A Return to the Belly of the Beast

“We’re going into the belly of the beast,” claimed one pro-life marcher, knowing that Boston remains among the most pro-choice cities in the country.

That was in 2022, when the second annual Men’s March, organized by the Catholic radio host Jim Havens, brought 200 mostly white men to one of the country’s most liberal cities to spread their message that life begins at conception and that the Constitution must protect all “persons.”

While the speakers’ words expressed how much they cared about life, the unborn, and the women who might bear them, there appears to be little to no empathy or compassion for women’s needs or the idea that abortion is healthcare and at times can even be life-saving.

In the first three years of the march, which began in 2021, few counter-protestors, save a small cadre of kazoo-blowing clowns, showed up to confront the pro-life men. But in November 2024, that changed. A combination of continued outrage over the denial of abortion rights, and the re-election of Trump, seems to have energized young pro-choice activists, who showed up en masse to disrupt the march from Planned Parenthood on the border of Boston and Brookline to the Boston Common, three miles away.

As the confrontation grew a bit tense,  a Boston Police motorcycle escort, which annually leads the men to their downtown destination, appeared caught off guard by the counter-protestors and called out the SWAT teams from both the Boston Police Department and the Massachusetts State Police. While there was a lot of shouting, shoving, profanity and threats, and a number of arrests, no one was hurt and with a reinforced police escort, the Men’s March did make it to the Boston Common for their speeches and rally.

These images, all from a one-day march in November 2024, are part of an ongoing project on abortion rights.

Edward Boches

Edward Boches is a Boston and Cape Cod-based documentary photographer.

Interested in how photography can connect us, help us understand each other, and inspire empathy, Boches has photographed such diverse communities as inner-city boxers, former gang members, Black Lives Matter activists, transgender men and women, pro-life and pro-choice advocates, women shellfishers, and homeless writers. He makes it a point to meet and photograph at least one stranger every day.

His work has been shown in museums and galleries that include the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA); the Bronx Documentary Center (NY); the Cambridge Association for the Arts (MA); the Plymouth Center for the Arts (MA); the PhotoPlace Gallery (Middlebury, VT); the Providence Center for the Photographic Arts (MA); and in Boston at both the Bromfield Gallery (online) and Panopticon Gallery, among others.

Boches’s work has also been distributed internationally by the Associated Press and has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Sun Magazine, ZEKE Magazine, and the Provincetown Independent, where he is a regular contributor.

In 2021 and 2022, he received multiple grants for public art installations for his community-based project Postcard from Allston. The project advocates for small businesses, raises money for local arts initiatives, and calls attention to how gentrification disrupts communities and affects the artists who reside there.