Asheville Pregnancy Support Services often gives baby gear to women who feel they can't afford to raise a child.
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"I thought they might be really defensive or judgmental," Frontino recalls. "The first word out of their mouths was to ask our forgiveness that they hadn't dealt with this sooner. I think we were all surprised." Five years have passed since that initial summit meeting, and against all odds, they are now good friends. The protester has left Hutchinson's church, but no one wanted to stop meeting, because they had found a larger mission. Now they are out to show how people who disagree violently can debate civilly, even lovingly, and find some common ground. They know they won't change one another's core beliefs, but that doesn't mean they haven't changed.
Friends or not, it took a year to come up with a common-ground statement of goals: to decrease abortions, relieve the social and economic conditions that lead women to consider abortion, make adoption easier, condemn violence and keep talking. "One of the principles is the importance of factual information," says Lynn von Unwerth, a nurse at Asheville Planned Parenthood who has been attending the meetings from the start. And then she pauses: "That's something we're still wrestling with."
Hutchinson has wrestled with it himself, as a spiritual matter. "I never would have said that the ends justify the means," he says. "But I know that was in my heart--if lying helps save a baby's life, that glorifies God." He has read some pregnancy-center brochures that he suspects are maybe shading the truth in the name of a larger good. "This whole process has reminded me that Jesus is not a Machiavellian," he says. "It really helps me trust the sovereignty of God. He's in control of who lives and dies. My effort is to serve folks, and the means I use matter. I have to glorify Jesus. The results are in God's hands."
Since Hutchinson's church sponsors the Asheville pregnancy center and the former director goes to Blue Moon meetings, Planned Parenthood's Von Unwerth brought in examples of its literature and argued that some of it was misleading and out of date. She points to one brochure that is still in use called "You're Considering an Abortion: What Can Happen to You?" It warns, "Your next baby will be twice as likely to die in the first few months of life" and "After an abortion you may become sterile." The citations throughout are to journal articles dating back to 1967, with none from the past 20 years. Since that discussion, Wood took over the Asheville center and Hutchinson hopes the topic will be revisited. Wood says she would be glad to meet with the group; she has created a new brochure, but would be prepared to discuss the ones she inherited and still uses. "It's been a real education about the scientific facts and data and who are reliable sources," Hutchinson says. "That gets to the heart of the divide. If we as a society can't agree on who is the gold-standard source of medical information, that just reveals we've really got problems."