It all started nearly 30 years ago with a trash can full of babies. Father Paul Schenck, who was a Protestant minister before converting to Catholicism in 2004, had just wrapped up a worship service when a couple from his congregation rushed up to him and said, “There’s something urgent we need to see you about right away.”
“I invited them into my study,” Father Schenck recalled, “and they told me they had moved into a home in the neighborhood, and … [the wife] was rocking the baby in the front room. She noticed a medical personnel in a white lab coat step out of the building across the street. [He] had in his hand what appeared to be a plastic bag.” The woman described to him how the lab worker then lifted the plastic bag up to the sun, poked at it with his fingers, said something to some nearby colleagues, and threw the bag into the trash.
“She was so suspicious, she told her husband,” Father Schenck told LifeSiteNews. “He went into that trash container and retrieved not one, but four plastic bags, and they brought them … to my study. We opened them, and in them were the remains of four little preborn babies.”
“We could discern the sex of three of the four,” Father Schenck said of the gruesome discovery. “They had little baby faces, little hands and feet, but their heads were severed, their bodies eviscerated. One little boy had his spine sticking out at the middle of his back.”
“This was the first time in my life that I looked on the direct victim of an abortion,” he said. “Until then, I knew abortion was morally wrong, but I believed people made bad moral decisions, and that was my mission as a minister, to help them find forgiveness and healing. I still believe that, but I didn’t have in mind that first victim.”
Father Schenck gave the babies’ bodies a proper burial, and kept checking the trash for more victims. “We found two more before they got wise to ask for a lock on the container,” he said. Shortly thereafter, local pro-life activists reached out to him and asked if he would accompany them to a local abortion clinic to pray and counsel women.
When Father Schenck told his twin brother, Rev. Rob Schenck, about what he had seen in his study, his brother was appalled.
“During those years … I was doing Christian humanitarian work in inhabited garbage dumps in Central America,” Rev. Schenck explained. “The fact that I watched children living amidst trash; they were essentially discarded children living in massive inhabited garbage dumps, and the news reached me of what [Paul] was experiencing with babies in our own backyard being thrown in trash dumpsters – that was the connection for me in my heart.”
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Together, the brothers began a robust pro-life ministry, visiting clinics to pass out Bibles and literature to abortion-minded women and counseling them to choose life. But abortionists didn’t take kindly to their presence on their sidewalks. They were sued by a group of abortionists in New York, locked up in county jails, and even did time in federal prison for their pro-life activism.
Eventually, the New York lawsuit took Father Schenck all the way to the Supreme Court, after he challenged an injunction granted by a district judge that barred him and other pro-life activists from going within 15 feet of any abortion facility entrance, or within 15 feet of anyone approaching an abortion facility – effectively creating so-called “fixed” and “floating” buffer zones, respectively.
With the help of American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) attorney Jay Sekulow, Schenck fought the judge’s ruling all the way to the highest court in the land. At the time, his victory was only partial – the court upheld the fixed buffer zone, but voted 8-1 to strike down the floating buffer.
Then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in explaining the court’s ruling:
The floating buffer zones prevent [sidewalk counselors] from communicating a message from a normal conversational distance or handing leaflets to people entering or leaving the clinics who are walking on the public sidewalks. This is a broad prohibition, both because of the type of speech that is restricted and the nature of the location. Leafletting and commenting on matters of public concern are classic forms of speech that lie at the heart of the First Amendment, and speech in public areas is at its most protected on public sidewalks, a prototypical example of a traditional public forum.
In June, the Supreme Court finally ruled fixed buffer zones unconstitutional, too, decrying them as an “extreme step of closing a substantial portion of a traditional public forum to all speakers.”
Comparing the most recent case to his brother’s case in the 1990s, Rev. Schenck said, “they really are companion cases,” and said the decision was “really good news for us pro-life counselors.”
Despite all the trials the brothers have endured in fighting for the rights of sidewalk counselors, Rev. Schenck said, it was “worth it. Completely worth it. Both of us would live it again and do it again.”
These days, the Schenck brothers are still active in the pro-life movement, but at 55, their activism looks much different than it did in their mid-twenties, when they first began.
In 2010, Paul Schenck was ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he directs the Respect Life office. He remains active in pro-life ministry nationwide.
Rev. Rob Schenck now runs Faith and Action, a Washington, D.C.-based Christian mission that reaches out to politicians, judges, and their staff on Capitol Hill with the Gospel of Christ.