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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan. 4/11, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Over 1,000 people came out for an afternoon pro-choice rally and march Dec. 30 and an evening memorial service here to mark the first anniversary of the murder of two workers at Boston-area abortion clinics. Marchers, many of them young women, came from as far away as the West Coast and Europe.
One of the speakers was David Gunn Jr., the son of a Florida doctor who was slain two years ago while leaving an abortion clinic. He said, "It's nice to see a community offer so much support for pro-choice endeavors." All the speakers stressed the need to be vigilant in the face of right-wing attacks against a woman's right to choose abortion.
On Dec. 30, 1994, John Salvi, a New Hampshire man with ties to numerous anti-choice organizations, shot and killed Shannon Lowney, a receptionist at the Planned Parenthood Health Center in Brookline, Mass., and wounded five other people at that clinic. He then went down the street to the Preterm Clinic and murdered receptionist Lee Ann Nichols.
Salvi was apprehended the next day in Norfolk, Va., where he fired shots at a clinic there.
Salvi is scheduled to go on trial in Massachusetts in February. The big-business media has portrayed him as a crazed lone shooter. But despite the efforts of anti- abortion forces to distance themselves from Salvi, it is clear that he is the end result of a climate of terror against women that these groups have created.
The local, state and federal governments were also directly responsible for the Brookline clinic massacres, because they ignored repeated requests from clinic directors to protect them from anti-choice picketers. Even today, a year after the murders, the government continues to allow anti-abortion forces to harass women going into clinics.
A woman in Boston who goes to a clinic must walk through a gauntlet of harassment, as anti-choice demonstrators shove anti-abortion literature in her face and scream at her that she will burn in hell for what she is doing.
The right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term is a basic right of women. It was paid for in the blood of the thousands of women who died from illegal abortions, and was fought for by millions of women who struggled to make abortion legal. Unfortunately, like most other basic rights for women, the right to choose, particularly for poor and rural women, is under severe attack.
The Abortion Access Project estimates that one out of five women who needs an abortion cannot get one, primarily because of financial or geographical reasons. Further, 84 percent of all counties in the United States have no abortion services.
Congress has prohibited using federal funds for abortion in the vast majority of cases, making it very difficult for poor women to get an abortion.
The assault on abortion rights and clinic workers is part of an overall attack on women. Massachusetts mirrors the rest of the country in this respect.
More than 15,000 jobs in Massachusetts were lost in 1995 alone due to corporate restructuring. Many of those jobs had been filled by women at the lower clerical and service levels. Thousands more jobs are expected to evaporate in 1996.
Massachusetts Gov. William Weld's response to this economic devastation has been to try to out-Gingrich Newt. Weld has been pushing for Draconian welfare reforms that would force many mothers off the welfare rolls, presumably into non-existent jobs.
Weld's welfare program makes it very difficult for women to get the financial support they need in order to escape abusive relationships. Thirty-three women were murdered in Massachusetts last year as a result of domestic violence; countless others were injured.
While the right wing holds up those who picket and harass abortion clinics and workers as heroes, the true heroes are people like Shannon Lowney, Lee Ann Nichols and the thousands of clinic workers who put their lives on the line because they believe so strongly in the right of women to safe, legal and affordable abortion.
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