JEFF DURBIN: 3000 babies a day murdered in
our nation. 3000 a day, that’s a 9/11 every day.
KID: Babies are murdered here. We should not murder babies.
ASHLEY GREY: I think the real reason they are out there is a deep deep rooted hatred
of women. JEFF DURBIN: Whatever you’re afraid of,
it’s not an excuse for you to kill your own baby.
BC: They are attacking people on the very worst day of their lives.
DAN HOWLETT: For the first time ever, the
number of people who consider themselves pro-choice in America outnumbers those who’re pro-life.
50% of Americans now say that they respect a woman’s right to choose, but half of the
population still do not. I’ll be travelling to Arizona to spend time with Jeff Durbin
and his Red Door Ministry. They are a controversial group who picket Planned Parenthood clinics
and broadcast a weekly show with a very strongly worded message.
JEFF DURBIN: Our movement in this area is
to end abortion immediately. Calling it murder and focusing on legislation that would criminalise
the performing of an abortion in any state.
JEFF DURBIN: Planned Parenthood will dismember,
decapitate and disembowel your own child. You’re not going to leave Planned Parenthood
no longer a mom or a dad, you’re going to leave the mother and father of a dead child.
My name is Jeff, I’m a pastor at Apologia church. Please turn away from this place of death.
DAN HOWLETT: Could you tell me when and why you founded Red Door Ministry?
JEFF DURBIN: Goodness, I think it’s been
about three years since we started the Red Door Ministry . So we had said at that time
that if we can do this and save even one baby, if we can bring the gospel consistently to
the abortion mills, then it’s worth our whole lives and as of today, that we know
of, over 50 babies have been saved through this ministry.
DAN HOWLETT: Do you see absolutely no difference between a mother killing her teenage son and
a mother getting an abortion? JEFF DURBIN: No. No difference. I think that
anybody that severs the heads and arms and legs off of a baby girl should receive a death
penalty, yes. DAN HOWLETT: Do you think that people just
find it quite distasteful to shout at women when they’re going in?
JEFF DURBIN: Yeah! I think that people might have the wrong perspective when we’re out
there and not understand our motivations. MAN: There is no wrong, there is no right.
It was a rape. JEFF DURBIN: For example, if we were back
during Hitler’s regime and we stood outside of Auschwitz to plead for the lives of the
Jews inside, it might make a lot of people uncomfortable.
DAN HOWLETT: Do you consider abortion to be similar to the Holocaust?
JEFF DURBIN: Yes. I absolutely do consider abortion to be the modern day Holocaust. Although,
I believe that it is a bit of an insult to Hitler to compare what he did in Nazi Germany
to what we have before us. If we take a body count of Hitler’s Germany to what we’ve
had since Roe v Wade, we have beat him by the metric ton.
JEFF DURBIN: Arizona is considered a friendly
pro-life state. It’s definitely not, ultimately just, and that we are still murdering babies
in Arizona. I think in an area like this, just where we're at in Tempe with ASU campus
right there, there is definitely a lot more hostility this way, like you see people driving
by, giving us the middle finger, throwing stuff at us, stopping and screaming at us.
DAN HOWLETT: And it’s not only Jeff and
his followers who regularly picket Planned Parenthood. Pro-choice supporters also line
the pavement and the two camps often clash.
JEFF DURBIN: And the supporters out here,
the Planned Parenthood supporters on this site generally don’t want to engage in any
kind of conversation, not a rational, peaceable conversation.
CHRISTY ANDERSON: I don’t care what you
believe; I will stand in your face day in and day out, because murder should be illegal.
BC: Murder is illegal. CHRISTY ANDERSON: No, not apparently.
BC: But this is not murder. CHRISTY ANDERSON: This is murder.
BC: This is not murder. CHRISTY ANDERSON: This is…
BC: No, it’s misleading. That’s what it is.
CHRISTY ANDERSON: How is murder misleading? It is what’s happening. There was a life
in the mother, then she walks in and there is no life when she walks out.
BC: If we do declare that abortion is not a service that should be provided anywhere,
to anyone at any time, for any reason. We take the rights of each very little individual and
place them above being able to help an entire people, which would be women in general. If
I am raped or if my child is going to be stillborn, if there is a medical necessity for an abortion.
CHRISTY ANDERSON: Rape is not the norm here, number one, and even if it were, it's still no excuse.
DAN HOWLETT: Is abortion ever acceptable?
JEFF DURBIN: Is abortion ever acceptable? I would say no. Let’s work through the issues
quickly. A, first, rape. I ask the question what’s wrong with rape. Rape is the violation
of another’s person’s body. You don’t have any right to violate their person, I
would say. But that’s what's taking place in abortion, do we give capital punishment
to children because of the crimes of the father. The next thing is incest. I know people personally
who were the products of incestuous relationships and I don’t think we should kill them. And
the final thing is the life of the mother. Because of technology, where we are at today,
the instances where life of the mother is truly in danger and you have to actually execute
the child to save the life of the mother, the number of instances is so infinitesimally
small, that to use it as an argument across the board to slaughter children is intellectually inapt.
JEFF DURBIN: They do not care for you, ma’am.
They want to murder your child. We are here to help you. Please turn to Christ and live.
DAN HOWLETT: Could you tell us about what
your life was like before you found Christ? JEFF DURBIN: I remember as a teenager that
my dad had pro-choice bumper stickers on his car.
DAN HOWLETT: What about the addiction? JEFF DURBIN: There were areas of my life that
I had not turned over to Christ and I ended up going into drug and alcohol addiction.
One night almost OD-ed, I knew that I was dying and I told God, I said, “I know that
what I’m doing is sin” and I said, “Please just don’t take my life, don’t kill me, yet…”
JEFF DURBIN: I saw Christ for who he is. My
need for him, for forgiveness and I turned to him and trusted in him and my life changed.
JEFF DURBIN: We are right by ASU which is
a huge secular university, they are pumping out atheist and agnostics like a factory.
We know they are listening, we know they can hear us and we communicate with them even
with the door shut, because we were told that our voices make it into the lobby.
JEFF DURBIN: Turn from this place of evil and death.
DAN HOWLETT: One of the tactics used by the
ministry is to bring young children to the picket line.
MELISSA JOHNSON: These are our seven children.
We have McKenzie, Titus, Casey, Racken, Rinely, Amory and Archer.
GABRIEL JOHNSON: We’re standing for the
babies that can’t speak for themselves. KID: Because it’s not right to kill your baby.
KID: Babies are murdered here. We should not murder babies.
KID: Thou shall not murder, Exodus 20:13.
JEFF: How does it relate to what’s happening today?
What does your sign have to with what we are doing here?
KID: It's saying not to murder.
DAN HOWLETT: Despite realising his views are
controversial, father-of-four Jeff is very honest about indoctrinating his children.
JEFF DURBIN: We teach our children very very
young to do justice. My daughter, Immagin is 15. She thinks it’s a perfect age to
know what’s going on. Now what’s interesting here, somebody might say something, “Well,
you’re indoctrinating your children.” Well, I’d say, “Right! And so are you.”
Everybody goes about the business of indoctrination, it means teaching.
JEFF: Do we hate these women? No.
LADY: All parents are teaching their children a world view. That’s out job as parents
is to teach our world view.
IMMAGIN DURBIN: Sometimes, I do wish that
I could have like lived a different life where things are just easier, like most kids, they
go to public school and that’s normal for them, but as for me like, I’m home schooled,
I grew up this way. What I, this is what I believe, it’s what’s right to me.
ANNALEIGH CROOM: It’s a, it’s rough sometimes, you know, how people react to, you know, you
telling them like we go and protest abortion, you know, we defend babies’ lives. They
don’t always take it so well. IMMAGIN DURBIN: I mean, I definitely do feel
like an outsider sometimes in the world, but you just learn to deal with it.
DAN HOWLETT: Do you care that you are hurting
the women’s feelings when they are going in on obviously a very vulnerable stage in
their life? JEFF DURBIN: When they call out to these moms
and we say, ‘Please don’t murder your child”, we’re not doing it in any way
to be abusive to them. We’re doing it to remind them. You’re a mom, this is your
baby. And reminding them what is truly happening. You say it’s healthcare, but today they
are dismembering, disemboweling and decapitating little boys and girls. How is that healthcare?
BC: Today they are also treating STDs and giving birth control and providing sexual
education in schools all over the country. They are doing more than just abortions.
JEFF DURBIN: Okay! And Auschwitz also served a good chicken soup and they gave people shelter
and clothing. So, do we ignore what Auschwitz did to the Jews?
BC: We’re not here to argue that we’re going to change minds or that we’re hoping
to change minds. We don’t even hope to change theirs. They are attacking people on the very
worst day of their lives.
DAN HOWLETT: Due to the number of anti-abortion
protestors, they are now established teams of escorts who accompany women to clinics
around the country. Ashley Grey founded the clinic escort team in 2014.
DAN HOWLETT: What kind of things have you
seen while you’ve been escorting women? ASHLEY GREY: I’ve seen them try to hand
women chocolate, because if they ingest food they can’t go under anaesthesia. So, it
either ruins the appointment and they have to come back or, even worse, they forget they
ate the chocolate, they go under anaesthesia and they could die, it could be fatal.
DAN HOWLETT: And what do you think about the Red Door Ministry in Arizona?
ASHLEY GREY: So, these guys in Arizona, they are a lot younger than most protestors I have
seen. They look cool, they have, you know, hipster beards. I think that they are trying
to change the stigma around what is a pro-life protestor so, most people think of old white
people waiving bibles. I think they could give us more problems than the older generation,
especially with social media and technology advances.
DAN HOWLETT: It’s true. Jeff’s ministry
broadcasts across social media in a persuasive and stylistic way, making it very hard to
realise just how biased and one sided their views can be.
MAN: Alright guys, what’s up? Welcome back
to another exciting episode of Apologia TV. That’s Joy, the girl on the TV show.
JEFF DURBIN: This is a new set we have for a new show we’re going to do. It’s just
like a lot of fun stuff. We reach people all over the world from all kinds of different
perspectives. We put out content recently, teaching Christians how to go out to abortion
mills and to minister to the women. LUKE PIERSON: In 3,2,1… action.
JEFF DURBIN: At usually Wednesdays and Saturdays, those are the surgical abortion days. Many
of you guys know about our ministry, the Red Door Ministry. We might look different than
a lot of people that are into the short hair and nice, tidy, cleaned up look and suit and
tie stuff. But that’s not necessarily biblical. Doctrinally speaking, we’re pretty old school,
ancient. We even have beards. MAN: That’s alright.
JEFF DURBIN: Yeah, so… JOY: I don’t.
JEFF DURBIN: Except for Joy. She has a spirit beard.
MAN: She’s been trying.
JEFF DURBIN: So, we were at the abortion mill again this morning.
JEFF DURBIN: We know a Planned Parent is a
business to do. We know that they kill about a thousand children a day in our nation. This
is ASU campus. ASU is one of the big party schools in the United States and during the
summer particularly women get pregnant and they come in and they kill their children.
DAN HOWLETT: What do you think is the real
reason they are out there? ASHLEY GREY: I think the real reason they
are out there is misogyny. I think it’s a deep deep rooted hatred of women and wanting
to control women. JEFF DURBIN: You’re a customer. They deal
in death.
JEFF DURBIN: The situations we are in now,
our law allows for women to kill their children. I would say my hope is that we get to a place
where the State will actually say that if a mother kills their child, it is a murder charge.
DAN HOWLETT: Is abortion murder?
ASHLEY GREY: Is abortion murder? No, absolutely not. It’s healthcare, it’s providing a
service, a very very needed service. Before abortion was legal, women were dying all the
time from illegal abortions. And when they made abortion legal in 1973, women stopped
dying overnight. It was just like that. No more deaths due to botched back alley illegal
abortions. I think they should leave people alone. You know, I don’t drink but I don’t
strand outside of bars and scream at people who do. It’s a private, personal, medical
decision. It’s none of anyone else’s business.
JEFF DURBIN: Ultimately I want to please God
and not men. And I care more about how God views the situation. I care more about ultimately
God’s truth than I do about someone’s feeling ultimately being hurt.