#1: SARINA DUVALL - “Someone who pickets abortion clinics.”
I have never fundamentally disagreed with anyone I like more than Sarina Duvall.
This can only end in a screaming match, I think, as soon as I spot Sarina’s burgundy Mitsubishi in the parking lot of the train station.
We’re in Pt. Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. In the car, I can hardly get a word in edge-wise Sarina is so animated, her tone touched with a thick Jersey accent. Before I can even speak once, Sarina has thanked Jesus twice; once, because she almost drove the wrong way on a one-way street. I find the sentiment foreign because I’ve never spent much time around people who evoked Jesus’ name for small favors, but to Sarina, it’s second nature.
Sarina is 24 years old. Her dark hair is pulled back in a tight, curly bun and she has clear, tan skin, a product of her mixed Hispanic and Italian heritages. Sarina smiles a lot when she talks and she’s wearing a brightly colored knit scarf. Everything about her is warm and friendly.
Sarina is also one of those people you see picketing outside abortion clinics.
We decide to talk at nearby Green Planet Coffee. Over mugs and cookies, she tells me the reason that she protests abortion clinics, specifically the one in her hometown of Tom’s River, is her religion.
“But we’re not there to condemn women or to throw stones,” she says. “We offer them prayer and counseling and advice and a hug. We say ‘God loves you.’ We want to lift them up.”
Sarina was born in Hoboken. Her family moved to Tom’s River when she was 10 years old. They were Catholic, though not particularly religious; Sarina says her mother was a drinker who quoted the Bible and then swore in the same breath. Her father was absent. Teenage Sarina got heavily into alcohol, drugs, sexual promiscuity and bullying others on the streets. She was also wildly unhappy.
After a friend passed away in a car accident, Sarina’s mother brought her to church. A woman there asked if Sarina wanted to be “saved.” Feeling like she’d hit rock bottom, Sarina agreed to accept Jesus into her heart. She’s never looked back. In 2008, Sarina married her childhood bully; a man named Eddy who had since also been “saved” and given up his vicious ways. They reconnected and fell in love.
Sarina got pregnant almost immediately after their wedding because she and Eddy don’t use contraceptives, especially the birth control pill. They feel they would be messing with ‘God’s will.’
“Were you ready to have a baby?” I ask.
“As ready as you can be at 23 years old,” she says. “The first year of marriage was tough with me being a pregnant, hormonal woman.”
While pregnant with her daughter, Shekinah, Sarina attended a Christian festival and spent time at an anti-abortion booth, fascinated by the pamphlets with babies being ripped apart. Then, not long after, a guest speaker came to her church to talk about protesting abortion clinics.
“My heart was so broken,” she says. “But then, because I was also pregnant and full of hormones, I was broken to another level. It was God saying, ‘This is what I want you to do, to be a voice for these children.’”
But Sarina had already known she was against abortion, the medical procedure wherein a pregnancy is terminated, because, she tells me candidly, her own mother was the product of a rape. Her grandmother was assaulted by two men and chose to keep the baby. This remained a family secret until Sarina’s mother was an adult.
“I understand that you feel hurt, shame and disgust. I’m not going to say I can’t see that,” she says when I ask about abortions in cases of rape or incest. “A woman is just as important as her unborn child and I know you feel disgusting and crushed but you should know there is hope. It’s a tough decision my grandmother made to go through that but it’s not the kid’s fault. Their life shouldn’t be taken because of someone else’s misdeed.”
Sarina’s mother, too, was pregnant with her and in the abortion clinic “with her feet in the stirrups” when Sarina says she felt God telling her not to do it.
“That’s two generations of people that could have been aborted,” Sarina says. “I’m living proof.”
“Do you file abortion under ‘Do not kill,’” I ask, “like in the 10 Commandments?”
Sarina nods, quoting Psalms: “God knew us in our mother’s womb,” she says. “Absolutely, that’s murder.”
I tell her I find the protesters signs and pamphlets vile. I’m surprised when she somewhat agrees. There are some signs, she says, that she would never hold up.
“One said, ‘Babies Are Killed Here.’ I don’t disagree with the statement but I don’t know how warm and Christ-like that is,” she purses her lips. “I just think you can be less vulgar. Jesus wouldn’t put a sign in their face and say ‘Baby killer!’”
Which begs the question, then: What would Jesus do?
Sarina says he would love them.
“So many women have decided not to just because someone said, ‘Someone loves you.’ I’d never tell someone they’re going to hell. That’s hate and Jesus didn’t preach that,” she says. “But a lot of women go in and don’t know what the doctor is doing. If people were more educated about abortion, I believe there’d be fewer abortions. There’s the saying, ‘If the womb had a window, no one would get an abortion.’ But no, I wouldn’t hold up a sign with a mangled fetus.”
The last time Sarina attended a protest, she tells me, was right before winter started. She brought her infant daughter with her, which offended some people passing by, who she says, gave her the middle finger, beeped their horns and yelled curses.
“Look,” I say, trying to be clear. “No one wants to be getting an abortion. None of the women going into that clinic feel good. It seems to me like you guys don’t get that.”
“We do,” Sarina replies. “The women always walk in there with their heads down. Only one time did a girl walk in with her head in the air, laughing in our faces. But I knew she was hurt. They lash out because they’re hurt.”
I say it’s interesting that most of the protesters against abortion, a women’s health issue, are men. She replies that she finds that idea of abortion as a feminist issue to be misdirection, when it should be about saving the children.
“They always think, ‘It’ll ruin me, it’ll affect my life’,” she says. “Well, you shouldn’t have laid down and done what you did. It’s the farmer’s principle, right? Reaping and sowing. You ‘made a mistake’ and now let’s just erase it really quick and act as if it never happened?”
“Would you want to see abortion made illegal?” I ask.
She nods, “That’d be great.”
“What if a doctor told you that you were going to die if you had the baby?” I ask.
Sarina apologizes because she doesn’t have an answer ready for that one. She thinks it over for a few minutes.
Finally, she says, “Me as a Christian having faith, I’d say I’d still have the child.”
I press, “Even if the doctor says you’ll die?”
She shrugs, “God is greater than that,” she says simply, her voice unwavering. “And if I do go, I’ll be bringing life into the world. I trust God over that and I’d pray that that wouldn’t come to pass.”
“You’d be leaving your husband alone with your daughter though,” I say. “How is that fair to him?”
“Knowing my husband,” she says, “he’d want me to have the baby. Doctors aren’t always right.”
This is not the idea I had when I set out to interview an abortion clinic protester. I imagined Sarina would be shrill and pushy, but her voice never loses its calm tone. She’s sitting in front of me and we’re discussing this issue that has literally become life and death (for doctors, for women, for “babies”) over coffee. The protesters I’d seen before were faceless goons in my mind; Evil, heartless monsters whose motivations I couldn’t fathom.
I am for a woman’s right to choose because I don’t believe life begins at conception and because, as I explain to Sarina, my mother works with children in the bleak and underfunded U.S. foster care system. It seems insane to me to be so hung up on life not yet begun, when children who are already in this world don’t have proper care.
Later, Sarina mentions she voted for Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential election because he is against gay marriage. I don’t get a chance to ask this before she drops me off, but I wonder how someone can consider themselves pro-life when one of those babies could grow up to want to marry someone of the same sex. It’s an unanswerable loop.
“What if you’d gotten pregnant before you got ‘saved?’” I ask. “Your lifestyle then wasn’t right for a baby.”
“I still would have kept the child,” she says after a moment. “I’m not going to say it’s not difficult but abortion is selfish.”
So now, the faceless enemy has a face to me. Sarina. All the layers of her life have made her believe the way she does. It was easier when I didn’t know her. It’s clearer in our minds to stand behind our position when we haven’t ever looked into the eyes of someone who believes differently.
Part of the problem with today’s political rhetoric is that by first dismissing our enemies, we dehumanize them. And I don’t blame us.
It relieves us of the responsibility of considering each other as complex human beings with individual histories and reasons for our beliefs — true or misguided, right or wrong.
When Sarina goes outside for a few minutes to call her husband, I write down in my notebook: “This is why I’m doing this project.”
[This is an edited version of what originally appeared. To read the unedited interview, go here.]
