The Story of the Sigma Seven Sit-In: The First Rescue at an Abortion Facility
The Sigma Seven women block the entrance hallway of the Sigma abortion clinic during their sit-in on August 2nd, 1975. Ann Schutt and Jeannette Reinecker hold their babies while speaking to a police officer.
It’s the summer of 1974, just a year after the US Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized all induced abortion across the country up to fetal viability. At the time, viability was considered to be around 28 weeks gestation (26 weeks fetal age). About ten years before, in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the Civil Rights Movement to march on Selma, Alabama. Quaker peace activist Charles Fager studied the nonviolent direct action (NVDA) tactics utilized by the movement and had recently written a book about them when he was invited to give a speech at the National Youth Pro-Life Coalition conference. The NYPLC was similar to today’s Consistent Life Ethic groups, and leaned liberal while remaining staunchly pro-life. This was the perfect opportunity for Fager to plant an idea: in the same way that NVDA exposed the violence of racial segregation in the American south, pro-lifers should use NVDA to expose the violence of abortion in the American clinics. Fager suggested that nonviolent sit-ins be performed by pro-lifers within abortion facilities. Inspired, NYPLC president Tom Mooney and his wife Chris began to plan. “There was really nothing happening legislatively. It really looked like abortion was here to stay. People were becoming desperate for some action,” Chris recalled.
The Mooneys charged their young “intern”, Burke Balch (who, at the time, identified as agnostic/atheist,) with doing research on civil disobedience. Burke scoured the Library of Congress until he found Martin Oppenheimer and George Lakey’s A Manual for Direct Action, a Quaker tract on how to do NVDA. From this, the organizers developed a three-page logistical plan, stressing principles including “WE MUST KEEP OUR COOL!” Chris Mooney, along with other women such as Jeannette Reinecker and Joli Fleming, founded Women Against Massacre and Brutality (WOMB), and began to host training sessions over the summer of 1975 for a sit-in. At one of the first sessions, the Mooneys handed out a survey which included the question, “How far would you go to save a life?” Jeannette recalled that it was this question that made her willing to risk criminal prosecution. From there, the women practiced role-plays of different scenarios, such as how to go limp while being arrested. Chris and Joli in particular drew from their experience protesting Vietnam during their antiwar days in college to train the other women. The group agreed that only women should participate in the sit-in portion of the demonstration, to break the stereotypes about men trying to control women’s bodies. They also agreed to focus on secular messaging, and developed literature to hand out to the public within a human rights framework. They hoped to “show the media and the public that the movement is not as dead as they think.”
The Sigma Sit-In ladies in the waiting room of the abortion clinic. A staff member at the Sigma Reproductive Health Center climbs over furniture to reach her office and to avoid the 14 anti-abortion women who demonstrated there on August 2nd, 1975..
On August 2nd, 1975, around 9 AM, a woman walked into the Sigma Reproductive Health Center at 11119 Rockville Pike in Rockville, Maryland to ask about appointments. After confirming that the facility was open, she and the protesters occupied the inside and outside. The choice of Sigma was calculated: a group of picketers had been frequenting the clinic for the past year, led by George Yourishin, so the organizers were familiar with it. A group of women and young ladies sat down in the waiting room of suite 410 – according to the official police report, a group of around fourteen total, but according to a conflicting pro-life news source, only twelve. Jeannette recalls many girls striding into the room in platform shoes, while a picture from the event captures ostensibly Chris on bare feet like a classic hippie. They began to sing softly, “you’ve got their whole lives in their hands”, setting the tone for the intervention. Later, to the tune of the Civil Rights Movement song “We Shall Overcome”, they sang, “your child needs your love…” According to the pro-life source, eight of the women were mothers, and three carried their infant babies into the facility with them. Meanwhile, a group of protesters – including regular picketers of the facility, husbands of the women sitting-in, and women who did not go inside – began to hold up signs, hand out fliers, and sidewalk counsel to the people entering the abortion facility. One of their signs read “National Youth Pro-Life Coalition: Love and Let Live.” Others read “Civil Rights for Babies” and “Unborn Women Have Rights Too”.
Some of the abortion facility staff reacted calmly, while others responded more aggressively, climbing over furniture to get past the women. Lisa Donohoo recalls one of the staff members posing as a clinic patron and freaking out at them in front of the media. Ann Schutt, the designated police liaison for the group, spoke to officer John Meiklejohn in the waiting room. She told him that they were protesting the existence of the center, and that they wanted to speak with the center administrator and would not leave until she answered their questions concerning abortions. The facility was owned by Gail Francis, and the administrator on duty was Ethel Naugle. Naugle said she’d only meet with two of the women in her office if the rest of the group left the suite; the ladies declined this offer, stating it did not suit their needs, and began chanting again. At 10:30 AM, according to the police report, six of the women left the facility, taking one of the infants with them, leaving eight ladies behind. Meicklejohn then asked Ann what the group’s goals were, and she stated “to shut down the health center and completely do away with abortions.”
Chris Mooney is dragged out of the Sigma abortion clinic by two police officers.
It was then that the remaining women decided to escalate. They moved from the waiting room to the narrow hallway in front of the suite and linked arms, blocking the entrance entirely. They tried to speak to any patron who attempted to breach their blockade. Around noon, fed up, Naugle announced she would prosecute the eight ladies, enabling the police to begin their protocols for arrests. At 12:35 Naugle declared the ladies to be trespassing. At 12:45 Meicklejohn then advised the ladies that they would be prosecuted if they did not leave the premises, and a young lady who refused to give her name to the officer got up and left. Based on pictures of the women in the hallway, we believe this young lady was Jeanne Miller, a minor. The remaining ladies stated that they refused to leave and would have to be carried out as they would not move. These ladies were identified as Chris Mooney, Ann Schutt, Jeannette Reinecker, Eileen Renzi, Amy Donohoo, Lisa Donohoo, and Mary Hayes. They were dragged out to the police cars, with care as two held babies, and transported to Bethesda Station, where Lisa was released to her mom as she was a minor. While this meant only the six adult women were charged with trespassing (a misdemeanor), they agreed in solidarity to call themselves “The Sigma Seven”. (While many sources have referred to them as “The Sigma Six”, all four demonstration participants interviewed insisted adamantly that they were “The Sigma Seven”, and they are named this way in the pro-life news source as well.)
The protesters were pleased that the media seemed “eager to explore this new radicalism” among pro-lifers. Photos of the sit-in were featured in the Montgomery Journal, and footage of them was shown twice during that evening’s news on WMAL-TV channel 7 (which became WJLA the next year.) News of the protest spread across pro-life and Catholic publications. Even their trial and conviction was covered by The Washington Post. To them, this was a success; they got abortion back in the news, proving it was not a settled issue.
Jeannette Reinecker is carried out of the Sigma abortion clinic by two police while holding her baby and placed into a police car. Women and men hold picket signs around her.
On September 8th, 1975, at the Montgomery County District Courthouse, supporters of the Sigma Seven demonstrated outside with signs and placards. Inside, Gerard Mitchell, a lawyer who had taken on the case pro-bono, argued that the women had compelling necessity to their actions: because life begins at conception, they were attempting to rescue children from violence. Judge Stanley Klaven didn’t bite, and they were found guilty of trespassing and sentenced to six months of unsupervised probation. In response, Chris Mooney said she was disappointed with the decision, “because there is a large issue and that issue is that abortions are killing humans. We will continue to fight, in the courts, in the legislature, wherever possible." Little did they know that on August 2nd, 2000, 25 years after the sit-in to the day, Sigma would close its doors for good.
The Sigma Seven continued to fight abortion their entire lives, in big ways and small. The next year, on the bicentennial of the founding of the United States, WOMB performed another sit-in in Washington, DC. Chris and Joli opened up the Pregnancy Aid Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the first of its kind. Jeannette and Chris ran as delegates for pro-life democratic presidential candidate Ellen McCormack. Chris served as the director for the Center for Life at Providence Hospital in Washington, DC. Jeannette became a social worker so she could help moms through difficult pregnancies. Eileen became a nurse and remained outspoken about the violence of abortion. Jeannette, Ann, Amy, Lisa, and Jeanne all continued to perform sit-in “Rescues”. Lisa got arrested as many as eleven times. Jeanne was one of the first rescuers to serve time in jail at just age 18, and she went on to organize the first national series of sit-ins. And later, Jeanne and Burke helped found the Pro-Life Nonviolent Action Project, prompting an era of Rescue that would span a decade. These brave women didn’t act to please anyone – not husbands, not religions, not parties – but out of conviction. They were willing to suffer violence upon their own bodies to save lives. Their sit-in wasn’t just a moment in pro-life history; it is progressive history, it is nonviolent history, and it is women’s history.
The mugshot of Amy Donohoo taken at Montgomery County, MD Police Department on August 2nd, 1975.
Sources
Grace Elizabeth Hale, A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Richard L. Hughes, “The Civil Rights Movement of the 1990s?: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” The Oral History Review, vol. 33, no. 2, 2006, pp. 1–23. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Oral History Association. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4495380.
James Risen and Judy L. Thomas, Wrath of Angels: The American Abortion War (Basic Books, 1998).
Jennifer Donnally, The Politics of Abortion and the Rise of the New Right, PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013.
Linda White, photographs of the Sigma sit-in, Montgomery Journal, 7 August 1975.
Joe Green, “Six Md. Abortion Protesters Convicted of Trespassing,” The Washington Post, September 1975.
John Meiklejohn, Police Incident Report, 2 August 1975. Montgomery County Police Department, Maryland.
Elise Ketch, telephone interviews with Burke Balch, Jeannette Reinecker, and Lisa Donohoo, 17 June 2025.
Elise Ketch, email correspondence with Jeanne Gaetano, 7 July 2025.
John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, “Fr. Altman #1 – Who Is He Attacking?” Open Letter, 22 June 2021, https://signofthecrossing.blogspot.com/2021/06/fr-altman-1-who-is-he-attacking.html.
This post was researched and written by Elise Ketch and originally posted on the 50th anniversary of the Sigma Seven Sit-In.
