Alabama clinic bombing: Racist right wing behind
attacks
By Dianne Mathiowetz
Birmingham, Ala.
With vicious premeditation, reactionaries who
would deny women the right to abortion bombed the New Woman All
Women Health Care Center in Birmingham, Ala., Jan. 29. The bomb
killed a security guard, Robert Sanderson, and severely wounded
nurse Emily Lyons.
Sanderson, a Birmingham police officer working a second job,
was instantly killed. Lyons underwent 10 hours of surgery to
remove shrapnel from her face, abdomen and legs. She lost her
left eye.
Here in Birmingham and around the country after the bombing,
pro-women's- rights forces held news conferences, rallies and
candlelight vigils to denounce the escalating violence against
women's right to choose abortion.
In 1997 alone, there were 13 bombings and cases of arson at
women's health facilities, including a still-unsolved bombing
at an Atlanta-area abortion clinic. Federal authorities now
link the 1996 Olympic Park blast and a February 1997 explosion
at an Atlanta lesbian nightclub with the clinic bombing.
Witnesses to the Birmingham bombing have reportedly told
investigators they saw a white man remove a wig and stuff it in
a bag while walking to a Nissan truck. The vehicle's owner,
identified as Eric Robert Rudolph, is being sought as a
material witness. Rudolph lived for many years in Topton, a
small community in western North Carolina where a racist
militia group has its headquarters.
Diane Derzis of the New Woman Clinic said she hopes to
reopen the facility within a week. Meanwhile, down the street
at Summit Medical Center, all appointments were kept after the
bombing.
A sign in a window reads "This Clinic Stays Open."
Linked to racist terror
Some 35 years ago, Birmingham was at the center of the
historic civil-rights movement. Arch-racist Alabama Gov. George
Wallace incited the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist
groups in their violent attacks on the Freedom Riders and Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s followers.
During the epic struggle against segregation, 41 bombings
occurred in this city, earning it the name "Bombingham."
The most deadly assault occurred Sept. 15, 1963. Ten sticks
of dynamite exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing
four young girls attending Sunday school.
A Klan member was finally convicted of this heinous crime in
1977-14 years after the bombing.
Today, Gov. Fob James Jr. is the voice of the right wing. He
has declared Alabama exempt from the Constitutional separation
of church and state. He has threatened to use National Guard
troops to impose prayer in the public schools.
James is also pushing to make abortion essentially illegal
in Alabama. According to Melanie England, a pro-choice escort
at the nearby Summit Medical Center, James promotes the notion
that the precepts of the fundamentalist religious right
supersede any secular law.
The Ku Klux Klan recently held an anti-immigrant rally in
Cullman in northern Alabama.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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