March 29, 2024
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Fire & ice As an abortion opponent, Terry Hughes ignites passion; as an expert on glaciers, he coolly challenges scientific minds

Stationed between bloody pictures of aborted fetuses, Terence Hughes is spending his usual Saturday igniting the wrath of passers-by in downtown Bangor.

Jeers, catcalls and obscenities assail eastern Maine’s most notorious pro-life activist as he stands in front of the Mabel Wadsworth Women’s Health Center on Harlow Street encased in a sandwich board displaying the hair-raising photographs that make adults rage and children cry.

“Why don’t you mind your own business and let people live their lives the way they want to, you goddamned heathen?” a motorist screams.

Hughes, who takes such comments in stride, says the people hurling insults likely have had an abortion or that someone close to them has had one.

“They’re in denial – why else would they be so angry? We remind them that they’ve been involved in something really terrible – taking the life of their own child – and they can’t handle it,” he says with his customary forthrightness.

JoAnne Dauphinee, president of the local National Organization for Women chapter, has her own theory about why Hughes infuriates people.

“I think people’s anger … comes from his ‘holier-than-thou, I-am-the-one-true-way’ in-your-face rudeness,” she says. “From a feminist perspective, he seems to have no respect for women. It’s extremely disrespectful to women to think we aren’t adults and aren’t able to make our own choices.”

Hughes’ penchant for going against the grain doesn’t stop with abortion. He has his feet in two worlds as far removed from one another as they can be. He moves easily from the overheated realm of child-bearing politics to the frozen polar ice caps.

The scientist

A tenured professor in the University of Maine’s Department of Geological Sciences and the Institute for Quaternary and Climate Studies, Hughes, 64, is one of the world’s leading experts on glaciers.

Even here, he’s considered something of an iconoclast, but he’s earned his colleagues’ respect.

“Most people consider him a genius,” said Professor Daniel Belknap, department chairman.

“Terry will put up an idea that’s controversial and follow it up to the nth degree. He’s someone who finds great satisfaction in going against the established pattern to see if he can find the weak points and new ways of thinking, which is a very admirable way of looking at things. We joke around here that Terry’s the kind of person that will give you a hundred new ideas a week and 99 of them might be wrong. But that one is golden,” he said.

Hughes, who has won more than a dozen grants from the National Science Foundation, frequently travels to Antarctica and Greenland to measure the movement of glaciers and determine how they have waxed and waned over millions of years, influencing global climate changes.

Professor Harold Borns, founder of the Quaternary Institute, first hired Hughes almost 30 years ago.

“Terry has enormous insight into things that others don’t seem to have. He’s sort of the conscience of the glaciological community,” Borns said. “He comes up with ideas [that may seem] crazy, but most of them work out to be correct.”

For example, scientists initially scoffed at Hughes’ argument that ice sheets, because of their changing temperature and density, move up and down rather than horizontally, Borns said. Now his theory is accepted by many scientists.

Hughes also suggested that marine-based ice sheets were larger than previously thought and that they extended deep onto the continental shelves of the Arctic Ocean.

“That idea has been dismissed for many years and is only now beginning to be accepted by others. But he first had the idea,” Belknap said.

Hughes also developed the physics of how pieces of the ice shelf break off and are pulled out to sea, according to Belknap. “Thanks to Terry’s work, scientists now realize that the potential for rapid climate change and sea level rise is much greater than they understood by looking solely at the records of continental – or land-based – ice sheets,” he said.

As a leading advocate of the importance of dust in climate change, Hughes went against the grain yet another time. Many people believe dust is a consequence of ice ages, but Hughes believes dust actually precipitated the ice ages, Belknap said. The theory is still controversial.

Hughes “has the ability to see the bigger picture and how-where the various pieces fit,” said Professor David Bromwich, an atmospheric scientist at the Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center, where Hughes himself once worked.

Bromwich is collaborating on a project headed by Hughes in which experts in a variety of fields are studying the Laurentide Ice Sheet to determine where contemporary climate is headed. The ice sheet covered much of North America 20,000 years ago.

Hughes “had a really brilliant concept in bringing all these different disciplines to bear on this problem,” Bromwich said. “[The ice sheet] has never been studied in such a comprehensive manner. He is able to think outside the box and pull together pieces that, until now, had been functioning independently … but really need to be integrated in order to answer the questions more completely.”

South Dakota cowboy

Growing up with his two brothers on a cattle ranch in Fort Pierce, S.D., where the Bad River meets the Missouri, Hughes said he had a “wonderful childhood, with wide open spaces and rolling grasslands.”

He was expected to complete his share of chores, like fixing fences and shoveling manure, but occasionally he got to play the role of a real broncobuster – roping and branding cattle. His Western roots go deep – he wears cowboy boots every day of the year.

Coincidentally, the area in which he spent his boyhood marked the southern limit of the great Laurentide Ice Sheet that he would later study. The huge granite boulders left by the ice sheet proved an endless source of fascination for him even as a child, he said.

Hughes’ passion for travel was ignited by the vast countryside around him. “Growing up on a cattle farm, there are far horizons. You can see for miles in every direction and the skies are very clear – you can see forever. It was that, plus reading books, that instilled within me a yearning to see the world,” he said.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, Hughes went on to Northwestern University to earn master’s and doctoral degrees.

His future as a glaciologist was cemented at Northwestern after he became intrigued by the book “Those Astounding Ice Ages.” Later, one of his professors, a prominent glaciologist, helped him obtain a research position at Ohio State University’s Institute of Polar Studies, now the Byrd Polar Research Center.

Hughes chalks his life up to serendipity: “If I hadn’t seen the book I wouldn’t be in glaciology.” He shows the book to his students every year “as an example of how a complete accident can change the course of your life.”

None of this explains his deep religious faith or his zeal when it comes to abortion politics.

Always a strong Catholic who tried never to miss Mass, Hughes says he underwent a “born-again experience” in 1966 during a service at a Catholic church in Russia on his first trip around the world.

When the priest blessed him “it was like an electrical current went through me,” he says. Reflecting upon it later, he said he determined that “God expects something from me.”

In the fall of 1988 he experienced another jolt when he was moved by a speech given in Chicago by Randall Terry, co-founder of Operation Rescue, an evangelical Christian group whose members stage sit-ins at abortion clinics.

“I decided I had to act, that I couldn’t just walk away,” said Hughes, who the next day participated in his first sit-in.

Bearing witness

Each Saturday, after he finishes what he calls “bearing witness” at the Wadsworth Center, Hughes heads out to Eastern Maine Medical Center on State Street for more of the same.

He’s also been visible on other fronts over the years, his provocative techniques raising ire wherever he goes.

He has picketed in front of the homes of local obstetricians. He once stood in front of U.S. Rep. John Baldacci’s residence to call attention to the congressman’s pro-choice record and was cited for violating the city’s picketing ordinance. A Penobscot County Superior Court justice later found the measure unconstitutional.

Eight years ago he interrupted a fund-raising supper the congressman was holding at Bangor High School for the Wadsworth Center. He was escorted out of the building.

And last spring he walked into St. John’s Church in Bangor a few minutes before Mass and displayed one of his pictures, again to protest Baldacci’s pro-abortion record. He was banned from the church.

He hasn’t confined his protests to Bangor. Each Monday noon during the school year, he displays his posters in front of the UM Memorial Union, a routine he began 10 years ago after a pregnancy counseling center started by his wife and others was accused of being an “adoption racket.”

Some reactions have been hard to ignore, he admitted. One angry student spit in his face. “There’s nothing I can do,” Hughes said. “If I drop the sign they’ll take it and run away. I just have to endure it. I think of Jesus on the cross being spat at. I’m in good company.”

Hughes also is on hand each time a pro-choice speaker visits the campus. “I’ve had exchanges with all of them,” said Hughes, who sometimes ends up in exchanges with the campus police as well.

He hasn’t gotten a lot of flack from the university about his visibility, he said. “No one has told me it’s bad publicity for the university or that it makes the department look bad. For one thing it wouldn’t do any good and they probably know it. Also, there’s a respect for some freedom of expression.”

Hughes is confident that he has his share of supporters. “I can say that more students and administrators agree with me than you might think. However, they probably believe it is prudent to stay hunkered down.”

An incident last spring furthered his belief that he’s making a difference. As he stood outside the union one day, a woman approached him. “You were here with a picture like that when I was pregnant and had scheduled an abortion,” she said. “Now my little boy is 3 years old and the joy of my life.”

Hughes holds that conversation close to his heart. “The Talmud says to have saved one life is to have saved the world,” he said, referring to the Jewish book of laws.

Expelled by right-to-lifers

Hughes even irritates other pro-lifers. The Maine Right to Life Committee expelled him years ago, he said, probably because of his affiliation with Operation Rescue in which participants often are arrested for trespassing.

Meg Yates, a Maine Right to Life Committee board member at the time, said her group had adopted a National Right to Life Committee policy specifying that those acting in the NRLC name “shall not encourage, promote or engage in any unlawful activities related to the purposes” of the group.

Hughes still is bothered by the Maine Right to Life Committee’s stance. The group isn’t supporting the people on the front lines, he says. “When they kick out those who are willing to sacrifice their jobs and freedom … I say they’ve lost the fundamental reason for their existence. They’re sacrificing it for something else.”

But Hughes’ tactics have their place in the pro-life movement, according to Yates. “He’s someone who stands up for the life principles that he espouses, and that calls for respect. His methods are where good people disagree,” she said.

Offering alternatives

If you’re going to be against abortion, you need to offer alternatives, Hughes said last month as he took up his customary position near the Wadsworth Center.

That’s why, over the years, he and his wife, Bev, took in 24 girls and women who had been sexually abused. Most were pregnant and kept their babies, he said.

That news probably wouldn’t have appeased one man who was so angry that he stopped his car to shout out the window.

“This is wrong! You guys can’t stand here on a public street and spread this crap. I’m against abortion like you, but people hate you because of this!” he said before driving off.

Pictures are the most powerful way to “educate people,” said Hughes. It took photographs of Vietnam and the Holocaust to make people understand what was really happening, he said.

“It’s the visual impact. You see the truth. It does upset people and it should. The day they’re not upset is the day I really worry.”

Judgment Day

Hughes’ fellow scientists say his activism is a nonissue. But his relationship with the university has hit some rough patches, likely because of his activism, he says.

The most recent was a couple of years ago when he received a letter informing him that a new university policy prevented demonstrations within 50 feet of the entrance to any building on campus.

Other faculty members hadn’t received the notice, according to Hughes.

Undaunted, he took up his usual position at the union. When campus police instructed him to move, he told them that his right to free speech was being denied and that he wasn’t demonstrating, but was “an educator presenting photographic proof that babies killed in the womb by abortionists are human beings.”

So far the university hasn’t taken action. But if it decides to press charges, “all … it would get for its trouble is a reputation for suppressing speech it doesn’t like,” he says.

Hughes says he “suspects” that his activism also prompted the university to refuse to allow one of his research grants to pay travel expenses for a trip to Russia in 1988.

Ten years ago he filed a grievance against UM, claiming he was unfairly reprimanded for providing counseling to a student he believed was pregnant. His complaint “went nowhere,” he says.

Ultimately, his activism may have affected his career. His “visibility on a divisive issue” has precluded him from ever being named department chairman or institute director, he says. “It’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make.”

Hughes, who is 6 feet 1 inch tall and weighs about 260 pounds, has paid in other ways. During his Operation Rescue sit-ins between 1988 and 1993, he spent time in jail and says he was physically abused by police.

His arm was injured during a demonstration in Rhode Island. As he sang “God Bless America” in Buffalo, police injured his cuffed wrists while dragging him from jail to a police bus. In New York City, he was “dragged naked through the cellblocks” by guards who jammed a billy club between the handcuffs behind his back.

He insists it’s not courage that propels him, but concerns about his own salvation.

“It’s selfish, ultimately. I’m just trying to save my own soul,” he says. “I hope on Judgment Day, Jesus will say to me, ‘You did a lot of things that made me ashamed, but you were there for the least of my brethren. So I’ll let you in.”‘


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