Reproductive justice victory in Alabama
By
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Birmingham, Ala.
Published Jul 26, 2007 9:58 PM
The local reproductive rights and justice community in Alabama declared victory
on July 21 after a week of defending women’s clinics against the
onslaught of “Operation Save America” (OSA), a rightwing hate
group.
Rev. Jack
Zylman and Minnie
Bruce Pratt on
clinic defense.
WW photo
|
Local organizers, with leadership from the Alabama National Organization for
Women and staff assistance from National NOW and the Feminist Majority,
mobilized Alabama Reproductive Freedom Summer from July 14 to 22 to withstand
OSA. The week included clinic defense, rallies, an interfaith forum, community
outreach and an abortion speak-out.
The speak-out on July 20 in an open area near the Five Points South fountain
gathered over 60 participants. Some spoke about their own abortions, both legal
and illegal. Some were obtained through the medical system by women who could
scrape up the money; others involved alternative methods used by women who
couldn’t afford a doctor.
Many spoke passionately about their commitment to defend women’s access
to reproductive choice, including accurate sex education, safe and reliable
birth control, comprehensive health care and support for child-rearing, as well
as abortion.
Peggy Bridges and
daughters Sarah
Bridges and Colie
Gilbert at abortion
speak-out.
WW photo: Minnie Bruce Pratt
|
Cheryl Sabel, Alabama NOW President, told of the doctor who counseled her when
she was a pregnant middle-aged and divorced single mother. He performed the
abortion and then urged her to speak out and stand up for abortion access for
all women. She revealed that the doctor was David Gunn, who was fatally shot in
the back by an anti-abortion protester in the parking lot of a Pensacola
women’s clinic in 1993.
The first of several abortion providers murdered by the ultra right wing, Gunn
had dedicated his life to providing ob-gyn services to women from rural north
Florida to central Alabama, including Birmingham. Reproductive rights activists
campaigned after his death for Congress to pass the 1994 Freedom of Access to
Clinic Entrances Act, prohibiting physical force or intimidation from being
used to prevent people from gaining access to a reproductive health
facility.
Sabel stated that with Gunn’s death she immediately began clinic defense
at the Montgomery clinic where he had practiced, and had dedicated herself to
the struggle for “each woman to decide for herself whether or when to
bear a child.”
WW photo: Minnie Bruce Pratt
|
‘This clinic stays open’
OSA descended on the Planned Parenthood and New Woman All Women clinics on July
14. Some OSA members stated they would “not allow these places to remain
standing” but would “turn them into rubble.” Anti-abortion
forces had placed city clinics under siege in 1988 and 1994 campaigns. In 1998
the New Woman facility was bombed by Eric Rudolph, who allegedly had ties to
white supremacist, homophobic and anti-woman ultraright groups, including
Operation Rescue—now renamed OSA.
The bombing killed the clinic’s security guard and seriously injured
clinic nurse Emily Lyons, who has since had to undergo 22 operations to regain
her health and mobility.
After the bombing, the clinic reopened within a week with a sign out front
saying, “This clinic stays open.” It has remained open since,
including during the current OSA attacks. Emily Lyons still works at New Woman,
as a registered nurse doing the state-required counseling of women seeking
abortions there.
Spirit of resistance
The tenacious spirit of resistance shown by Lyons and Sabel was apparent as
supporters defended the clinics during Reproductive Freedom Week, standing
their ground all day, every day in the broiling July sun and through torrential
thunderstorms. People came from Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee;
from Albuquerque, Atlanta and Mexico City; from Massachusetts, New Jersey and
Rhode Island.
In addition to NOW and Feminist Majority, organizations whose supporters were
present during the week included the ACLU of Alabama; Georgians for Choice;
Equality Alabama, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights group;
Feminist Outlawz, an artist activist group that does clinic defense; GIRE
(Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida/Information Group on
Reproductive Choice); Medical Students for Choice; National Women’s
Fightback Network/International Action Center; Religious Coalition for
Reproductive Choice; Socialist Workers Party and Workers World Party.
New Woman clinic owner Diane Derzis was clear on the need for struggle to keep
women’s access to a full range of reproductive care. She said to
supporters, “It was you, not the police or the law, that kept the clinic
open.”
Many passersby offered support: office workers on lunch break; an
African-American woman in her late teens walking to her high school equivalency
class nearby; a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alabama who hailed
from Ivory Coast. Local workers in the Five Points area, many of them from the
lesbian/gay/bi/trans community, were furious at the OSA invasion and eagerly
took flyers. They also turned up the music at their restaurants to heavy metal
and loud alternative rock to drown out the OSA preaching in the area.
During the week at least one-third of the defenders were young people, from
their late teens to late twenties, and about one-third were
male-identified.
The right-wing forces spewed non-stop hate, including anti-Islam, anti-LGBT,
and anti-woman diatribes. Speakers also gender-baited abortion supporters,
accusing them of not being “real” men or women. Another tactic was
the right-wing forces’ claim that their hate campaign against
reproductive choice was in the same tradition as the heroic Black civil rights
struggle of the South.
The aim of the hatemongers was clear: not only to close the clinic, but to
break down unity among oppressed peoples.
But reproductive justice advocates exposed their cynical ploy. The Rev. Jack
Zylman of the Unitarian Universalist Church, a longtime civil rights activist,
spoke of his conversations with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in which King
made clear his belief that abortion was an acceptable choice for a woman. King
had recounted that abortion referral to a reputable doctor was part of his
pastoral counseling for a congregation member with a problem or troubled
pregnancy.
Michelle Colon, MidSouth Regional Director for NOW and a woman of the African
diaspora, said that the civil rights struggle was when “this battle
began” and how the struggle for reproductive justice was its
continuation. She exhorted supporters: “We must continue fighting for
choice in the South. If we lose in the South, we lose everywhere. If they
can’t win here, they can’t win anywhere.”
High stakes unity
The stakes for unity have always been high in the South. The tactic of
plantation slave owners and corporate steel mill owners of the past was to
foment racism in white workers to prevent them from uniting with Black workers,
and also to segregate jobs rigidly by sex and gender to keep women’s
wages low and men vulnerable to inhuman job demands.
In this context, the struggle for reproductive justice can look like a
relatively isolated fight for “women’s rights” against
religious fanatics.
But the women who spoke out during Alabama Reproductive Freedom Summer made it
clear that their need for reliable birth control, access to abortion, and
affordable health care and day care were all part and parcel of their need to
be able to support themselves and their families, financially and
emotionally.
Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions can be linked to show the tightening
grip of the capitalist state on women as workers and as women who bear and rear
the children of the working class.
In April, for the first time since its original Roe v. Wade legalization of
abortion, the court ruled against a specific abortion procedure, upholding by a
5-4 majority a 2003 federal ban on certain late-term abortions.
The OSA forces actually denounced this decision as “wicked” because
the court did not completely outlaw abortion.
In May, the court ruled against Lilly Ledbetter, a worker at the Goodyear Tire
& Rubber Co. in Gadsden, Ala. She had sued the company for wage
discrimination on the basis of sex, using Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act. The court’s decision set virtually impossible time and procedure
limits on workers’ ability to file against discriminatory companies,
ruling that pay inequity and discrimination against women workers and all
workers of color is legal for employers under most circumstances.
Women add strength to working-class struggles
Working women, documented and undocumented, are central to industrial
development in the “new New South,” particularly in Alabama as it
experiences powerfully accelerated industrial growth and low unemployment
rates. They contribute to the potential for increased strength in the
working-class struggle.
The Alabama Development Office in 2006 was named the top state economic
development agency in the U.S. for attracting new capital investment, with 568
companies locating there, adding almost 25,000 jobs and over $3 billion in
capital investment. (ado.state.al.us)
The state is home to three major automobile producers: Honda,
Mercedes—which has doubled its plant size over the last 10
years—and Hyundai, with one plant of 400 robots that is one of most
technologically advanced in the world. A second plant is in the works.
In the last two months National Steel Car of Canada announced it was locating a
huge rail car factory in northern Alabama, while ThyssenKrupp of Germany
decided to bring its new steel plant to the Mobile area, creating almost 30,000
direct and indirect jobs. (al.com)
The high stakes for unity within the working class, especially among women, are
greater than ever.
And unity was demonstrated during the week of clinic defense, when a call came
down to the clinic from undocumented Latina women workers being held in the
Etowah County immigration detention center in Gadsden, Ala. Many had been
transferred there from Georgia, where they had resisted their arrest with a
1,000-person hunger strike in March. (Huntsville Times)
The women had received virtually no gynecological care; one was bleeding
extensively and in desperate need of assistance. Helen Rivas, a local Alabama
immigrant rights organizer, and Olga Vives, NOW national vice president, left
the clinic defense line to rush north to try to arrange medical care.
At the closing rally on July 21, Vives called on a breadth of struggle that
unites care for poor women with universal health care for all, that combines an
end to the war in Iraq with reallocation of funds to assist Katrina and Rita
survivors. She said of all the struggles, “We will not go back. We will
continue to be in the streets of the U.S., fighting until justice is
ours.”
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