , a highly specialized abortion provider based in Washington, D.
C., had halted weeks earlier. But members of Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust — who received confirmation of the development from Beverly Hills officials, emails show — decided to keep protesting anyway.
The Survivors, as they call themselves, were geared up for weeks of aggressive street outreach, in-your-face pickets and guerrilla freeway banner drops. Their Beverly Hills campaign would offer a playbook on future efforts to shut down a clinic even in the nation’s cities and states that most support abortion rights. “We wanted to demonstrate to the building management and to the city, if this clinic goes in here, it’s not going to be good,” Craig said.
“You’re gonna have protesters in your beautiful town with these terrible giant photos.” Almost as soon as they were approached, public records show that Beverly Hills officials moved swiftly to address the concerns of a group considered extremist even within California’s antiabortion movement — �.
