BOOK REVIEW
The conspiracy against women's right to choose
By Sue
Davis
Targets of Hatred:
Anti-Abortion Terrorism
by Patricia Baird-Windle
and Eleanor J. Bader Palgrave,
St. Martin's Press, 416 pages, $27.95
The evidence is overwhelming. "Targets of Hatred:
Anti-Abortion Terrorism" chronicles the day-in, day-out
violence perpetrated by anti-abortion zealots--murder,
maiming, bombing, arson, kidnapping, stalking, sabotage,
blockade, invasion, picketing, harassment, as well as all
sorts of legal and legislative maneuvers. All have been used
over the last three decades to try to stop women from
exercising their right to abortion.
This social history, compellingly written by clinic owner
Patricia Baird-Windle and journalist Eleanor J. Bader,
exposes a pattern of right-wing terrorism that is as shocking
as it is clear. Day-by-day accounts of various types of
attacks, supplied in wrenching detail by more than 190
abortion providers from all over the country, mount up in
dizzying, grotesque, unassailable succession. And the same
names of perpetrators of anti-abortion violence crop up all
across the country.
The authors' research reveals a conspiracy of domestic
violence of huge dimensions.
Evidence of conspiracy
Yet the book also exposes how law enforcement bodies on
city, state, and federal levels have often ignored or
minimized the evidence. Not only have government offices like
the FBI sloughed off abortion providers' requests for
protection, the Department of Justice has never conducted a
comprehensive national investigation that would substantiate
such a conspiracy.
That's why this book is so important--because it compiles
the needed evidence of a well-organized, well-financed,
highly motivated conspiracy. It exposes the woman
haters--often dangerous religious fanatics--who perpetrate
crimes against abortion providers. And it exposes many
instances of governmental dismissal or obfuscation of the
violence, which amounts, ultimately, to collusion.
The book also reveals the real-life heroes who have fended
off the attacks--the abortion providers who have diligently
defended their clinics, determined to provide needed health
care for the women they serve. The personal stories of the
providers are heart-wrenching as they describe how they coped
with being stalked, having their clinic bombed or discovering
a colleague's murder. Such individual acts of heroism are the
only line of defense that has staved off the violence.
Statistics show that 43 percent of women in this country
will have an abortion during their lifetime. That's why all
women--and their families--owe abortion providers a huge debt
of gratitude for holding out against such unrelenting
warfare.
What is the answer? This book does a thorough job of
explaining the problem--not only an entrenched right-wing
conspiracy, but a repressive state apparatus that has done
everything it can to sidestep and flout the laws protecting
women's rights. But it will be up to women's organizations
and the progressive movement generally to elaborate a program
to defend reproductive freedom for all women. That can be
fully realized only by shifting the authority and the
material means to protect women's rights from the state to
the organizations of the people themselves, especially the
women's movement.
In this way women will be able to receive needed
reproductive health care in a calm, understanding, supportive
environment, free from intimidation and shame.
"Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism" could not be
more timely. It is a loud rallying cry to defend women's
right to abortion and a powerful impetus to oppose the Bush
administration's anti-abortion stance. Read it and take
action.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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