During her shift at Portland, Oregon’s Purringtons Cat Lounge on Sunday, Mary Numair looked out the street-facing windows and saw a woman carrying a sign that read “Abortion Kills Children.” Numair had noticed a group of protesters about a block away, gathered outside one of Portland’s Planned Parenthood health care centers. “I thought [the woman] might be lost. I said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna feel real silly. The protest is down that way,’ ” Numair, 29, told me. “She said ‘No, I need to stand here.’ I said, ‘Fuck this shit,’ went back inside, and started making my sign.”

The sign, which Numair crafted out of masking tape and a piece of cardboard from the dumpster, praised Planned Parenthood for treating her chronic yeast infections when she was in her early 20s and uninsured. It also included a delightful cartoon of a vagina with a smiling clitoris and a stick figure with pigtails and prominent breasts (above).

Numair’s best friend and co-worker clocked in early so she could head out to the protest, where she planted herself between two families with children. “In my first 30 seconds of walking out there, I did get called a whore,” Numair said. “One woman was shaking her head. I knelt down to her kid and said, ‘Do you know about yeast infections?’ ”

Onlookers gave Numair the thumbs-up, and some passing cars honked in support, but she was the only counter-protester on the scene. Still, with a spontaneous chant, she managed to break up the protest in under a half-hour. “I don’t know why I started chanting ‘Yeast infections!’ but it just came out. I have this cold, so it was just this obnoxious squeak, cheerleader-like. And I started doing high kicks, which I don’t normally do, in my skinny jeans.” A religious leader was guiding a circle of protestors in prayers for Numair—but as her chants got louder and more grating, they stopped.