(Previously published at Liberal Street Fighter, also posted at My Left Wing and The Daily Kos)
Hurricane season comes around every year, and it’s that time again. But for anyone dedicated, courageous or just hardheaded enough still to be providing the women of Florida with abortion care, disaster can strike at any time–destroying their facilities and threatening their very lives–because there, as in so many places, the season of hatred never, ever ends.
Abortion providing clinics all across the country have been targets of hatred and violence for what seems like forever: break-ins, blockades, vandalism, butyric acid attacks, anthrax threats, bombings, and even murders. Since 1992, as many as 19 clinics have been torched each and every year. And even as we all celebrated our legacy of American freedom this 4th of July, yet another clinic burned, this time in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Just one more violent statistic added to a long, long list.
“All the faxes we’ve gotten through the years saying: ‘ALERT. WARNING. There’s been a bombing,'” said Mona Reis, owner of the clinic. “Now we’re the fax. Now we’re the statistic.”
For many people, this newest act of red-blooded American terrorism against women and the abortion providers who care for them might have been only a blurb in the paper or a blip on the news, if they heard of it at all. But not for me. Like Ms. Reis, I have watched countless warnings of hateful and explosive violence scroll off my fax for years, tearing them off the machine with a brick in my chest, dreading horror while hoping that this time no one was hurt or dead.
So I am not only sorry that yet another firestorm has closed the last abortion-providing clinic in Palm Beach County. I feel a lot of things–I am frustrated and furious, but fearful, too–because to me Mona Reis is more than just a name in the newspaper. That kindhearted and soft-voiced steel magnolia is my colleague and my long-distance friend.
Now that the FBI and ATF are casting a suspicious eye in their direction, the same protesters who have hounded Mona, her clinic’s staff and her patients for years have started sounding almost solicitous.
But when it comes to abortion, Florida has a long history of violence against clinics and those who work in them.
In 2003, Paul Hill was executed for the 1994 murder of a Pensacola doctor and his escort outside a clinic. A year earlier, another Pensacola doctor was murdered. The murders prompted the city to adopt [a] buffer zone.
In the late 1990s, 10 clinics from Orlando to Miami were the targets of acid attacks in a seven-day stretch. The Catholic Palm Beach Diocese’s Respect Life office organizes prayer vigils every first Saturday of the month at Presidential Women’s Center at 9 a.m. The Palm Beach County Right to Life League and FACE Life also man the sidewalks come Saturday. The crowds can range from 20 to 60 people, said the Rev. Joe Papes, the spiritual moderator for the Respect Life office.
“We’re not protesters,” Papes said. “We don’t endorse any kind of violence. There has never been any type of brouhaha or melee.”
Well, not exactly. These are the same people who have besieged both Presidential Women’s Center and Mona herself for a long time now, even more heavily since the July 4 weekend just a year ago, when another area clinic, WomenCare Centers of Florida, was also destroyed by fire.
So Mona knows all about being a target. Does she ever.
This is a very wicked state, and during Bush’s administration, if they don’t like what you do they come back and make your life miserable. And we’ve been the victim of that.
We’ve endured more anti-choice harassment than any other clinic in Florida, probably because we’re out in front on so many of these cases. But whenever we’ve taken on a fight it’s been with the consent of the staff. I wouldn’t want to do anything that puts them in danger, and they understand that. On Saturdays, we’re surrounded by hundreds of protesters with megaphones and awful signs trying to obstruct patients from our parking lot.
It’s very important to me to keep clinic harassment and violence front and center in our community. I’m asked often for contributions by people running for public office … and I won’t give anyone a check until they come here on a Saturday morning and experience what it’s like to be a patient or a provider of abortion services. …..
The attorney general’s office … really came after us and started to subpoena our records. The attack was vicious. If you could have sat in those courtrooms – and I’ve been involved in a lot of litigation before – it became so cruel and the tone was so anti-women, it was a nightmare. …..
Anti-choice activists opened a web site in my name twice. The last time they did it, they bought monareis.com and had my home address, a picture of me, with Adolph Hitler screaming in the background, aborted fetuses and holocaust victims everywhere.
A few months ago, Mona and her daughter, Rachel, received the Choice USA 2005 Generation Award for their shared commitment to women’s health and freedom. Rachel founded Florida Friends for Choice to help challenge the repressive legal actions of Jeb Bush and the Florida legislature and Attorney General’s office. She has always known that women’s freedom and autonomy were on the endangered list.
Rachel and Mona
Well, as the daughter of an abortion clinic owner, I was exposed to things that a child doesn’t typically see. …..
[T]here was the time when the word “murderer” was spray-painted on our driveway. I also remember getting the mail at home only to open the mailbox and see a baby doll covered in fake blood and a disgusting pamphlet and videotape to go with it. …..
I enjoy making this issue a part of my life ….. But it’s not something that’s always easy to deal with. I’d be lying if I said I don’t sometimes wish my mother would choose a different profession. I have nothing but the utmost respect for what she does, but when it’s your mother, it’s different. Your life and emotions and are involved. There are days that I get nervous and feel like I am going to get news that something has happened at the clinic and to my mother. It’s really scary.
Yes, it really is. Sometimes it’s scary as all hell. But potential violence isn’t the greatest threat we face as providers of abortion care, as women, or simply as citizens of the United States of America who believe in our right to personal privacy and the freedom to control our own lives. And antiabortion terrorism doesn’t occur in a vacuum. That is why the growing lack of support for reproductive rights among Democratic politicians is more than just a worry for Mona Reis; as Americans, it threatens us all.
I’m afraid of how willing we are to compromise on access issues. We have allowed these access issues to be negotiated – when the real issue is not just to having legalized abortion, but to have legal abortions available and accessible to women regardless of where they live or how much money they make.
I’m worried that the Democratic party isn’t standing strong for this issue. It seems like it’s not a priority anymore – there’s less outrage now where there needs to be.
That opinion is hard to argue with when even Hillary Clinton sidles toward the right, auditioning her new moderate talking points to the New York State Family Planning Providers. Master framesman William Saletan claims that Clinton is right on target, luring abortion opponents into a Democratic Bigger-Than-Ever Tent by pushing the envelope of the iconic Safe, Legal and Rare all the way to Safe, Legal and Never: “Clinton isn’t trying to end the abortion war. She’s repositioning her party to win it.”
Saletan is the acclaimed author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. I heard him speak at an annual meeting of abortion care providers over a year ago, where Saletan painstakingly explained to us that the same words can mean different things to different groups of people.
Well, we sort of already knew that, and we are reminded of it again every time another “pro-life” jihadist decides to save women from what Senator Clinton now calls a “sad, even tragic choice” by reducing their ability to make that choice at all–whether with a bomb, a high-powered rifle, a shotgun, a jerrycan of gasoline . . . or with one more TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) law among the hundreds that have been deceptively mass-marketed to the public in over 30 states–and endorsed by far too many Democratic politicians–as putative protections for women’s health and safety.
As is always the case with strategists, Saletan’s and Clinton’s campaign is fought from safely behind the lines, and only with whatever words they think they need to say in order to win it. But Saletan’s own words are ill-chosen. Controlling and restricting access to abortion is the key to winning a broader struggle for cultural, ideological and societal power–one waged on a field of human flesh in order to subjugate the bodies, minds and spirits of living, breathing women.
But here on the front lines, providers of abortion care have one thing in common with those who keep us in their sights: whether the weapon of choice is a bullet or a ballot, at least we both know which side we’re on. Neither of us affects not to understand what the artfully framed and coded language of politicians and pundits really says. It announces to friend and foe alike that for some in today’s Democratic Party, a woman’s right to control her own reproduction is starting to look like mortar bait, an expendable loss on their road to victory.
The emerging coalition of “moderate” and “pro-life” Dems might or might not win their war, but women’s control over their bodies, their educational and economic futures and their very lives, already decimated by a protracted right wing siege, are now further endangered by friendly fire. The right to safe and legal abortion means nothing when it exists in law, but not in practice.
TRAP laws have proved to be a brilliant legal strategy in the war on women, a favorite tactic of anti-choice forces because they are so devastatingly effective at reducing access to competent abortion care. And where they leave off, the “saints” and “gentle Christian warriors” of the American Taliban stand ready to step in.
An ever-dwindling number of physicians remain willing, or even able, to afford either the tremendous personal risks or the professional sacrifices a doctor is now forced to make in order to provide abortion. The inevitable result is that quality abortion care, while still nominally safe and legal, continues to become rarer in most states every year.
Again, Mona Reis speaks for all of us who continue providing abortion care to the women who need us.
What keeps me going more than anything else is the lives people share with you, hearing their reasons, and getting the privilege of being able to be there for them. I’ll tell you something, these women never forget their abortion experience. I have mothers bring their daughters, saying, `I was here 20 years ago and you were there for me, now my daughter needs you, and I’m so glad you’re here.’ I feel honored to be a part of their decision.”
That says it. That is why people like Mona Reis–and even people like me–are still here. But maintaining our dedication to the high quality of care we offer our patients while continually renewing our own spirits is a much greater challenge when we know that we must face the same fights again tomorrow, with even less support and respect from some members of our own party for the real-life needs of the women we serve than we had when we began.
Mona also says, “We have a great resolve and deep conviction for what we do, and we will prevail.”
Yes, Mona. Yes, we will. Even though it gets harder every day.
Mona is rising from the ashes and rebuilding … of course. 🙂
I find it very sad that many in the democratic party now appear eager to compromise our women’s reproductive rights in order to gain political power. perhaps it would be well for every so-called liberal who’s movement righward facilitates the return of jane crow to visit Mona Reis’s clinic on a Saturday, and experience first hand the true nature of the devil they bargain with.
you are so right!
That’s what I have always called (mis)informed consent and mandatory waiting period TRAP laws. Every single state, about 26 of them now, has given that law the same title: Woman’s Right to Know.
But from the beginning, I have called it Woman’s Jim Crow.
that’s actually a great way to talk about parental notification laws, requirements for “counseling” and all the rest … JANE CROW LAWS.
I read a comment media girl made last week in a thread on this site where she used the term, and I had one of those moments of instant recognition. And judging by the fact that molv says (above) that she’s often thought of it exactly the same way, and artemisia seems to agree with the usage, and you also recognize it, i would venture to guess that the use is proper and validated. i’m open to hearing from anyone who disagrees.
with calling a thing what it is. Another reason I hate these laws is that, like Jim Crow, the burden falls hardest on those who can least afford it.
For example, I’ve kept statistics on the patients whom we’ve had to turn away since Texas’ de facto ban on abortion over 15 weeks gestation–requiring that it be performed in a hospital or ambulatory surgical center–took effect in January 2004. No hospitals in Texas will admit a woman for an abortion, and even in one of the 3 available ASCs the cost is at least three times higher than the cost of the same procedure used to be in a licensed clinic, and far beyond the reach of most women.
The breakdown? Of the women denied access to abortion in our clinic by our current law, as of May this year 88% were unmarried, 76% were women of color, and 53% were under age 18.
Jane Crow, baby, Jane Crow.
BTW, I do love your sig. There were lots of stories about Emily confronting Rudolph on the day he was sentenced, but I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere that it happened on her birthday.
thank you. i found emily lyons site the evening of the day of the verdict. i read something about her having a site in the new york times, and that her book was going to go on sale the day of the verdict, so i searched around until i found it. upon my first visit i read the quote of hers that i’m using in my sig, and today i thought it would be a thoughtful touch to add the quote to my comment in your diary in the hopes it might illustrate the regard i hold for women such as Mona Reis, Emily Lyons and yourself.
Watch how our “leaders” are willing to sell us out to win. I won’t cast a single vote for them.
Great Diary!
They won’t be happy till we’re all barefoot and pregnant and making sure their nightly dinner of roastBEAST is on the table waiting with a fresh drink in our hand for them.
Abortion Clinics…
They are called Womens Clinics. It’s where so many can go to get private help, get check ups.
It’s where I had to go when we didn’t have any insurance. I’m grateful they were there. Not grateful that my appt was the week of the 2004 elections and the security was unbelievable.
Getting a check up is bad enough without the constant threat, reminders that you can be bombed or harrassed because you entered the only place you can go to get your needs met.
We do see GYN patients who have insurance, but most of the women who come to us for their annual chackups and birth control aren’t insured.
Why do they think it’s worth putting up with protesters? Some are so pro-choice that they feel they’re making a political statement (and bless them, they are), but for most women we are still the least expensive women’s health care provider there is–with fees lower than either the non-abortion providing PP clinics or the county health system’s clinics.
I get so fed up with hearing that “America has the best health care in the world.” Yeah, sure, if you can pay for it. First we deny women access to affordable birth control, and then demonize and persecute them for seeking abortions. Whatta country.
I hope all of you will forgive me for rating everyone 3’s in this thread. Let me explain why I did so. Someone, earlier today, accidently I hope, rated molvs post to her own diary a 3 and thus pushed it down in the thread. I do not understand why someone would do that, I assume it was an accident. At some sites this comment to one’s self would be called a tip jar and I hope you all agree with me that it belongs at the top of the diary directly under the words she wrote.
I gave you all three’s to push it back up, doing the math with my calculator, and figuring out it would work.
Please forgive me. Every post on this thread is excellent. ALL OF YOU ARE GREAT! I am only doing it to get her comment back where it rightfully belongs, at the top.
I’m sure it was an accident. But this was interesting, bayprairie. I didn’t know about doing this until you explained it. I’m guessing moivs wouldn’t have cared, but it’s nice of you to be concerned and to go to the trouble.
its such a good piece. when i saw it this morning her comment was at the top and all day i thought about trying to see if i could push it back up. i hope everyone understands.
Of course, I start to wonder if it was me who goofed and gave a 3. It happens sometimes ya know.
I panic and rush around trying to find just how exactly I screwed up… thus getting more and more confused. An old poster with a newbie, skittish concern that it was “I” who made a mess.
But after a long hunt… I don’t see where I did anything wrong. Whew. (For now)
🙂
Years before 9/11, I always wondered why the pro-choice movement wasn’t calling a spade a spade and referring to the anti-abortion movement as what it is: the largest domestic terrorist organization since the Ku Klux Klan. If the government were actually interested, an investigation of the informal ties between the actual terrorists and the smiling churches that fund them would more than likely bring down a lot of powerful people.
As for Hillary Clinton, well, if she gets the nomination in 2008, I’m sitting out the election. There are a few things I insist on in the people I vote for, and unequivocal support for abortion rights is one of them. My vision of the big tent does not include people who attack — or are unwilling to defend — the bedrock principles of basic human rights.
I’m for keeping abortion safe and legal. Whether it is rare or not is none of my damn business, and it sure as hell isn’t any business of the government’s. The “safe, legal and rare” folks are just as bad as the openly anti-choice faction in that they still consider it their business what individual women choose to do with their own bodies. The open anti-choicers are at least honest about it, whereas the sleazy fence-straddlers of the left are not.
These would-be fence straddlers can’t have it both ways. Either abortion is murder, or it is not. If you think it is murder, you are morally obligated to oppose it. If you don’t think abortion is murder, what’s your fucking problem? Are you proposing that it’s not murder, but it is still repugnant? And if so, what is it exactly that is repugnant about it?
Not all dilemmas are false ones. In practice, the self-appointed moderates are simply pawns of the far right.
I would give you a 12 if I could for that comment.
I’ve always hated the “safe, legal, and rare” formulation, without ever stopping to pinpoint exactly why it bothers me so much, except that I sensed it had a smell of hypocrisy to it and a stench of judgementalism. You have done the rest of the thinking for me and nailed it, thank you very much.
‘Safe, Legal and Rare’ has also been used as the number-one stealth weapon for implementing the TRAP laws that are so successful at making Roe redundant.
If they can’t make abortion illegal, they’ll just regulate it out of existence with laws marketed to the public as public health measures to improve the safety of abortion care — which already has a record of safety unmatched in any other specialized field.
I think the next wave of TRAP laws will require abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within “X” miles of where they practice (which is almost always a freestanding clinic/office).
That means that areas without a doctor will no longer be able to fly one in, and that most abortion doctors won’t be able to practice even where they live, if their practice is confined to abortion–as it often is. The reason is that the only way to gain admitting privileges at a hospital is actually to admit patients there–which abortion doctors almost never need to do.
In fact, if a doctor whose practice consisted only of providing abortion had to call an ambulance often enough to gain admitting privileges to a hospital, I wouldn’t let him/her spay my dog.
But it will be sold to a gullible public as a bill to prevent “unqualified” doctors from doing abortions. And it will sound real good to the public, too, won’t it? Real safe.
The law will ensure that in order to be LEGAL, the abortion muct be performed by a doctor who is classified by the law as SAFE, and abortion will become more RARE than before.
That’s what Safe, Legal and Rare is really intended to do, and it’s working like a charm.
Empty choices: we’ll give you the choice, just not the ability to act on it.
We’ll give you the vote, just not count that vote. We’ll give you 1,000 conceptual dollars instead of the 100 actual dollars you’re owed. This administration gets by on words, not deeds.
I agree with many other posters that this is a civil rights issue of a most visceral sort. The state does not own this body, whether the issue is to bring a pregnancy to full term and when, whether it’s to pick cotton for a master, whether it’s to be cut open to donate an organ for a politician’s ailing relative, whether it’s to be relocated — without recourse or involving incarceration for a crime — to another location for the whims of the state.
I explained it this way to a close male friend (in his thirties) who wanted to have a family and was envious about women’s ability to have children. His efforts to adopt were viewed with suspicion, unfortunately, and having known him most of my life, I’m sure he’d make an ideal parent. But reproductive rights are about all of us.
Should the state decide how to use the resource of his body, I asked, and its reproductive “product” to raise, say, in vitro future soldiers for future wars? Once my friend fulfilled his biological purpose, should a government panel be allowed to relocate his body into a more efficiently lucrative profession to support “his” children, scheduled for termination in some war? The next day he joined NARAL.
to being framed as a stealth activist to deny abortion through legislation. I firmly believe that any woman, in any place, at any time in her life, should be able to make health choices concerning her life without government interference. Period
I also believe that abortions should be rare and how that rarity is achieved is through sex education, unimpeded access to birth control and properly teaching women how to use those means of birth control
The wingers in my state, have decimated sex education to the point where it is abstinence only, which has helped to accomodate a mini baby boom amongst 13 to 17 year old females in this state.
The right of a woman to control her own body and the choices she makes concerning her health are none of the Governments business.
If the winger men had to all have vascetomies and then have them reversed before they could conceive children, there would be such an uprising of violation of my personal rights, that you would believe that the world has come to an end.
I think I might forward some of the comments I have read in another diary to my two wingnut Senators and ask that they sponsor legislation to that effect. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm wondering if that might impede the wingnut invasion of our country.
Hi, Ghostdancer. I’ve been thinking a lot about this “rare” business since this diary yesterday. Putting aside for the moment the inherent judgment in it that abortion is bad (everybody’s entitled to their own opinion about that), there is something I don’t think most people are facing,which is that abortions are never going to be rare. They just aren’t. Birth control is never going to be perfect and neither are men and women. There are a whole lot of us–Americans–and so there will always be a whole lot of mistakes, and flawed techniques of birth control, and yes, selfishness, along with immaturity, and wishful thinking and all the other imperfections of judgment that go along with being human.
As far as I know, there have been abortions ever since women figured out ways to cause them, and there always will be and will need to be, because there’s no perfect way except to avoid sex altogether. Of course that’s what the wingnuts have been saying all along, but we don’t want to deny people sex, and so I think we have to face up to the idea that abortions have never been and will never be rare. Personally, I don’t think they “should” be, because I don’t have a negative judgment about them or the women who have them. While I could certainly be wrong in my moral evaluation of abortions, I don’t think I’m wrong about saying that they will never be rare, whether they’re legal or illegal. Not without a truly, deeply fascist state, that is, and none of us wants that.
And so that’s a major reason why I dislike the formulation, “safe, legal, and rare.” I understand the political usefulness of the phrase, and I’m all for better sex education and liberal distribution of birth control, but even with all that, I think abortions will not be rare and so when people hear that phrase they don’t quite trust it, possibly without even knowing why they don’t trust it. Do I have a better phrase to use? No, wish I did, but I’m thinking about it.
BTW, I deeply admire your activisim.
assessment and rare to me would be any decline in the numbers that are performed based on comprehensive sex education, better and more immediate access to birth control.
The wingnuts are making it more difficult for women to access birth control with their pharmacy ideology, that a pharmacist does not have to dispense medication that is personally abhorrent to their beliefs.
I say to that pharmacist, find a new occupation, or expect your pharmacy to lose customers quickly and soon you will be out of business. Unfortunately for many small towns there is only one pharmacy so that does tend to limit their ability to boycott.
Hell I don’t have any answers, all I know is that if I was a woman and someone is telling me that I can not make informed medical decisions with my doctors concerning my health and well being, I would be very very pissed.
I will not compromise on a woman’s right to make those decisions for herself. For me it will always be a human rights issue. For if they take that decision making process away from women, how long before they start taking other decision making rights away from the rest of us.
The best way to prevent abortion is to prevent pregnancy. The only problem is that they want to embrace these Pollyanna policies of “Just Say No to Sex.”
As if sex were just like bad television. Okay, some of it is. But a plan is only as good as its effectiveness and reliability. Their policy is like saying the best way to avoid flat tires is to not drive on nails.
Safe, Legal and Rare. Safe is a no-brainer. ‘Legal’ is problematic, because it already is legal. It’s like saying, “Flying the flag should be legal.” It makes so sense, because it already is legal, yet the statement implies that it isn’t.
Rare. Well, that’s indicating that it’s a bad thing, abortion, when in fact very often it can be a lifesaver. Is saving a woman’s life a bad thing? Is saving a 14-year-old’s education and childhood a bad thing?
Imagine if someone said, “Voting rights for minorties should be safe, legal and rare.” Suddenly it doesn’t sound so good, does it?
As for an alternative, I’m still mulling it over. Lately I’ve been talking about being pro-reprodutive rights and the opposition being pro-reproductive slavery. But I’m the first to admit that’s not a positive frame.
that the Democrats for Life are running in 95-10 to derail Reid’s “Prevention First” bill.
95-10 is nothing but a funding program for a national policy of compulsory childbearing. It provides tax breaks for adoption and funds federal grants to colleges/universities to discourage abortion, and institutionalizes federal subsidies for CPCs and other antiabortion propaganda outlets, but the bill includes no measures aimed at reducing unwanted pregnancies–which is the only way to reduce abortion without stripping women of what should be considered the basic human right to control their own reproduction.
95-10’s one and only gesture to rationality is insurance coverage of birth control. And right there in the brochure, they call this prelude to the The Handmaid’s Tale “empowering women.”
Good diary! Horrendous topic.
I’m in awe of you (and others) who fight this battle every day, not just in words but on the front lines. If there is anything I can do to help then please email me.
I am opposed to criminalization of abortion.
I support religious freedom.
Framing works.