Asheville, North Carolina Councilman Cecil Bothwell Acts as Abortion Center Escort

State   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Jan 1, 2009   |   9:00AM   |   WASHINGTON, DC

Asheville, North Carolina Councilman Cecil Bothwell Acts as Abortion Center Escort

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 21
, 2009

Asheville, NC (LifeNews.com) — Newly-minted city councilman Cecil Bothwell has received considerable national news attention recently because he is a declared atheist, and because the North Carolina Constitution prohibits anyone who denies "Almighty God" from holding office.

Bothwell is also coming under fire because he continues to work as an escort at an abortion center despite his position in local elected office.

One person making an issue of the discrepancy is local figure and Southern Heritage activist, H.K. Edgerton, an African-American known for parading while wearing a Confederate uniform as he carries the Stars and Bars flag.

What no media outlet has mentioned is that, for many years, Bothwell has been a volunteer "escort" at the Femcare abortion facility in Asheville.

Once a month, wearing a blaze-orange vest, Bothwell patrols the Femcare parking lot, greets pregnant women at their cars and walks them to the door, sometimes holding the door, inside of which they will have their pre-born children killed.

"I… have such a high regard for constitutional rights that I’m willing to put my life on the line to protect women who are threatened with violence when they seek access to family planning help,” Bothwell posted on the Asheville Citizen-Times on-line commentary site prior to the November election.

Local pro-life activist Meredith Eugene Hunt disagrees with Bothwell’s characterization.

Hunt told LifeNews.com: “Mr. Bothwell doesn’t stand up for constitutional rights, if he thinks aborting children is one of them. He doesn’t put his life on the line, because there’s virtually no danger.

She continued: "And it’s not true that women who come to abort their children are threatened with violence, unless it’s the violence of abortion. If he calls aborting a child, ‘family planning,’ what will city planning be?”

Councilman Bothwell once wrote in an Asheville weekly newspaper that the human fetus is a not a child, but a “parasite.”

Hunt has told Bothwell that he is “ignorant of the natural world if he believes that parasites are ever of the same species as the host.”

“While we were sidewalk counseling at the abortion place, and as he was leaving, Mr. Bothwell once stopped to assure us that he bore no personal animosity towards us,” said Hunt.

“He told us that the situation reminded him of the cartoons that feature Ralph the wolf and Sam the sheepdog. Ralph spends every day trying to steal the sheep, and Sam spends his day protecting them," she said. "At 5:00 p.m., a whistle blows, and Ralph and Sam punch the time clock and part company with amicable words. When he said this, I replied to Mr. Bothwell, ‘But, this is real.’ He never said whether he thought he was the wolf or the sheepdog.”

Councilman Bothwell is listed as a leader of the Social Justice Human Rights Team at the Asheville Unitarian-Universalist Church.

Femcare was featured in a February 15, 2007 Time magazine cover story, “The Grassroots Abortion War.”

ACTION: Contact Bothwell here.

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