Women to defend Birmingham clinics

Alabama Reproductive Freedom Summer is underway. National women’s organizations have issued a “call to action” for women’s rights activists and supporters to go to Birmingham, Ala., from July 14-22. Their clarion cry is: Defend the clinics from a right-wing siege! There are two vital women’s health clinics in that city—the New Woman All Women Health Center and Planned Parenthood.

The so-called Operation Save America (OSA), a virulent anti-abortion group formerly known as Operation Rescue, has mobilized its followers to come to Birmingham for that week to shut down the clinics, threatening to push them “into a deep grave.”

The National Organization for Women website, in calling for volunteers to go to Alabama, states that the OSA is a “religious hate-group, a group of bullies who spend their time harassing and intimidating women, and spewing hatred toward the gay community and immigrants, among others.”

But a strong response is being organized. Local activists plan clinic defense, with security and escorts so staff members and patients will be safeguarded from harassment and abuse. Activists from around the country will join their sisters and others from throughout Alabama and the South to march and rally in Birmingham. An abortion-rights speak-out, community outreach and a tour of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute are also included in the week-long events.

At a June 21 meeting of the Birmingham Peace Project, which focused on LGBT concerns, organizers for the Alabama Reproductive Freedom Summer revealed that OSA has also announced plans to target the local lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. They summoned all activists—LGBT, anti-war and anti-racist—to join with them in defeating the right wing and defending the clinics.

For many years the New Woman All Women Health Center has stood up to right-wing violence and provided women with quality health care and comprehensive reproductive services, including abortions. In 1994 the staff, with the help of hundreds of pro-choice activists, defied a week-long OSA siege and stayed open.

In 1998 the clinic was bombed, killing a security guard and severely disabling Emily Lyons, the director of nursing. Eric Robert Rudolph, an avowed white supremacist and misogynist, is now serving a life sentence without parole for that murderous act.

Rudolph bombed the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, killing one woman and injuring 100 others, and also bombed a women’s clinic and a lesbian bar in Atlanta. Rudolph’s racist ideas and actions are a continuation of white supremacist violence during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. These attacks brought so much death and destruction to the Black community of Birmingham that the city was dubbed “Bombingham.”

After the 1998 bombing, the New Woman All Women Health Center quickly rebounded and rebuilt with the support of women’s rights and other groups. It has continued to serve women throughout Alabama, and from Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee.

The two Birmingham clinics have also withstood legislative attacks. In Alabama, reactionary legislators have long maneuvered to undo women’s reproductive rights. Their goal of a total ban has not succeeded. But they have pushed through restrictive state abortion laws, harming many women, especially the young and poor.

The Bush administration continues to give a green light to anti-woman forces by its all-out war on reproductive rights for women. The Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Federal Abortion Ban and the appointments of anti-choice justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito have emboldened the ultra-right in its campaign to overturn women’s rights.

Before his high court appointment Roberts gave legal support to Operation Rescue when it organized to shut down women’s clinics in Buffalo, N.Y., and actually endorsed a plan to hold “memorials for aborted fetuses.” (Washington Post, 8/16/05)

Alito issued a legal opinion that a married woman must have her husband’s approval to obtain an abortion. (DemocracyNow.org)

And this political and ideological campaign against women’s rights also occurs within a larger reactionary program—the imperialist war drive; racist campaigns against immigrants and other people of color, including youth and Katrina survivors; bigotry towards the LGBT community; and attacks on workers’ rights and civil liberties.

But pro-choice organizers in the South have won against these reactionary forces. In addition to the 1994 Birmingham victory, in 2006 a diverse coalition of pro-choice forces kept reproductive services available to women and their families in Jackson, Miss.

The ultra-right aimed to shut down the women’s clinic in that city.

A strong mobilization by coalition forces including African-American and Asian women and men, LGBT people and many young people pushed back the bigots. Their unified power kept open the only clinic that performs abortions in the state, as well as providing vital reproductive health care for poor women, Jackson NOW told Workers World.

Reproductive rights activists nationwide, including clinic staff, have bravely fought for years to defend the right of women to have access to quality health care. Right-wing attacks have been brutal and dangerous, resulting in deaths of health care workers, doctors and escorts.

The courage of these fighters for women’s rights is admirable. And they are showing the way to stand up to and defeat the right wing in this country—those both in and out of the White House.

The Alabama Reproductive Freedom Summer hotline is (205) 251-9623. Send messages of support and offers to participate to [email protected] Send donations to: Alabama NOW (mark the check ARFS), P.O. Box 826, Huntsville, AL 3580l, and to New Woman All Women Health Care, 1001 17^th Street South, Birmingham, AL 35205.