Protestors Rally Outside Clinic

Carrying bent wire coat hangers and calling anti-abortion activists "born-again bigots," members of a group supporting the right of women to have an abortion demonstrated yesterday in front of a Harvard Square pregnancy counseling center.

The rally in front of Au Bon Pain drew more than 200 spectators-many of whom were passers-by. About 100 then marched across Dunster St. to picket the clinic, which was guarded by police and appeared to be closed.

Demonstrators said the Daybreak Crisis Pregnancy Center, located above the Wursthaus restaurant, is operated by anti-abortion activists who try to scare women into not having abortions.

"We need to expose them for what they are," said Kathy Lawrence, a member of the Coalition to Defend Abortion Rights (CDAR)--a Boston group that sponsored the demonstration.

Lawrence said the right-to-life movement "is a movement that wants to see women forced into the back alleys and preaches total submission of wife to husband, not unlike what the Nazis did in pre-war Germany."

One protester read aloud a letter from a woman who said she had been misled by the Daybreak Center. '"They used psychological pressure to try to persuade me that if I were pregnant--which I was--I should not have an abortion,'" read the letter.

"'They said something like "God wants you to have this baby." I felt as though I had been tricked by the promise of a free pregnancy test. This was the means by which they got me to agree to a free counseling session,'" wrote the anonymous woman in her letter.

A CDAR flyer said that Daybreak's by-laws state, "We will never advise, or in any way assist with, the killing of an unborn child unless it is a necessary part of saving the mother's life."

A Daybreak advertisement makes no mention of being anti-abortion, and offers "resources and referrals you can trust." No representative of the clinic could be reached for comment.

CDAR was formed last fall in response to the establishment of a Boston branch of Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion organization, said Lawrence. Lawrence added that CDAR's membership consists of the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Marxist-Leninist Party, Refuse & Resist--a pro-choice organization--and students from Harvard and Tufts.

"Let's face it--banning abortion is like rape. We have to control our own lives. We need to go beyond abortion rights. We need to fight for reproductive freedom. Break the chains. Unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution," said Lawrence--who is also a member of the Communist Revolutionary Party--speaking at the rally.

But not everyone who watched the rally supported CDAR's pro-choice agenda. "They're here to impose secular humanism on what is supposed to be a God-fearing nation. The pro-abortion side is anti-God and anti-life," said Mary E. Haggerty, a Cambridge resident.

The rally and demonstration were held to celebrate International Women's Day, which was yesterday.