It was 7:30 on a Tuesday morning and there were already two women holding signs with fetus ultrasounds standing outside of Women’s Health Services, a family planning center in Brookline that offers several gynecological health care services, including first and second trimester abortion.

The women identified themselves as sisters Noreen Caveney and Mary Anne Kahler. Caveney agreed to an interview, but anytime a woman parked her car in the clinic’s driveway and stepped out to walk through the door, she would stop to call out to them.

“Excuse me! Good morning! If you had an unplanned pregnancy, I’d love to talk to you! My sister, can I talk to you? My name is Noreen, I’m a registered nurse. I’d love to give you some information. We’re here on the sidewalk for you! We’ll be waiting for you.”

In the thirty minutes of the interview, she attempted to communicate with three different women, all of whom arrived accompanied by a man. Two of the women ignored her, and one waved back sarcastically. One man came up to Caveney and said he was grateful for what we were doing, and that he had just manage to convince his sister not to go through with an abortion.

Below is a condensed version of what she said on that day.

Q: Can you describe what you’re doing right now?

A: “We’re actually doing two different things. We are here to pray and a lot for what we call sidewalk counseling for women for are in crisis who had an unplanned pregnancy. This has kind of turned their world upside down. ‘Wait a minute, I can’t be pregnant, I’m going to school’ or you know, ‘I’m about to start a new job,’ whatever. They’re really at a point of crisis in their lives. And unfortunately, nowadays, with technology, that’s not perfect technology, and there’s an ultrasound, and women are told, ‘There’s something wrong with the baby, you should abort. Now, experience has long showed us that many times that technology is incorrect. Couples have said, ‘We’re gonna have the baby’ and they had a perfectly normal baby. So there’s all these layers, these concerns. So we are here, really, to talk about help available for you.

We have loved ones on both sides of this. We have a sister who shared very open with us that she’s been through the abortion experience. And, you know, there was no one on the sidewalk for her. But she doesn’t know if she would’ve gone another way if someone was there to help her. And then my daughter had an unplanned pregnancy and considered abortion but did not go that route and has had beautiful children. So we’ve seen both sides. So we’re just here to offer loving support to really families in crisis, and let them know there are other alternatives. That are far safer and far less emotionally traumatizing. The other day a woman called a talk show, and she said she was in distress and ‘I had an abortion ten years ago, I can’t get over it,” she was just in such pain and such misery. And she said ‘I felt like I was manipulated’ and she said, ‘I’m just so depressed. I just can’t get over it.’ And there’s a higher breast cancer rate. I’m a registered nurse. Now, it’s not politically correct but there is, if you have a miscarriage or an abortion, it interrupts the ductile development of the breast cells. So there’s a higher risk of breast cancer after an abortion or a miscarriage. There’s higher rates of autism. And there’s a post traumatic stress, for many women.

Q: What is your approach when you see people go inside the clinic?

A: We try and just reach out to them. To say, ‘We’ll just talk for a few minutes. We’d like to give you some information’. I believe in informed consent. I don’t think anyone in there is going to tell them, ‘You’re gonna have a higher risk of breast cancer.’ You could be twenty years from now, you could be getting chemotherapy. And some women don’t win that battle, our cousin died of breast cancer in her fifties.

Because they’re told, ‘If you just have an abortion, it’s a quick procedure, and then you’ll be fine. And you’ll go on. And many women are not. They come for the procedure, they come back maybe once, but after that, you’re on your own. They’re not gonna provide you with counseling, no one will hold you hand. So it’s a really really difficult situation. And you know, life itself is just priceless. And what right do we have, if given a gift, to destroy that gift of life.

Q: Do you see teenagers come here that often?

A: Oh, sure, yeah, it’s very sad. And they come with friends and their friends and family and they think they’re being very supportive of them. But in the end, the person is more broken. It’s not a fix, it’s more of destruction. You see, fear is so big your brain is paralyzed, it’s tunnel vision, our sister said this to us too. You tell yourself, ‘This is what I have to do, I have to do this’ and so by the time they get here, emotionally, many feel they’ve detached from the child by the time they get here, and it’s really difficult. What we want to do is reach out to the woman and say, ‘Let us help you’ because in her mind, either the baby’s gonna be okay or she’s gonna be okay but not both.

They see one being okay or the other. Either, ‘I’m going to have this abortion and I’m going to be okay,’ or ‘I’ll have the baby but then I’ll lose my life’ They see it as an either/or, they don’t see it as a both/and. When my daughter was 18, she was was pregnant, she had already been accepted to go get her bachelor’s degree in accounting. Between high school and college, it was all laid out, there was the plan, and then she was pregnant. We were pretty devastated, and really upended, but we stayed, we supported her, and she had the baby, and she went back to school, and she became an MRI technologist. She bought her home as a single woman, and all these things fell into place. Was it easy? No. But today, that baby is starting high school.