PHOTO: The men of Operation Save America close out the group’s weeklong anti-abortion protest in front of the Nathan Deal Judicial Center in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 22, 2023. (John McCosh/Georgia Recorder)
This story by Sofia Resnick appeared on Colorado Newsline on September 14, 2023. We are sharing it in two parts.
Wendell Shrock doesn’t believe in condoms. “We should leave the uterus to God,” the street preacher from Tennessee tells States Newsroom, in front of an abortion clinic outside of Atlanta, mid-morning in late July. Sweat drips from his cowboy hat into his salt-and-pepper beard that stretches halfway down his red-plaid shirt.
The retired police officer is running security for the conservative Christian group Operation Save America’s annual national event. Their followers interpret the Bible literally. Some believe constant procreation is God’s will.
Shrock surveilled the crowd while his wife, Dawn, cared for six of their 11 children on the opposite end of a sidewalk crowded with warring abortion messages. One of their daughters walks over, and Shrock explains she will wed soon. He’s been praying God will give her 20 children. (For privacy reasons, he doesn’t share her age.) One of his sons got married about six years ago at 18 and has had a child every year since.
Shrock says with pride that Dawn, who wears a hair covering and a long dress, has never held a public job.
“God created a woman, not only to have a baby and a baby to grow inside of her, but to nurture a baby,” says Shrock, who is not a spokesperson or leader for the group. “I could never have the closeness to my children that my wife has. That’s because God created her that way. He created her different from me. And I know that goes against some of today’s norms. ‘We’re all the same’— that’s not what my Bible says.”
Overwhelmingly, men are driving the quest to restrict and remove women’s reproductive rights in as many states as possible. Women leaders are and have always been involved in this decades-long fight. But in the post-Roe era, when more mainstream anti-abortion groups are trying to navigate increased bipartisan support for reproductive rights, a more extremist male-dominated faction has risen up. Groups like Operation Save America want to put women on trial for abortion. They want to eliminate all abortion exceptions and certain forms of birth control and fertility treatments. And they are finding support for these messages across the U.S. — in conservative churches and among conservative Christian lawmakers.
But even beyond the militant corner of the anti-abortion movement lies a male-dominated network of academics, attorneys, judges, lawmakers and lobbyists working on legal arguments that position fertilized eggs as constitutionally protected persons. And now that federal abortion rights no longer exist, these men are able to say the quiet part out loud: that somewhere between conception and the first few weeks of pregnancy, the rights of the zygote, embryo, or fetus trump those of the pregnant woman.
South Carolina Supreme Court Justice John Kittredge recently argued as much in his opinion upholding the state’s so-called “heartbeat” ban, which was approved by the majority on what recently became the only all-male state supreme court in the nation.
“To be sure, the 2023 Act infringes on a woman’s right of privacy and bodily autonomy,” Kittredge wrote. “The legislature has made a policy determination that, at a certain point in the pregnancy, a woman’s interest in autonomy and privacy does not outweigh the interest of the unborn child to live.”
For South Carolina right now, that point is approximately four weeks of pregnancy.
Shrock recently texted States Newsroom about the gender roles he’s laid out for his daughters.
“As my daughters were growing up, I would from time to time ask them what they wanted to be when they grow up. Regardless of their answers, I would take them to this scripture and tell them that this is what God has said they should do when they grow up,” Shrock wrote, then quoted from the second chapter in the New Testament’s book of Titus, his version varying slightly from other translations:
Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may instruct the young women in sensibility: to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, SO THAT THE WORD OF GOD WILL NOT BE BLASPHEMED.
Asked to explain the verse on the phone, Shrock warned, “You won’t like it.”
“God in the Bible, in Genesis, God created a man to provide, protect,” he said. “And he gave the man a mission. And he created the woman; he said he needs a helper. God gave me a mission, and it’s my wife’s job to come alongside me and help me with that mission. And I know that goes against the world’s grain. They’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, what if she wants a career and what if she wants recognition? What if she wants to climb the corporate ladder?’ Well, God created my wife to have babies, to — literally what it says in Titus.”
Operation Save America’s pervading message is about empowering men and boys to adopt an old, punitive Christian worldview, one more widely embraced when women had few rights and power. But they also take their roles as provider and protector seriously.
For its national director Jason Storms and his father-in-law, longtime anti-abortion radical Matthew Trewhella, that partly means buying guns and building militias. Trewhella has shared his 2013 manifesto calling for government defiance with many interested state lawmakers.
“We live in a culture of so many weak and pathetic Christian men who couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag if their life depended on it,” Storms said in August 2022, from the pulpit at Mercy Seat Christian Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, where he is the minister of evangelism and Trewhella is the lead pastor. “It’s not being a protector to your family that God has called you to be. Get yourself in shape. Cultivate some physical strength. Buy guns. If you need to, buy a lot of guns. It’s no limit on gun purchases; you have my blessing. … And if you buy a gun and you buy ammunition, train with it, and get around a group of men that you can train with. Get around a group of courageous men who will fight, bleed, and die with you, for you, and for your families and for your liberties.”
A 2021 YouTube video that was posted on Operation Save America’s website featured suggestive and violent imagery involving scenes of a man with an assault rifle, then cutting to a Planned Parenthood facility, while reciting the biblical verse that begins, “To everything there is a season” and includes the line, “a time to kill.”
That video “was removed by the uploader” after the initial national publication of this States Newsroom report.
Storms, in a recent interview, said his organization doesn’t advocate for violence against abortion providers and believes in advancing its causes through peaceful persuasion. He said the film was produced by a friend for a Christian film festival and is not an endorsement by OSA to commit any violence against Planned Parenthood or abortion providers. When asked why the video was on OSA’s website, Storms said that he’d been meaning to take it down because of its “mixed messaging.” It was removed a short time later.
Storms said, under his leadership these past few years, he is trying “to teach our boys to be hardworking, responsible, sacrificial, caring, thoughtful.”
This year Operation Save America hosted its first Manhood Restored Bootcamp for boys and young men in Frankfort, Indiana, which involved hand-to-hand combat training and an event referred to in the schedule as “shooting range.”
“Aborting your own child is a betrayal of every godly masculine virtue,” reads an OSA Facebook post leading up to the bootcamp. “Making allowance for others to abort their own children emasculates society, decimating its soul and conscience. Abortion will end in America when Men become Men again.”
Storms said this bootcamp is also about teaching men to be responsible and good to women, including when it comes to sex and reproduction. He said he’s against “toxic masculinity” and noted that women participate in his organization.
“We do have a lot of very active women, and women that have jobs outside the home, like, all my kids.”
In addition to claiming to protect women, OSA approves of penalizing them for their reproductive decisions. They call what they support “abolitionism,” and use language from anti-slavery and civil rights movements.
“Thirteen states have banned abortion,” Storms said during the last protest of OSA’s summer event in front of the Nathan Deal Judicial Center in Atlanta, on July 22 (at the time it was actually 14 states that banned abortion at all stages; now it’s 15). “In all those states they’ve given immunity to mothers, and mothers are still killing their children with immunity. That is a problem. We must pursue equal protection, equal justice, equal weights and measures.”
In a follow-up interview post-publication, Storms said the purpose of including criminal penalties for women is as a deterrent.
“I don’t want any woman to go to jail,” Storms said. “The bigger debate is more about the humanity of the preborn child than it is about the punishment for the moms. The whole reason why pro-life organizations exempt the mothers from punishment is because they think that that’s going to help them politically, with public opinion, to make it more palatable. But that’s actually not true. Now 15 states have banned abortion, right? Every single one of those exempt the mothers from punishment, so moms can still legally do self-managed abortion in every one of those states.”
Storms acknowledged there is a difference of opinion among members and leaders about how harsh penalties should be.
“We readily acknowledge the place for various mitigating circumstances which would cause a massively reduced sentence if a woman did procure an abortion under an equal protection law. We certainly do not want to pursue the harshest of penalties. … Our heart is not to see women executed or anything like that,” Storms said in an interview.