(Previously published at Liberal Street Fighter, also posted at My Left Wing and The Daily Kos)
Hurricane season comes around every year, and it’s that time again. But for anyone dedicated, courageous or just hardheaded enough still to be providing the women of Florida with abortion care, disaster can strike at any time–destroying their facilities and threatening their very lives–because there, as in so many places, the season of hatred never, ever ends.
Abortion providing clinics all across the country have been targets of hatred and violence for what seems like forever: break-ins, blockades, vandalism, butyric acid attacks, anthrax threats, bombings, and even murders. Since 1992, as many as 19 clinics have been torched each and every year. And even as we all celebrated our legacy of American freedom this 4th of July, yet another clinic burned, this time in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Just one more violent statistic added to a long, long list.
“All the faxes we’ve gotten through the years saying: ‘ALERT. WARNING. There’s been a bombing,'” said Mona Reis, owner of the clinic. “Now we’re the fax. Now we’re the statistic.”
For many people, this newest act of red-blooded American terrorism against women and the abortion providers who care for them might have been only a blurb in the paper or a blip on the news, if they heard of it at all. But not for me. Like Ms. Reis, I have watched countless warnings of hateful and explosive violence scroll off my fax for years, tearing them off the machine with a brick in my chest, dreading horror while hoping that this time no one was hurt or dead.
So I am not only sorry that yet another firestorm has closed the last abortion-providing clinic in Palm Beach County. I feel a lot of things–I am frustrated and furious, but fearful, too–because to me Mona Reis is more than just a name in the newspaper. That kindhearted and soft-voiced steel magnolia is my colleague and my long-distance friend.
Now that the FBI and ATF are casting a suspicious eye in their direction, the same protesters who have hounded Mona, her clinic’s staff and her patients for years have started sounding almost solicitous.
But when it comes to abortion, Florida has a long history of violence against clinics and those who work in them.
In 2003, Paul Hill was executed for the 1994 murder of a Pensacola doctor and his escort outside a clinic. A year earlier, another Pensacola doctor was murdered. The murders prompted the city to adopt [a] buffer zone.
In the late 1990s, 10 clinics from Orlando to Miami were the targets of acid attacks in a seven-day stretch. The Catholic Palm Beach Diocese’s Respect Life office organizes prayer vigils every first Saturday of the month at Presidential Women’s Center at 9 a.m. The Palm Beach County Right to Life League and FACE Life also man the sidewalks come Saturday. The crowds can range from 20 to 60 people, said the Rev. Joe Papes, the spiritual moderator for the Respect Life office.
“We’re not protesters,” Papes said. “We don’t endorse any kind of violence. There has never been any type of brouhaha or melee.”
Well, not exactly. These are the same people who have besieged both Presidential Women’s Center and Mona herself for a long time now, even more heavily since the July 4 weekend just a year ago, when another area clinic, WomenCare Centers of Florida, was also destroyed by fire.
So Mona knows all about being a target. Does she ever.
This is a very wicked state, and during Bush’s administration, if they don’t like what you do they come back and make your life miserable. And we’ve been the victim of that.
We’ve endured more anti-choice harassment than any other clinic in Florida, probably because we’re out in front on so many of these cases. But whenever we’ve taken on a fight it’s been with the consent of the staff. I wouldn’t want to do anything that puts them in danger, and they understand that. On Saturdays, we’re surrounded by hundreds of protesters with megaphones and awful signs trying to obstruct patients from our parking lot.
It’s very important to me to keep clinic harassment and violence front and center in our community. I’m asked often for contributions by people running for public office … and I won’t give anyone a check until they come here on a Saturday morning and experience what it’s like to be a patient or a provider of abortion services. …..
The attorney general’s office … really came after us and started to subpoena our records. The attack was vicious. If you could have sat in those courtrooms – and I’ve been involved in a lot of litigation before – it became so cruel and the tone was so anti-women, it was a nightmare. …..
Anti-choice activists opened a web site in my name twice. The last time they did it, they bought monareis.com and had my home address, a picture of me, with Adolph Hitler screaming in the background, aborted fetuses and holocaust victims everywhere.
A few months ago, Mona and her daughter, Rachel, received the Choice USA 2005 Generation Award for their shared commitment to women’s health and freedom. Rachel founded Florida Friends for Choice to help challenge the repressive legal actions of Jeb Bush and the Florida legislature and Attorney General’s office. She has always known that women’s freedom and autonomy were on the endangered list.
Rachel and Mona
Well, as the daughter of an abortion clinic owner, I was exposed to things that a child doesn’t typically see. …..
[T]here was the time when the word “murderer” was spray-painted on our driveway. I also remember getting the mail at home only to open the mailbox and see a baby doll covered in fake blood and a disgusting pamphlet and videotape to go with it. …..
I enjoy making this issue a part of my life ….. But it’s not something that’s always easy to deal with. I’d be lying if I said I don’t sometimes wish my mother would choose a different profession. I have nothing but the utmost respect for what she does, but when it’s your mother, it’s different. Your life and emotions and are involved. There are days that I get nervous and feel like I am going to get news that something has happened at the clinic and to my mother. It’s really scary.
Yes, it really is. Sometimes it’s scary as all hell. But potential violence isn’t the greatest threat we face as providers of abortion care, as women, or simply as citizens of the United States of America who believe in our right to personal privacy and the freedom to control our own lives. And antiabortion terrorism doesn’t occur in a vacuum. That is why the growing lack of support for reproductive rights among Democratic politicians is more than just a worry for Mona Reis; as Americans, it threatens us all.
I’m afraid of how willing we are to compromise on access issues. We have allowed these access issues to be negotiated – when the real issue is not just to having legalized abortion, but to have legal abortions available and accessible to women regardless of where they live or how much money they make.
I’m worried that the Democratic party isn’t standing strong for this issue. It seems like it’s not a priority anymore – there’s less outrage now where there needs to be.
That opinion is hard to argue with when even Hillary Clinton sidles toward the right, auditioning her new moderate talking points to the New York State Family Planning Providers. Master framesman William Saletan claims that Clinton is right on target, luring abortion opponents into a Democratic Bigger-Than-Ever Tent by pushing the envelope of the iconic Safe, Legal and Rare all the way to Safe, Legal and Never: “Clinton isn’t trying to end the abortion war. She’s repositioning her party to win it.”
Saletan is the acclaimed author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. I heard him speak at an annual meeting of abortion care providers over a year ago, where Saletan painstakingly explained to us that the same words can mean different things to different groups of people.
Well, we sort of already knew that, and we are reminded of it again every time another “pro-life” jihadist decides to save women from what Senator Clinton now calls a “sad, even tragic choice” by reducing their ability to make that choice at all–whether with a bomb, a high-powered rifle, a shotgun, a jerrycan of gasoline . . . or with one more TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) law among the hundreds that have been deceptively mass-marketed to the public in over 30 states–and endorsed by far too many Democratic politicians–as putative protections for women’s health and safety.
As is always the case with strategists, Saletan’s and Clinton’s campaign is fought from safely behind the lines, and only with whatever words they think they need to say in order to win it. But Saletan’s own words are ill-chosen. Controlling and restricting access to abortion is the key to winning a broader struggle for cultural, ideological and societal power–one waged on a field of human flesh in order to subjugate the bodies, minds and spirits of living, breathing women.
But here on the front lines, providers of abortion care have one thing in common with those who keep us in their sights: whether the weapon of choice is a bullet or a ballot, at least we both know which side we’re on. Neither of us affects not to understand what the artfully framed and coded language of politicians and pundits really says. It announces to friend and foe alike that for some in today’s Democratic Party, a woman’s right to control her own reproduction is starting to look like mortar bait, an expendable loss on their road to victory.
The emerging coalition of “moderate” and “pro-life” Dems might or might not win their war, but women’s control over their bodies, their educational and economic futures and their very lives, already decimated by a protracted right wing siege, are now further endangered by friendly fire. The right to safe and legal abortion means nothing when it exists in law, but not in practice.
TRAP laws have proved to be a brilliant legal strategy in the war on women, a favorite tactic of anti-choice forces because they are so devastatingly effective at reducing access to competent abortion care. And where they leave off, the “saints” and “gentle Christian warriors” of the American Taliban stand ready to step in.
An ever-dwindling number of physicians remain willing, or even able, to afford either the tremendous personal risks or the professional sacrifices a doctor is now forced to make in order to provide abortion. The inevitable result is that quality abortion care, while still nominally safe and legal, continues to become rarer in most states every year.
Again, Mona Reis speaks for all of us who continue providing abortion care to the women who need us.
What keeps me going more than anything else is the lives people share with you, hearing their reasons, and getting the privilege of being able to be there for them. I’ll tell you something, these women never forget their abortion experience. I have mothers bring their daughters, saying, `I was here 20 years ago and you were there for me, now my daughter needs you, and I’m so glad you’re here.’ I feel honored to be a part of their decision.”
That says it. That is why people like Mona Reis–and even people like me–are still here. But maintaining our dedication to the high quality of care we offer our patients while continually renewing our own spirits is a much greater challenge when we know that we must face the same fights again tomorrow, with even less support and respect from some members of our own party for the real-life needs of the women we serve than we had when we began.
Mona also says, “We have a great resolve and deep conviction for what we do, and we will prevail.”
Yes, Mona. Yes, we will. Even though it gets harder every day.
