ARTICLES

Teen Angel

16-YEAR-OLD ON ABORTION BATTLE'S FRONT LINES

By Tracy Moran

The cold morning drizzle ends as Brenna Sullenger and her mother, Cheryl, park on a La Mesa sidestreet next to the building housing the Family Planning Associates abortion clinic. This Saturday they arrive as usual at 8 a.m. and head to the parking lot entrance. Sixteen-year-old Brenna assembles two large pictures of aborted babies while Cheryl calls out to abortionist Robert Long, who also is just arriving.

"Shame on you," Sullenger shouts. "Repent while there's still time. God hates the hand that sheds innocent blood." He ignores her.

Today, the sidewalk counselors -- Cheryl, Brenna, Marcie Northum, and a handful of others -- have a special appeal for women who come seeking abortions: the next day is Mother's Day.

"Women's hearts are a little softer today," Cheryl says. "They think of their own mothers. We can use it to prick at their hearts and their consciences."

As cars pull into the lot, the women offer brochures. "We can help you," Brenna says. "You don't have to kill your baby." Few women acknowledge the counselors. They scurry to keep their appointments as Cheryl pleads, "You'll always remember Mother's Day as the day you killed your own baby."

Brenna, because of her youth, manages to capture the attention of some of the girls going in, says Northum.

"Brenna's their peer," Northum says. "She's a great comforter. When she's talking to them, she's trying to make them see that going through with the abortion destroys them, too. She can relate that better than [the other women] can sometimes. With us, there's a mother image, so it's kind of like your mom telling you what to do. Coming from Brenna, that carries a little more weight for some of them."

While one of the women talks to a car's driver, Brenna sometimes walks around to the other side to show the passenger a model of a 12-week-old fetus. "If the girl [in the car] is somewhat upset," Northum says, "Brenna pats her on the shoulder. They accept that from her more readily because she's a young girl."

Brenna, who with her family attends Bible Missionary Fellowship in Santee, has been sidewalk counseling for about five years. She began by holding signs. "And then," she says, "I asked my mom if I could do [the talking] and she let me."

She learned by watching her mom, but, says Northum, Brenna's not out there because her mom is. "It's a personal decision for Brenna," says Northum. "If she has a choice whether to go out there or somewhere else, she'll go to the abortion clinic to minister to the women."

Brenna says she tries to be as nice as she can to those going in. "Sometimes if they look like they're going to be mean," she says, "I let my mom do it. I try to talk to them, and if they're yelling at me from the parking lot, I just keep saying what I'm saying. The men are usually the ones telling me to be quiet."

Brenna prepares for her weekly ministry by praying and asking God to give her the right words. She recalls one Saturday when her prayers were answered: a couple came into the parking lot, the girl "crying her eyes out."

"They went into the building then left a few minutes later," Brenna says. "She looked terrible. But they came back and went up a second time." Brenna and a male sidewalk counselor darted in a side door after the security guard turned his back to them. They went into the abortion clinic and found the couple sitting in front of the receptionist's window.

"I started talking to her," Brenna says, "and the guy with me started talking to the other guy. I told her we wanted to help her and that she shouldn't do it." Brenna asked if the girl wanted to go outside. She did, and they continued talking on the stairway.

"The security guard found us and told us to leave," Brenna said. A few minutes later, the couple came out and thanked Brenna and the other counselor. "The girl looked totally changed when she came up and told us she wasn't going to have the abortion," Brenna says. "It was neat."

Last summer, when Brenna, her mother, and some friends were returning from an Operation Rescue national event in Dayton, Ohio, Brenna had an encounter that didn't end so well. Driving home, the group stopped to counsel one Sunday at an abortion clinic outside Omaha, Nebraska. Brenna was standing in the parking lot when a policeman arrived and told her to leave.

"I didn't realize that it was just the clinic's lot," she says. "I thought other businesses had rights to [the lot]. I told him I was just trying to give literature." When she continued to ask him where in the parking lot she could go, he told her she couldn't go anywhere.

"Then he grabbed me by the arm," Brenna says. "I was scared. I thought, 'Uh oh. I don't know what I'm going to do now.' My mom started yelling at him, then he put me in the back of the police car and took me to the station." There the younger Sullenger signed a paper saying she'd return if the case went to trial. Luckily for her, nothing more came of the incident.

Her mother's past legal troubles were more severe. In the predawn hours of November 5, 1987, when Brenna was 6 and her sister, Rayna, 3, agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms burst into the Sullenger's El Cajon home and arrested Cheryl and her husband, Randy. The two were charged with conspiring to bomb a College Area abortion clinic in July 1987. Cheryl admitted supplying pipe and gunpowder for use in making the incendiary device, which was never detonated. In 1988 the couple pleaded guilty to conspiring to bomb the clinic. She served two years of a three-year sentence and he served 13 months. The experience, however, only strengthened Cheryl Sullenger's commitment to saving unborn babies.

Brenna too is committed to her ministry outside the clinic, and believes her classmates at Bible Missionary Fellowship Christian School respect her for it, though few teens are willing to do this kind of work. Northum believes the fault lies with parents who aren't setting an example. "[The teens] need someone to follow," Northum says. "It's hard to get out there on your own."

Patrick Sullivan, a Catholic pro-life activist who spent the Saturday morning before Mother's Day praying the rosary on the sidewalk near Brenna, Cheryl and the others, agrees with Northum. "Nobody tells them," he says. "The idea of self-sacrifice is never taught [to teens] by my generation, which brought them contraception and divorce. The me-first morality perpetuates the idea that self-sacrifice is the most foreign concept in our culture."

Sullivan, on the first Saturday of each month, also prays in front of Mission Valley's Planned Parenthood office with about a dozen young adults from the Mission San Diego de Alcala and the University of San Diego. So while there are some younger people on the front lines at abortion clinics, there are few teens.

Escondido's Deacon Ken Finn, his wife Marie, and a handful of others pray all 15 mysteries of the rosary in front of Womancare in San Marcos each Tuesday morning.

"There is a very small percentage of teens out there because it's like vocations -- we haven't asked them," Finn says. "I don't think it's because teens don't care. It's because adults haven't asked them directly and specifically. But I think if there was a concerted effort to ask them to join us, there would be a bigger response." Finn would also like to see more Catholic clergy praying in front of abortion clinics.

Brenna Sullenger agrees that the silence from the pulpits, in her case Protestant ones, contributes to the abortion culture.

"When I think about churches' reaction to abortion," Brenna says, "it's kind of discouraging, because churches don't want to get involved. They just want to make everybody feel good. I think it's sad that people don't really see how wrong abortion is. Everybody's just blinded themselves to it."