Author: moiv

There’s a lot of talk these days about what might happen if Roe falls, and most opinion seems to be roughly divided into two camps.  A sizable contingent feels confident that the Republicans need Roe more than Democrats do, both because it’s the most reliable way of energizing their base, and because they fear the voter backlash that would surely follow its loss.  Almost as many people seem to believe that Democrats should shut up about the issue of abortion and let it go, because all it’s good for is losing elections.  Their reasoning goes that even if Roe was struck, abortion rights would revert to the states and because — as some preciously naive poster commented a few days ago — “Americans are liberal and pro-choice,” women would still keep access to safe and legal abortion care.  

Both those opinions are wrong — for some women, even today, literally dead wrong.  Should you still cling to either of those cherished illusions, PBS Frontline‘s The Last Abortion Clinic and numerous abortion providers will tell you that you’re only whistling past the graveyard.
Fifteen years later, Walter Dellinger‘s 1990 analysis sounds like prophecy.

[Harvard professor Mary Ann] Glendon suggests that Roe v. Wade “insulated the pregnant woman from the larger society” and that it precluded humane statutory initiatives and supportive communitarian approaches to the problem of abortion and unwanted pregnancy. Nothing in Roe v. Wade, however, precluded a woman from choosing to consult her parents, spouse, minister or supportive friends about her decision; nothing in Roe precluded government from reducing the number of abortions by making more effective birth control widely available; nothing in Roe v. Wade precluded the community from providing the financial support that would make it easier for more women to choose to have more children. What Roe foreclosed was not communitarianism, but compulsion.

Now, in 2005, even with Roe still nominally alive, a mounting wave of TRAP legislation is making compulsion our national norm.  This year’s state-level legislative sessions imposed a near-record number of laws imposing new restrictions on a woman’s access to abortion or contraception.

Since January, governors have signed several dozen antiabortion measures ranging from parental consent requirements to an outright ban looming in South Dakota.  Not since 1999, when a wave of laws banning late-term abortions swept the legislatures, have states imposed so many and so varied a menu of regulations on reproductive health care.

West Virginia and Florida approved legislation recognizing a pre-viable fetus, or embryo, as an independent victim of homicide. And in Missouri, Gov. Matt Blunt (R) has summoned lawmakers into special session Sept. 6 to consider three antiabortion proposals. (Note: One of these has already forced the closing of the only clinic within 160 miles of Springfield, MO)

While national leaders in the abortion debate focus on the upcoming [Supreme Court] nomination hearings grass-roots activists have been changing the legal landscape one state at a time. In most cases, the antiabortion forces have prevailed, adding restrictions on when and where women can get contraceptive services and abortions, and how physicians provide them.

Antiabortion activists say they have pursued a two-pronged approach that aimed to reduce the number of abortions immediately through new restrictions and build a foundation of lower court cases designed to get the high court to eventually reverse the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision making the procedure legal.
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South Dakota has been among the most active states, passing five new laws, including a “trigger” law that would impose an immediate abortion ban after any Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.  
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In its new informed-consent law, South Dakota requires physicians to tell women seeking an abortion about the “existing relationship between a pregnant woman and her unborn child,” and that all abortions “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being.

What World Magazine‘s “Christian Views” applauds as the “clinic-killer” tactics of Pro-Life Mississippi have raised state-enforced compulsion there to a holy imperative and made it official government policy.          

The last abortion-providing clinic in Mississippi is the Jackson Women’s Health Organization.  PBS producer Raney Aronson and a team from Frontline spent two months finding out how that has happened, and how your own state could be next.  Wherever you are, it’s comforting to think “it can’t happen here,” but I can virtually promise you that at some level, it already has begun.

This November, the Supreme Court will take up its first major abortion case in five years: Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. This case will come before a changed court. But for Betty Thompson, a former abortion clinic director in Jackson, Mississippi, the concern is less about Ayotte and more that Roe v. Wade is simply becoming irrelevant as states pass hundreds of abortion regulations across the United States. “[Pro-life groups] are going to chip away at Roe v. Wade until the law is on the books, but nobody will be able to access the service,” she tells FRONTLINE. According to one abortion provider in the South, who prefers to remain anonymous: “The assault on abortion rights is very clever. It’s very smart. And we are losing.”
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Americans United for Life considers Mississippi an example for the nation. In fact, the organization’s motto is “Changing Law to Protect Human Life, State by State.” “Mississippi has an impressive track record,” AUL senior legal counsel Clarke Forsythe tells FRONTLINE. “Our goal is to see that other states pass the type of legislation that Mississippi has passed over the past decade, and we see a lot of legislative activity. Legislators and governors across the country in many different states are looking at the same type of common sense legislation that Mississippi has passed.”

Mississippi isn’t the only state where women are tithing their health and safety to the religious right.  Even in the major metropolitan area of Dallas, “moral values” TRAP laws are driving women and teenage girls into deep and dangerous waters.  Two or three women a week finally make their way to our clinic only after having tried everything from self-injecting multiple vials of Methergine, to ingesting up to 30 tabs of Cytotec (10 times the therapeutic dose when used as the stage-two drug in medical abortion), to taking or doing just about anything else you can think of, including punching their abdomens purple.  Some of the women who try to abort themselves are from countries where abortion is illegal, and they already “know” and accept that abortion is dangerous.

Flea markets and bazaars here do a thriving business in drugs to “make your period come,” and in low-income neighborhoods everybody knows “a lady down the street who can help you out.”  All of this has become so prevalent in the Spanish-speaking community that when a woman calls to ask about fees, I feel her out a little and ask if the cost will prevent or delay her having her abortion. If she says yes or even seems to hesitate, then we contact the Lilith Fund or Texas Equal Access, so that if she’s alone and has no one to help her she won’t do something dangerous or have to prostitute herself to get the money.  That happens a lot, too, since our Texas TRAP laws and more restrictive state regulation took effect last year.  They were diabolically designed and crafted to cost providers dearly and thereby increase the cost of providing abortion care, and they do exactly that.  

And the teenagers who can’t tell their parents are a whole ‘nother story. They think that they can drink bleach to have a miscarriage. They pay their best friend’s boyfriend to punch them in the stomach every day after school for days on end. They get on the internet and read about how abortions are performed, and call to find out what kind of tube they can use at home.  Jane’s Due Process literally saves lives in this state, but I live in fear of the day that I can’t keep one of those kids on the line long enough to make her believe that there’s a safe way out.  

And I can virtually promise you that when one of them carries out her pitiful, desperate plan and ends up in an ER, nobody talks about it.  Only a few weeks ago, an OB/GYN resident at a major Dallas hospital told me about the women who come bleeding into their ER, but she won’t tell anybody else, and it’s hard to blame her. I can’t imagine a quicker road to professional perdition for a hospital physician in Dallas, Texas in 2005 than stirring up a public ruckus about abortion — unless it’s getting caught performing one.

The people who imposed our TRAP laws here are the people in charge, and they like things just the way they are — quiet as a church mouse. That’s why Rick Perry had mega-evangelist Rod Parsley at his elbow when he signed the Texas parental consent law that made abortion providing physicians eligible for the death penalty… in a Ft. Worth church.  

But it could be worse. What follows is information received just a couple of days ago from a friend who is an abortion provider in yet another southern state, as we discussed the Frontline program and the increase in illegal abortion caused by TRAP laws.  This comes from a woman for whom I have unbounded respect and admiration, someone who saw “abortion wards” up close and personal before 1973 and who has dedicated herself to providing women with a high quality of abortion care ever since.

Our local university medical hospital tells me they see 12-20 patients per year already who have either self-induced or had illegal abortions.  Some make it, some don’t. These are underage and/or poor women mostly and a few daughters of pro-life families who can’t be seen entering a clinic or going against what their parents believe.  So we’re already living with this at that level and know it will increase when Roe falls.  As a matter of fact I’ve already been approached to help them organize an ‘abortion ward’ — like in the old days — as they know their caseload will mushroom.  

[I] don’t think this is unique to our area or news. The local hospital I referred to is unfortunately publicly funded and we’re in a solid repug state so I imagine they’re afraid of losing funding if this info is confirmed.  Also the very doctors who treat these women are afraid of losing their contracts and there’s always the ‘privacy’ excuse.  

I know other ‘private’ docs and hospitals are experiencing the same but just like in pre-Roe days, mum’s the word.  Most people don’t even realize  hospitals had abortion wards before Roe. Just like what’s happening today, it simply wasn’t talked about openly.

We deal occasionally with a patient who’s attempted to self-induce (through use of caustic douching or ingestion – most common being taking an entire bottle of quinidine tabs chased with castor oil).  When the quinidine dosers call, we get involved with getting them to E.R. before their cardiac rhythm is interrupted — then if the pregnancy continues, we provide abortion care at little or no charge — as patients are usually poor; however some are underage, in which cases we shepherd them through the judicial bypass procedure — sometimes both.

In this culture I don’t know of a woman who’s been through this (or her family) who could ‘go public’ as they would be shunned in the community, lose job, lose children, etc.

Shades of Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaids Tale”.

[W]e’re already dealing with it to some degree here and certainly know what to do if there are complications from legal abortion — but this is a whole other aspect I haven’t had to deal with in years and with my outrage over losing this right for women, I know I’m not detached and objective (nor do I intend to be).  …

To know now how safe and simple this care is and deal with the fallout from criminalization (knowing that those injuries and infections were totally avoidable — except for the religious right, ignorant, backward, etc., etc., etc.), going back to holding women in my arms while they die a totally preventable death is not something I aspire to and not sure I can hold up to it.

This isn’t some specter of a future horror that might or might not ever come to pass. This is the United States of America right now, and repressive state-level laws “regulating” abortion are already compelling women — as always, primarily poor women of color and teenage girls — to resort to the same dangerous and sometimes deadly methods of illegal abortion that kill thousands of women in the Third World every year.  

If you aren’t already horrified, there’s no hope for you.  Don’t even try to imagine how much worse it would be if Roe fell. And maybe no one could hold up to the reality of it, or would — if they knew.  But until Frontline went to Mississippi and Louisiana, nobody except people like us was talking about what already has been going on for some time.  

And where’s that guaranteed political backlash?  It’s nowhere, the same place it would be without Roe. If nobody is talking about it now, in this time and space of relative freedom, who would dare to make a public issue of nonexistent abortion rights in places where abortion had become a crime?

OK, the timing’s lousy. Tuesday is election night, and we all have races to watch. But the polls will have closed before “The Last Abortion Clinic” begins, and nothing else you do then will change even a single vote.  Watch this program, learn the details of what not enough people know, and then let’s all come back and talk together about what we can do — and must do — to keep women safe and free.  If you won’t be home at the regular broadcast time, you can even see it via streaming video from the PBS site.

Or don’t watch it, and try not to think about what a desperate woman somewhere in the United States of America in 2005 will feel forced to do tonight.  Just push it right out of your mind.

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

And on your way home, don’t forget to whistle when you pass the graveyard.

from Our Word

OK, everybody, how about some good news for a change?  

If you live in Rhode Island, chances are that you already know about the impressive professional accomplishments, extensive political involvement and numerous social contributions of Dr. Pablo Rodríguez.

Basically, as many people already know, and as the Bushistas in Florida are only beginning to find out, Pablo Rodríguez rocks.

And I thought everybody else might like to know him, too.

Meet my friend Dr. Pablo Rodríguez.

Dr. Pablo Rodriguez is associate chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Women and Infants’ Hospital in Providence, medical director of Planned Parenthood of Rhode Island, and is a clinical assistant professor at Brown University’s Program in Medicine.
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[H]e specializes in advanced endoscopic surgery and is recognized as one of the pioneers in the use of lasers in Rhode Island. He is board certified in obstetrics and gynecology and by the American Board of Laser Surgery and Medicine.

He is a well-known leader in the Hispanic community and an active participant in civic and charitable organizations. He chairs the Rhode Island Latino Political Action Committee and the Democracy Compact, a statewide voter participation project. For the last three years he has been the vice chair of the Rhode Island Foundation and led the effort for the $1.5 million Capital Campaign to benefit Progreso Latino, the leading social service agency for new immigrants.

He was actively involved in the Health Care Reform Commission in charge of drafting the Rite Care legislation in Rhode Island and has been involved in numerous Health Department initiatives such as chairman of the Minority Health Advisory Committee and the Preventive Health Advisory Commission.

He has received numerous awards for his community involvement including Community Service Award from the American Medical Association in 1994 and Planned Parenthood of RI in 1996. In 1996 he was named a Community Hero Torchbearer for the Olympic Torch Relay of the 1996 Olympics.

Most recently, he has been awarded with an award that bears his name by the R.I. Department of Health for his work on behalf of minority health and also received the Bertram Jaffee Award for advocacy in Public Health, given by the R.I. Public Health Association. The John Hope Settlement House also gave him their highest honor, The Paris Vaughn Sterett Award for community service, and the Ministers Alliance bestowed him with the Martin Luther King Service Award at their Annual MLK Day Breakfast.

After a list of honors as long as this one, it’s tempting to get flippant and say, “Other than that, hey, he’s just an average guy.”  But as Nixon said, “that would be wrong” – because that thumbnail bio, amazing as it is, barely scratches the surface of the man who is Dr. Pablo Rodríguez.  

Like most physicians who provide abortion care, Dr. Rodríguez has known his share of trouble.

The Doctor in the Bulletproof Vest

On Saturday morning I was in the family room getting ready to go to work. As usual, my wife reminded me to wear my bulletproof vest, and once again my 7-year-old son wanted an explanation. As I began to tell him that the vest was part of Daddy’s work uniform, the television news was reporting the murder of Dr. Barnett A. Slepian, the gynecologist in Buffalo who performed abortions.

I never want my wife or children to hear news of violence or murder at an abortion clinic before I do. I want to explain it first, to edit the coverage, make it less scary, protect them from worrying. But this time I was frozen.

One might think that after all these years and other murders, I would be somewhat numb to the horrors. But no, it’s always just as hard as it was the first time.
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I know that it is impossible for most people to understand what thousands of health care providers feel every day. But consider what my life has been like since I was identified by anti-abortion groups as one of their targets.

In the beginning, the harassment consisted of just nasty letters and graphic pictures of dismembered fetuses. Then I began receiving strange packages with dolls inside, as well as subscriptions to gun magazines and advertisements for hunting lodges showing pictures of dead animals hanging by their limbs.

Then the Wanted posters with my picture on them began to appear; the first one was taped to the front door of the clinic for patients to see. Copies were also sent to my wife at home and to my other office.
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Just after Dr. Gunn’s death, I was driving my mother to the bus station when I realized that my car was steering poorly. I checked my tires and found 45 nails embedded in them – this after I had been driving over 50 miles an hour on the highway.

That evening, my wife painfully discovered with her foot that our driveway had been booby-trapped with roofing nails cleverly buried beneath the snow. An image of my young children running on that same section of driveway has filled me with a fear that I have never been able to shake off. My home, my haven of safety – violated.

The following week I received a bill for an insurance policy on my wife’s life. I called the insurance company and was told that someone had filled out a fraudulent application, but that the company could do nothing for me but apologize.

Next I received an identification card in the mail for a catastrophic health and dismemberment policy that would cover my medical costs in case such circumstances should arise. My experiences are not unique. Other providers around the country and in Canada have been through similar episodes, and worse.
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Personally, I could never turn away a patient who needs my help. I know my advocacy and services are just a drop in the ocean considering all the needs that people have.
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Reasonable people disagree over abortion. <…>  [But] it is unreasonable that my children are not allowed to play in our yard because it is not safe.

Unlike many politically influential people, Dr. Rodríguez is a man intimately acquainted with the pain and suffering of others as well, and he gives of himself — professionally, financially, and always personally — to do something about it.

I never thought that I would be performing an abortion in a room with a picture of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, but there I was, in the middle of the Andes. My brain was loaded with the images of the American abortion war, not knowing if what I was experiencing was a result of the steaming coca tea or if indeed these lay midwives, whom I trained to safely manage the complications of unintended pregnancy, have found a way to publicly view their work as God’s work.

Perhaps it is the fact that hunger, extreme poverty and disease are so diabolic and real in their lives that anything that could somehow stem the flow of misery is nothing less than a blessing.

Next to the crude poster of contraceptive methods with condoms and IUDs taped to it were multiple religious icons and passages from the Bible. From what I could tell, these women were as religious as those who protest in front of my clinic in Providence every Thursday and Saturday. Every woman who came in was embraced in her decision to accept or not the promise of a future child.
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I am back in town now, and the religious icons have placed themselves outside the clinic once more. Politicians continue to dance their awkward mambo with both feet firmly planted on both sides of the fence and the sleepy electorate is awakening from its slumber. But inside my heart, the story of the Andean cholitas (native women) spreading the gospel of reproductive rights will forever lift my spirit.

And that he is still among us is almost a miracle. Last February Pablo sustained severe and extensive injuries in a highway accident here in Dallas.  Now the Providence Journal (free registration, and worth doing to read the entire article) tells us that the doctor is back, but his joy is mixed with fear.

The wan look, evident when the high-profile physician and community leader began reentering public life several months ago, is gone. He has color in his cheeks. He limps, but his step is spry. His usual gregariousness and humor are in full swing.

But whether Rodriguez will be able to fully resume his 20-year career as an ob-gyn doctor is unclear.
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The car crash, caused by a drunken driver (the accident also claimed his niece’s life and injured other family members), left Rodriguez with radial nerve palsy in his right hand.

“The nerve that feeds the arm was bruised, or even cut, in portion, by the fracture” to his right arm. “So I lost the ability to lift my wrist and extend my fingers.” He is hoping a hand surgeon may be able to help.

Rodriguez goes to his Pawtucket office every day, where he does his morning radio show on WELH (88.1 FM), opens the mail and takes phone calls. But he has not yet begun seeing patients, nor set a date for doing so.

“I haven’t even tried yet to see what I can do. I’m afraid that I’m not going to be able to do it — that I’m not going to be proficient,” he said.

“In gynecology you have to touch people, you have to examine them in a certain way. I want to do it right. I don’t want to just go through the motions and pretend that I’m doing a good job. And I think it’s also the fear of, I’ll be able to do this, but not be able to do that,” he said.
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Since his latest surgery in August, to reverse a colostomy and close his abdomen (“my belly has been open since March, with a skin graft just holding my guts together”), he has made great physical and emotional strides.

“Every day,” he said, “every day is better.”

In the meantime, he’s not sitting still. Dr. Rodríguez not only continues to do his radio show in Rhode Island, but is making an incursion into Florida’s airspace as well. You gotta love it: a Spanish-speaking, abortion-providing, politically active liberal doctor on the air in the heart of Bushistan’s Latino community.  The station is WOCN, Union Radio 1450 AM, covering Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. If you speak Spanish, you can hear Pablo live via streaming audio at 1:00 PM Eastern on Fridays.

Aside from all the other civil and human rights under threat, considering Cytotec Sam Alito’s anti-immigrant rulings . . .

ALITO HOSTILE TOWARD IMMIGRANTS:
In two cases involving the deportation of immigrants, the majority twice noted Alito’s disregard of settled law. In Dia v. Ashcroft, the majority opinion states that Alito’s dissent “guts the statutory standard” and “ignores our precedent.” In Ki Se Lee v. Ashcroft, the majority stated Alito’s opinion contradicted “well-recognized rules of statutory construction.” [Dia v. Ashcroft, 2003; Ki Se Lee v. Ashcroft, 2004]

. . . there couldn’t be a better time for Democratic outreach to Florida’s Spanish-speaking community, and Dr. Pablo Rodríguez is just the man to deliver the message.

And by the way, you know what else el doctor is doing? As usual, he’s putting his money where his mouth is. Pablo Rodríguez believes so strongly in the importance of taking back Florida that he’s paying for the radio time all by himself. If he didn’t have to worry about covering the expenses involved, he could expand his talk show into Tampa and Orlando much sooner than he’s already hoping to do. The advertising rates at WOCN look pretty reasonable to me, so if you know any business owners in Dade/Broward who don’t vote Republican, maybe they’d like to buy a commercial or two.  

If you’re glad to have met my friend Pablo, then please help to spread the word: “¡Hola, Miami! The Doctor Is IN!”

from Our Word

Governor Mel Blunt signed an omnibus bill to restrict access to abortion in Missouri only weeks ago, but the sole abortion providing facility in Springfield, Missouri has already been forced to close its doors–leaving women in that region 160 miles away from the nearest doctor who is willing to provide abortion care.

The new law requires that doctors who perform abortions must hold professional privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of any location where an abortion is performed.  But abortion providing physicians now have become such a rare breed that many must travel considerable distances, so that the nearest hospital where a doctor has admitting privileges can lie much farther than 30 miles away from the clinic where she or he provides abortion care.

Like all TRAP laws, its provisions might apply to doctors, but women are the ones who get trapped.

The clinic filed a legal challenge and won a temporary injunction to stave off implementation of the law, but all hospitals in the area – evidently bending to the prevailing political winds — have refused to consider granting privileges to the clinic’s doctor. The Springfield clinic’s director, Michelle Collins, explains, “It’s just so difficult to provide abortions for patients here when there’s zero support from the medical community.”

As a result of the clinic’s closing, the lawsuit will be dropped. “The law will now come into effect very quickly,” Sam Lee of Campaign Life Missouri said.

According to Collins, the clinic asked 10 to 15 local physicians and out-of-town doctors if they would offer the procedure, and all have declined.
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Dave Plemmons, chair of the Springfield chapter of Missouri Right to Life, said the organization will work against any provider trying to fill the closing clinic’s place by offering abortions.
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Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri President Peter Brownlie said that the closing of the clinic will further restrict a woman’s access to abortion, adding, “Women have … a legal right” to reproductive health care procedures, but “that right becomes pretty hollow if there isn’t a facility to meet” women’s needs. Lee said the clinic’s closing is “unexpected but great news.”

Jessica Robinson, a spokesperson for Blunt, said, “The governor hopes this closing will move Missourians to consider alternatives to abortion so that our state can move forward in embracing a culture that values human life.”

It seems particularly ironic that this new law devaluing the human lives of women was heavily promoted and sponsored by an all-woman coalition of pro-“life” legislators including Democrats for Life All-Stars Belinda Harris and Kate Meiners — Our Loyal Democratic Sisters — in enthusiastic collaboration with the ongoing right wing crusade to persuade women to “move forward in embracing” compulsory childbearing.  

Abortion is in the headlines this week.  On Saturday jsmdlawyer at Daily Kos diaried Clarence Thomas’ attempt to prevent an imprisoned woman in Missouri from having the abortion to which she was legally entitled, just because she didn’t have the $350 she needed to get to the clinic (before we were through with that one, she could have hired a limo, but how much better for women everywhere that she didn’t need it after all).  

And this morning none of us was shocked–shocked!— to hear about Harriet Miers’ 1989 promise to support a Constitutional amendment banning abortion altogether.  

But now I’m going to tell you an abortion story that hasn’t made the news, and probably won’t–a story about the women of Katrina, and about the hurricane relief effort no one talks about–the Katrina aid that dare not speak its name.

How many young women did we all see on our TV screens, bedding down on the floor at the Astrodome in Houston or Reunion Arena in Dallas with their babies and toddlers, surrounded by crumpled plastic bags that held all they had left in the world? There seemed to be thousands of them, and then more thousands.  As in any population of young women, many of them were pregnant.  And for a great number of those young women–the ones for whom unexpected and unwanted pregnancies represented a second disaster–the devastation that their lives had become was worsened by the anxiety of wondering how they could find the help they needed to have a desperately desired abortion.  

Fortunately, they didn’t have to depend on FEMA.  Low-income women who are residents of Texas and who cannot afford the cost an abortion are able to rely on two sources of help–the Lilith Fund and the Texas Equal Access Fund–volunteer nonprofit organizations that immediately expanded their previous scope to offer all possible assistance to displaced women who were relocated to Texas in the aftermath of Katrina.   Lilith and TEA typically provide somewhere from $50-100 in assistance, and as providers, we generally find a way to make up the rest.  

This morning at the clinic I was paged to the phone to take a call that meant bad news for any low-income woman in this very large state who needs an abortion.  Because of the huge additional burdens on its resources since the first part of September, the Lilith Fund has been completely wiped out and will no longer be able to offer help to any woman in Texas for at least the next one to two months. Nothing like this has ever happened before, because the Lilith Fund is a well-managed and extremely responsible organization, but providing care for the women of Katrina has overwhelmed us all, funders and providers alike.  

The need of women who are faced with rebuilding their entire lives is tremendous, and the response of the pro-choice community has been remarkable.  In Arkansas, a state with fewer evacuees, Dr. Jerry Edwards and Dr. William Harrison are offering abortion care without charge to women displaced by Katrina–and quite predictably have been condemned for it by all the usual suspects.  But in the much more highly populated metropolitan areas of Texas, the need has outpaced our ability to provide services to all the women who need us, even at reduced fees.  That’s what we get for having kept the regular cost of abortion care so low that, as a colleague in Louisiana often says, we seem to be producing quality medical care out of thin air.

The few national funding groups that usually can assist women in any part of the country now are so depleted that they are unable to help almost anyone but Katrina victims, and the Lilith Fund–which together with the TEA Fund has carried most of the burden here in Texas from the beginning–has been hit so hard during the last couple of months that it can no longer help anyone at all.

And there are so many women who need that help.  Gretchen Dyer of the TEA Fund can tell you about them better than I can.

More than a choice
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When Tracy called, she had the curtains closed and the door bolted. She spoke in a low whisper that made it hard to understand her. She was hiding in her apartment with her two children because her ex-boyfriend had threatened to kill her. When she’d contacted the police, they’d informed her that he was a known criminal and advised her to get as far away from him as possible.

This was good advice. The problem was, Tracy was a struggling single mother with no savings, no place to go and no one to protect her. She was also pregnant.

Tracy couldn’t manage another child on her own, and she didn’t want to bear the man’s child or have any further connection to him. So she’d decided to have an abortion. For her, this was more than a choice. It was a chance to survive, to start over and make a safe life for herself and her children.
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I speak to dozens of women in difficult situations every week, some more desperate than Tracy’s. Most are single mothers working low-wage jobs that don’t pay enough to support their families. Some are victims of rape or incest, women on the run from domestic abuse, women with serious health problems or teenagers trying to finish high school and keep from getting thrown out of their homes because they’re pregnant.
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Last week Charlene called. A few months out of treatment for methadone addiction and only a few days out of a homeless shelter, she’s trying to get her life back together. Her child is about to start school, and she’s looking for a job. Another baby right now will put her simple goals out of reach.

And then there was Louise, a single mother of two with breast cancer. She was too sick to work, had no medical insurance and had used up her savings on medical bills. The doctor advised her that the pregnancy was life-threatening for her and the radiation treatments an unacceptable risk to the fetus. The decision to abort was a life-and-death decision for her and for her two children who need her. It was a whole lot more than a choice.

As most of you know, Texas covers about the same land area as France.  There were countless Tracys and Charlenes and Louises even before any of us ever heard of Katrina.  And they’re still here, and still needing help, along with 41 year-old “Mary” from Slidell, a mother of three with hypertension and diabetes, and 13 year-old “Tiffany” from New Orleans, who just wants to fit in with the other seventh-graders at her new school–both of whom were patients at our clinic on the same day last week.  And the phone just keeps on ringing . . .

Without the partnership provided by the Lilith Fund, the TEA Fund will be left alone to carry the almost unimaginable burden of helping numberless women who are living in circumstances more desperate than most of us have ever known.

Every donation that Lilith and TEA receive goes directly to a woman who needs it. For a woman from Louisiana still cooped up in a motel and buying no-name macaroni and cheese to feed her kids on the shrinking balance of her FEMA check–or for a Texas woman sleeping in her car with her two year-old because she’s afraid to go home–no amount is too small to make a difference.  By the very nature of their work, Lilith and TEA have the strictest of privacy policies. There are no third party middlemen, and their operating expenses pretty much consist of a toll-free phone number, a few cell phones and a checkbook.  

When I took that call this morning, my first thought after “Oh, my God, no” was that I knew a lot of good people who would want to help Tracy and Charlene and Louise and Mary and Tiffany just as much as Lilith and TEA and I do.

The Lilith Fund

Texas Equal Access Fund

For all of them, for every one of them, thanks a lot for anything you can do.

Update [2005-10-20 1:59:42 by moiv]: A friend at Lilith sent me some figures this evening, and I wanted to share them with you.

“In April, the Lilith hotline took 463 calls…in September we took 797

In 2004 we paid out around $17,000 in vouchers.
So far in 2005…a whopping $38,000″

Those numbers represent a lot of women in a lot of trouble. I’m only one person in one clinic in one city of a big state, but today I met women whom you’ve already helped. The volunteers at TEA and Lilith are feeling pretty overwhelmed right now–which for them is normal–but this time, and for a change, it’s a good feeling. They’ve said thank you to me today about half a dozen times, and I feel the need to pass that along to its rightful owners.

From all of them, and most especially from all the women, thank you.

It had to happen somewhere, sooner or later, and none of us should be surprised that it has happened first in Texas. The rabidly anti-choice mob comprising the majority of the Texas Legislature passed a law this year that finally has abortion-providing physicians exactly where the Rapture Right wants them: subject to the death penalty.

How could such a thing have happened?  In a state like mine, how can you ask?

The new law was signed by Rick Perry at a Fort Worth church three months ago, on the same occasion that he notoriously suggested that returning Iraq veterans should come back to anywhere but Texas . . . if they were gay.    

But at least he didn’t sign their death warrants.

“It has been a tragedy of unspeakable consequences that for decades activist courts denied many Texas parents their right to be involved in one of the most important decisions their young daughter could ever make – whether to end the life that was growing inside her,” Perry told a crowd of about 1,000 people gathered at the Calvary Christian Academy. “For too long, a blind eye has been turned to the rights of our most vulnerable human beings – that’s the unborn in our society.”

Texas already had a parental notification bill, approved in 1999. The new, tougher measure requires a parent to provide written consent for unmarried girls under 18.
<…>
Before Perry spoke, several pastors received standing ovations and shouts of “Amen!” from the crowd as they touted the two measures being signed by Perry.

“It seems to me that people of the great state of Texas will be silent no more,” said Rod Parsley, of the Center for Moral Clarity in Ohio. “Folks in this room understand, God is still watching.”
<…>
Pastor Larry White of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Houston said the gathering inside the church school was about life, family and marriage.

“There are those that would drive people of faith from the public square if they could,” White said.

Perry spokeswoman Kathy Walt said many of the critics “would object to this bill-signing if it were in a public school, a library, a Wal-Mart parking lot or any other venue, because they oppose pro-life and pro-family issues.”

This particular critic doesn’t give a nickel-plated damn where Brother Perry signed such an appallingly framed and potentially lethal excuse for a statute. If he didn’t realize what he was doing, he’s merely hopelessly incompetent. But if he did know, there are no words for what he is.

Capital Defense Weekly

Sunday, August 28
Texas Authorizes Death for Some Abortion Providers

Abortion providers in Texas who don’t follow the exacting letter of that State’s abortion law are eligible for capital punishment according to the Texas District and County Attorneys Association’s Lindsay Roberts.  “This is a case study of sorts on how changing one code can have dramatic effects on other codes that actually reference those statutes,” Roberts said. “I presented it as an unintended consequence on a change to the civil code, but you will have to talk to your local prosecutors there about how they will handle those situations. I just presented what the Legislature has done.”

The Waco Tribune-Herald notes:
<…>
Roberts noted that the Legislature two years ago altered the definition of an individual in homicide statutes from “a human being who has been born and is alive” to “a human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation, from fertilization until birth.”

There was debate when the definition of individual was changed about whether the effect would make abortion the equivalent of murder. So lawmakers took particular care to write into the homicide statute that a lawful medical procedure performed with consent by a physician or other licensed health-care provider, if the death of the unborn child was the intended result, is an abortion. That provided a lawful defense or exception to homicide laws.

Continuing to connect the statutory dots, however, Roberts told local prosecutors that there is no such defense provided for a doctor who performs an unlawful medical procedure, such as an abortion on a minor without parental consent.

So, in effect, the doctor would have killed a child younger than 6 in an illegal abortion and thereby subjected himself or herself to potential prosecution for capital murder, Roberts told the dumbfounded audience.

OK, I’m not a doctor, so all I can be charged with is having an average degree of imagination.

Scenario #1:  Kim and Katie are sisters. Kim is 17 and Katie is 19, but like many other sisters, they look alike enough to be twins. Their devoutly antiabortion parents hate Kim’s boyfriend, believe that she broke up with him when they ordered her to stop seeing him three months ago – and now Kim is pregnant.  There will be hell to pay if Mom and Dad find out, so Kim makes an appointment for an abortion in Katie’s name. She borrows her sister’s driver’s license, presents it at the clinic as her own ID, and no one suspects a thing.  A week later, while Kim is at school, Mom tosses her bedroom and finds a crumpled note from Kim’s best friend that mentions Kim’s abortion.

Scenario #2: There’s already a ton of paperwork required for getting an abortion in Texas. There’s a consent form for the ultrasound and the prerequisite lab tests. There’s a receipt for the clinic’s HIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices, and another signature to attest that a woman has received a copy of her aftercare instructions. There’s a consent form for IV sedation, and yet another for the abortion procedure itself. And then there’s the woman’s signed certification that the doctor personally gave her a laundry list of state-mandated information (including dire warnings of such mythical consequences of abortion as breast cancer and thoughts of suicide), and that she afterward completed a 24-hour waiting period before her procedure — a document without which no abortion in Texas can be legally performed.  Somewhere amid all this documenting and attesting, a woman will have questions about birth control, about how the abortion procedure itself is going to feel, and about a dozen other things.

If the patient is a minor, her mother will have many questions of her own. And while a clinic’s staff is making sure that having an abortion really is the teenager’s idea and not just what her parents want, detailing the patient’s medical history, flagging the chart for medical evaluation, filling out the lab requisition form for a Pap smear or selecting informational materials for the girl to take home  — or while they’re doing any number of other necessary things — it’s humanly possible that they could overlook yet one more form, the one that certifies parental consent.

 

Scenario #3: The parental notification law was part of the Texas Family Code, but in its fervid zeal to tighten restrictions on abortion, the Lege attached the new consent law as an amendment to an entirely different section of the state statutes. The law requires the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners to provide doctors with an official consent form for compliance, but TSBME says that it will be next spring before they create that form and make it available. Until then, doctors are on their own, and simply will have to hope that whatever documentary standards they come up with now eventually will prove to have met legal criteria yet unknown. But I’m sure that’s nothing for them to worry about — not in Texas.

Before September 1, performing an abortion without having a teenager’s parent sign a form could have cost doctors their licenses to practice. Now, under the law of the State of Texas, it could cost them their lives.  

And it seems odd that some of the holy hyenas who howled the loudest about stopping abortion during the legislative session now seem unusually reluctant to comment about what they’ve accomplished.

In signing the parental consent bill, Perry said, “Today, we are laying down a significant marker in the effort to create a culture of life by protecting those who can’t protect themselves, by giving voice to the voiceless who yearn for life.”

Robert Black, the governor’s deputy press secretary, said last week that his office was not aware of the potential created by the new bill for doctors who perform illegal abortions to face possible death sentences.

“During the legislative process, a lot of folks see conspiracies everywhere,” Black said. “But the fact is that the parental notification law as well as the parental consent legislation that the governor has always supported is intended to protect young girls and protect the rights of parents. What you mentioned is a hypothetical and we are not going down the road of hypotheticals.”

Cold comfort, when everybody knows how they enforce the death penalty down here in Texas — hypothetically.

Roberts said he is no conspiracy theorist.

“We are just giving facts. . . . Roberts said. “It shows you that when they change one thing, for whatever reason they changed it, it can have an effect on other things. It happens all the time. We are just telling it like it is.“

And I can’t think of a single reason not to believe him.

When bayprairie (with TruBlueDem) posted her diary here at Booman Tribune presenting a compelling case for opposing Democrats for Life, every last face in her Rogues’ Gallery belonged to a man. There’s no objective reason that we should expect more compassion from women on issues involving reproductive freedom than we expect from men.  Certainly we shouldn’t.  Especially not from women such as Missouri state representatives Belinda Harris (left) and Kate Meiners (right) – both DFL All-Stars.

Just how hard-line are the positions of these two women?  Before the 2004 election, both Harris and Meiners won strong endorsements in bold type from Missouri Right to Life, an organization that is 100% anti-abortion, anti-birth control and anti-stem cell research — and that trusted these Democratic women to further those extremist goals over their staunchly “pro-life” male Republican opponents.

And that’s about as hard as the line can get.

Meiners (left) and Harris (right) understand loyalty to a cause; it is what unites them. We hear a lot of talk about loyalty ourselves, about party unity, about not “applying a litmus test on every issue” — especially if that test involves a women’s right to control her own reproduction — because “when push comes to shove, they’ll be loyal to the party and vote our way.”  We’re scolded that in failing to support all Democrats all the time, we are not only hurting the party’s chances now, but sabotaging our own future interests.  Lockstep right down the line, no matter who a Democrat is or what they stand for, because we’re sick and tired of losing elections: “We Wanna Win!”

And the American Catholic agrees that Democrats ought to be more practical.

State Sen. Patrick Dougherty and Reps. Patricia Yaeger, Belinda Harris and Thomas Villa, a few of the estimated 25 to 35 pro-life Democrats in the Legislature, said the Democratic Party needs to reassess its positions as it looks to the future. Dougherty termed the reassessment “soul-searching.” Others said they believed that the 2004 Democratic candidate for governor, state auditor Claire McCaskill, would have won the election if she had not taken a position in support of keeping abortion legal. “Look at who won and who lost” the Nov. 2 elections, Yaeger said.

That’s the ticket. Step right this way into the Big Tent, and save yourself a spot before it gets to be standing room only. Sashay your pro-choice ass inside, pipe down, and try to find a seat in that crowded back row.  But why is it that the only ones who owe unwavering loyalty and support to the Democratic Party are the voters, the people — you know, US?  What about the Democrats our loyal votes carry into office?

Belinda Harris damned sure doesn’t lose any sleep over it.  In fact, she takes the Democratic Party’s solid support and financial contributions, tallies its straight-ticket voters in her “win” column, and then tells it, and us, to go straight to hell.

State Rep. Belinda Harris, a 30-year member of Morse Mill Baptist Church who chairs the 27-member Democrats for Life Caucus in Jefferson City, said that it is important for elected officials to be completely pro-life. Whether the topic is abortion or embryonic stem cell research, defending life is defending life, she said.

“This is a moral issue,” Harris told The Pathway as her longtime pastor, Jim Johnston, quietly, but firmly expressed his support during interviews in the central Jefferson County brick church nestled in a suburban/country setting near the Big River. “This is something that is a part of your being. If you are a Christian or a church-going person, it doesn’t matter what (political) party you are, this is really kind of instilled in you. To go against it is a destroying factor to you as a person and as a Christian.

“If you truly feel this way, then to buck your party is not the problem. You don’t want to buck God. You are ultimately responsible for your actions when your time has come. To me, honoring God’s wishes is more important than honoring any political party.”
<…>
“I feel like on the state level we are winning more support as Democrats for Life,” Harris said. … “After Roe v. Wade, the Democratic Party just kind of took that one side. I felt that was wrong. I’m even really strong on young girls that were raped or had incest to spare that child. The rape and incest is not the experience that’s going to be wiped away by killing this child.”
<…>
Her goal is to defend even the tiniest embryo that contains a human being. The potential of curing a disease that is keeping someone in a wheelchair pales in comparison to the moral necessity of defending that embryonic soul, in her mind.

At least no one can ever say that Harris hid her true agenda.  So none of us should be surprised by what Belinda Harris and Kate Meiners did today.

Women Will Sponsor Abortion Bill

08/27/2005

A group of 10 women state legislators – eight Republicans and two Democrats – have agreed to co-sponsor an abortion bill in the Missouri Legislature’s special session that begins Sept. 6.

The bill will deal with the primary provisions sought by Gov. Matt Blunt, who ordered the session. According to state Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield and one of the lead sponsors, those provisions will include:

Requiring physicians who perform abortions to have clinical privileges at a hospital within 30 miles that provides obstetrical or gynecological care.

Allowing the parent or guardian of women under 18 to sue anyone who helps the minor get an abortion without the parent or guardian’s consent, as required in Missouri.

That provision is aimed at curbing the number of Missouri minors who obtain abortions in Illinois, which does not have a parental-consent requirement. Parents who commit incest will be barred from suing, Cunningham said.

The bill also is likely to include a requirement that minors seeking a judicial bypass to the parental-consent mandate must be accompanied by a “next friend” who is over 18, Cunningham said Saturday. That person cannot be someone who would benefit financially from the minor’s abortion decision, such as an employee of an abortion clinic.
<…>
Paula Gianino, head of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region, said Saturday that if the women co-sponsors truly wanted to discourage abortion they would seek to resurrect the state’s family-planning program, which the Legislature killed several years ago.
<…>
Cunningham identified the other co-sponsors of the anti-abortion bill as: state Reps. Belinda Harris, D-Hillsboro; Cynthia Davis, R-O’Fallon; Kate Meiners, D-Kansas City; Susan Phillips, R-Kansas City; Therese Sander, R-Moberly; Danie Moore, R-Fulton; Kathy Chinn, R-Clarence; Jodi Stefanick, R-Manchester; and Sally Faith, R-St. Charles.

Well, what’s wrong with a little compromise?  Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land, at least so far, and those provisions don’t sound all that bad, do they?  If any of this sounds like the voice of sweet reason, either you’re an anti yourself or you just haven’t learned to decipher their carefully crafted and coded language yet.  This bill’s hard-line antiabortion sponsors understand a whole lot more than most of their constituents do about what these provisions really mean and what they’ll really do.  

Requiring physicians who perform abortions to have clinical privileges at a hospital within 30 miles that provides obstetrical or gynecological care.

Well, what’s so bad about that?  Won’t that help make sure that abortions are performed more safely, and only by qualified doctors?  After all, what kind of an OB/GYN doesn’t have clinical privileges in at least one area hospital?  

That would be the kind of OB/GYN that provides abortions, especially in an area (like the state of Missouri) where there are so few local providers. Sometimes a doctor has to travel to a clinic from another city, or even from another state. Abortion care is now so marginalized that “mainstream” OB/GYNs who regularly admit women to hospitals for hysterectomies, endometrial ablations, tubal ligations or deliveries hardly ever provide abortion care anymore, especially, again, in places like Missouri.  And how does a doctor gain clinical privileges at a hospital in the first place?  By a standard credentialing process and by regularly admitting a minimum qualifying number of patients, which becomes highly problematic for abortion-providing physicians in places where hospitals won’t permit abortions to be performed.

Abortion is such a safe procedure that emergency hospitalization for complications is an extremely rare event — so much so that if a doctor whose practice was confined to the provision of abortion care sent enough women to the hospital to qualify for admitting privileges, I wouldn’t let him/her spay my dog.  But if a woman should need to be hospitalized for complications of an abortion, that would qualify as an emergency admission, and obviously a doctor wouldn’t need hospital privileges in order for her to be admitted for any treatment she needed.

That one innocent-sounding provision alone will go a long way toward doing away with access to abortion care in the entire state, since abortion providers in Missouri are already nearly as scarce as they are in Mississippi — and small wonder when the few existing Missouri providers are targeted by having their photographs posted on the Internet by rabid anti activists like Angela Michael, to whom we’ll return in a moment.  And that brings us to the next booby trap.

Allowing the parent or guardian of women under 18 to sue anyone who helps the minor get an abortion without the parent or guardian’s consent, as required in Missouri. Parents who commit incest will be barred from suing.

That afterthought of an exemption in the last sentence is the only drop of Christian mercy you’ll find in this entire bill. If you clicked on the “Missouri” link above, you saw only one listing for a provider in that state; the others were for clinics in Colorado, Arkansas and Illinois. That alone tells you how hard it already is to get an abortion in Missouri.  Many women there, and most teenagers, cross the Mississippi River instead to seek care at clinics such as the Hope Clinic for Women in Illinois, a state where legal restrictions on abortion are less severe.  

Others flock across the river to Illinois as well, but with entirely different motives.  As promised, meet Angela Michael – head of Small Victories Ministries, mother of 11 children, “pro-life” street activist, and bosom friend of Operation Save America/Operation Rescue‘s notorious Flip Benham.

Angela is an authority on the relationship between [Hope Clinic and St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, located directly across the street], having sidewalk-counseled outside [the] abortuary three or four times a week for seven years. Hope Clinic sits on land the hospital sold … to abortionist Hector Zevallos, who was on St Elizabeth’s staff when he built it, in 1974. In 1981, Zevallos hired hospital colleague Yogendra Shah to join him there as an abortionist. In 1982, Angela reports, Shah bought the business, Zevallos having lost his taste for it when he and wife Rosalie were held captive for eight days by a wildcat prolife group calling itself The Army of God.

(Well, I have mentioned before that there are fewer abortion providers now than there used to be . . .)  

For years it has been Michael’s self-appointed mission to harass anyone who approaches Hope Clinic and to make life hell for everyone who’s dedicated and determined enough to work there.

Angela is always there, just outside the clinic. Taking names. Taking license numbers. Taking pictures and posting them on the net. Calling the police with wild accusations.  Producing a radio show that airs in St. Louis seven times a week. And watching changes in Missouri’s abortion laws like the vulture she is.  What do you think will happen now every time she sees a young woman get out of a car with Missouri plates?  That’s the kind of thing Harris, Meiners and their Republican girlfriends are really counting on to “curb the number of Missouri minors who obtain abortions in Illinois.”  

Minors seeking a judicial bypass to the parental-consent mandate must be accompanied by a “next friend” who is over 18. That person cannot be someone who would benefit financially from the minor’s abortion decision, such as an employee of an abortion clinic.

“Benefit financially”?  Give me a crying break.  Is there anyone, anywhere, of any political persuasion, who actually believes that there is a judge anywhere in the country – let alone in a state as antagonistic to abortion rights as Missouri — who would routinely grant bypasses solely as favors to abortion providers?  Because unless you think that’s exactly what this provision is saying, it is clear that its sole purpose is to prevent minors from having any access to judicial bypass at all.  

When Texas instituted parental notification (now consent) and judicial bypass in 1999, pregnant teenagers there were fortunate that a group of compassionate pro-choice attorneys created Jane’s Due Process as an advocacy organization.  When a young woman under 18 is unable, for whatever reason, to obtain the consent of at least one parent, JDP eases her access to the judicial bypass process by giving her information about her rights and connecting her with an experienced pro bono attorney who will represent her and accompany her to court.  JDP is nationally recognized as a model for such legal advocacy, and it’s a sin and a shame that it has so little competition for that honor.

Even adult women with financial resources of their own would be intimidated by the prospect of having to hire an attorney, go to court and share the most intimate details of their personal lives with a judge in order to be allowed to have an abortion. For the average scared-to-death teenager with no moral support or accurate information about to access the legal system in the first place, the judicial bypass option might as well not exist at all.  In states without a legal advocacy group like JDP, most often the only available assistance for a pregnant teen seeking an abortion comes from the clinic itself – and antis like Harris and Meiners know it.  

Belinda Harris and Kate Meiners: Democrats, Democrats for Life. This is what they support.  This is who they are.  This is what they are.  Now somebody explain that litmus thingy to me one more time.

The Food and Drug Administration has now “indefinitely” put off a decision on making Plan B – also called Emergency Contraception (EC) and the Morning-After Pill — available over-the-counter.  The FDA promised, during (then acting) FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford’s confirmation hearings, to issue a final decision by September 1, 2005. Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Patty Murray then released the hold they had placed on Crawford’s confirmation. And as soon as Crawford became the official head of the FDA, he issued the ruling earlier than promised – proving that even US Senators need access to Plan B.

For years the MAP Conspiracy has been fighting to make sure that all women can get EC in an emergency.  

Here is the latest information on what the MAP Conspiracy is, what they are doing to protect the right of all women to take control of their own reproduction, and what you can do to help tomorrow, tonight … and the morning after.  

We are the MAP Conspiracy.

MAP Conspiracy’s name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that so many women have to conspire to break the law in order to get the Morning After Pill.

We began passing out the pills publicly on February 15, 2004. Our campaign uses speak-outs and civil disobedience to highlight the injustice of the prescription requirement and to show that women are the real experts on why women need unrestricted access to the Morning-After Pill.

We have held speak-outs and passed out the pill in New York City, Washington, D.C., Rockville, MD and Gainesville, Florida.

Over 2,700 women around the country have pledged to “Give a friend the Morning-After Pill” in defiance of the prescription requirement. You can sign the pledge at www.mapconspiracy.org

This fight is over nothing less than birth control– and the FDA, along with its friends of the Rapture Right — seem determined to keep this safe and effective way of preventing pregnancy out of women’s hands.

• For four years the FDA has ignored a citizen’s petition requesting that Emergency Contraception be available without a prescription.
• The FDA’s own advisory panels unanimously said EC was safe and voted 23 to 4 that it should be sold over-the-counter.
• The American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine and other mainstream medical organizations say that EC is safe.
• Major newspapers all over the country have run editorials in favor of over-the-counter sales, and more than 3,000 women across the nation have pledged to commit acts of civil disobedience by giving out the Morning-After Pill to friends who need it (www.mapconspiracy.org to sign the pledge)

The FDA has already received thousands of calls, emails and letters from women who want EC available over-the-counter.

How much more “public comment” does the FDA need?

ACTIONS AROUND THE COUNTRY

NEW YORK
On Tuesday August 30th at 1pm, outside the NYC Office of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Women’s Liberation Birth Control Project is holding a press conference and then, in an act of civil disobedience, passing out packages of the Morning-After Pill to
women who want it. Come on your lunch break!

WHEN:   Tuesday August 30th from 1-1:45pm

WHERE: 26 Federal Plaza, Jacob K. Javits Federal Building. Sidewalk
in front of main entrance on Broadway.

CONTACT: Annie (917) 842-5306 or Cecilia (917) 859-9379

DIRECTIONS: From R/W City Hall Subway stop walk north on Broadway 3 blocks. Women will be holding signs. The exact location is Broadway  between Duane and Thomas Streets.

WASHINGTON DC
National Organization for Women, has called a National Day of Action on Emergency Contraception

WHERE: U.S. Department of Health and Human Service 200 Independence Avenue, S.W.  Washington, D.C. 20201

WHEN: Tuesday, August 30 @ 12:00 pm

CONTACT: Phone: (202) 628-8669

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

Members of the MAP Conspiracy in Gainesville, FL will be setting up a Feminist Phone Booth for the upcoming weeks so women can call Lester
Crawford on the spot and give him their opinions.  

Please help by donating your time, your money or your cell phone minutes to the Feminist Phone Booth so we can give Lester Crawford the public opinion he has asked for!  

In solidarity with the actions in NY and DC, we will be faxing 3,000 pledge signatures directly to Lester Crawford on Tuesday.  
CONTACT: 352-380-9934 to help out.

Utah NOW Young Feminist Task Force and Campus Action Network

Contact: Meghan at (801) 949-4546

CALL LESTER CRAWFORD and PILE ON THE PRESSURE!

Call Commissioner Crawford on Tuesday, and any day after that, and tell him to make Plan B available over-the-counter for all women.

You can leave him a message at (301) 827-2410 during business hours, or email him at d.commissioner@fda.hhs.gov

With actions in NY and DC, faxes and calls, we can give the FDA the “public opinion” they are asking for!

DONATE

Your financial contribution will help us pay for cell phone minutes for the Feminist Phone Booth.

It will help us organize a civil disobedience action in New York City, organize women across the country to call the FDA, and even go to Washington DC if necessary

• To use a credit card or direct withdrawal from your bank account,go to Paypal.com, and donate any amount, using the email address lisa@gainesvillenow.org
• To mail in a check, make checks payable to:

Gainesville Area NOW
PO Box 2235, Gainesville, FL, 32602-2235
(please put Morning-After Pill in the memo line)

Actions are taking place all over the country.  Let us know if you are having one in your town.

You can reach the Morning-After Pill Conspiracy at:
352-380-9934 (FL)
917-842-5306 (NY)
mapconspiracy04@hotmail.com
www.mapconspiracy.org

Previously at LSF.

Do you know  Mrs. Judie Brown?  If you haven’t made her acquaintance, an introduction is long overdue.  

As cofounder and president of the American Life League, she’s known in “pro-life” circles as America’s #1 Church Lady – and it must be true, because the Vatican says so.  In fact, she’s well into her second five-year term as a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and the Daily Catholic cites her as one of the top 100 Catholics of the 20th century.

When Mrs. Judie Brown speaks, Catholic “pro-lifers” listen.  This week, she’s got a lot to say about Bill Frist and the National Right to Life Committee – and Judie’s not in a good mood about what she calls a case of mistaken identity.

Not that Judie would be so vulgar as to call a conniving sellout son-of-a-bitch by his right name, of course. No, no phrase so common as that would issue from the mouth of a lady like Mrs. Brown — but snidely refined bitchery comes to her lips as naturally as ten Hail Marys.

Have you ever had an “I think I know you, but I can’t recall your name” moment when you see a familiar face at a gathering? And even worse, have you said, “Hi, Jane,” only to blush in embarrassment at the reply, “I’m sorry but my name’s Ruth”? It’s certainly an uncomfortable moment. But after the initial embarrassment, it always turns out fine.

But what happens when an “I think I know you” moment happens among organizations that all claim to have the same goal? What happens when the face we think we know turns out to belong to a total stranger?

OK, so much for her specialty, the coy intro. Judie was only warming up for her “Billy, we hardly knew ye” moment, and here it comes.

On July 29, Senator Bill Frist announced that he had “changed his mind” and decided to support human embryonic stem cell research. This physician-turned-politician claimed that scientists need to pursue the “truly magnificent, truly remarkable properties” of stem cells taken from days-old human embryos.

As a point of information, human embryonic stem cell research can only be done by killing innocent boys and girls in the embryonic stage of development. So while Frist claims this research will save human beings’ lives, he ignores the fact that it always begins with a sacrifice of other human beings.

Saints above, weren’t all those innocently sweet and fluffy kitty cats enough?  Does the blood lust of the Abominable Dr. Frist know no end? And Judie’s even more furious that his dark and seductive aura of power is making baby killers out of the National Right to Life Committee, too.

In response to this “change,” the National Right to Life Committee made the following statement on July 29:

“National Right to Life is very disappointed that Senator Frist has expressed support for a bill that would mandate federal funding of research that requires the killing of human embryos, which National Right to Life opposes. It is worth noting, however, that Senator Frist also stated that the creation of human embryos by cloning should be banned, and we call on the Senate to pass such a ban promptly, in order to prevent human embryo farms from springing up in the United States.”

Human embryo farms?  Ye gods and little fishes, what does the Department of Agriculture know about this, and when did they know it?  Where in that porked-up appropriations bill did they hide the subsidies, because not even ConAgra or ADM would underwrite the R&D and startup costs on that much new technology without some federal sugar.  Otherwise they’d just outsource this baby, and cut themselves a sweeter deal on some fallow rice paddies in China.

But I digress. The subject is not baby farming, but baby killing, so let’s get back to Judie’s nuclear outrage over Frist’s and NRLC’s endorsement of the home grown variety.  

My initial reaction to this was horror, which turned to anger, which turned to sorrow. The National Right to Life Committee took yet another step in their quest to get a wink from the “stars” (i.e., the Beltway political power brokers). Rather than having the courage to criticize a Republican, they chose to sell out the babies.

How could NRLC say that anything is “worth noting” when a United States senator turns his back on the most vulnerable members of the human family and chooses to support their direct killing? Why pander to a clearly pro-death pronouncement by this Republican senator? Why not excoriate him for his abuse of power? Why not challenge his warped sense of science?

The answer to all these questions is the same. The National Right to Life Committee has chosen to play politics with the big boys. They’ve been doing it for years. NRLC has supported proposals such as the campaign finance reform bill and made it a barometer for gaining the organization’s support, despite the fact that could not possibly impact in any way the heinous crime of abortion. The Republican Party was for the bill, you see, and so they are for it too.

But now they have gone too far. They have publicly excused a man who is willing to permit the wholesale slaughter of innocent human beings for the vacuous promise of “magnificent” research that is, at its core, unethical and immoral. Senator Frist is not pro-life. Nobody who has studied his record would have ever made that connection.

My question is more fundamental, however: Just how pro-life life is the National Right to Life Committee?

Well, if “pro-life” is still code for “anti-abortion,” the NRLC has done a pretty good job of persuading most people of their intentions.  But since we’re apparently all just mindless dupes who can’t see what’s in front of our faces, it’s a saving grace that Judie’s around to show us what blind fools we’ve been.

NRLC has been around a long time and they’ve convinced millions of pro-lifers — especially pro-life Catholics — that they are 100 percent pro-life and they will never compromise on even one baby’s life.

However, NRLC is corrupting the very meaning of the term pro-life. A human being is a person the instant his life begins, be it in a petri dish or safely within his mother. There is no such thing as an expendable human being. How can you say you genuinely care about all the babies when you publicly make excuses for a man who doesn’t mind condoning their direct killing?

And now, as president of the largest and one of the most influential anti-choice organizations in America, Judie Brown goes downtown — in an impeccably ladylike manner, of course — and calls for jihad not only against the NRLC . . .

It grieves me that so many good pro-life Americans actually think that NRLC is unflinching in its defense of the babies. Every year, thousands of good people offer their prayers, their efforts and their hard-earned money to an organization they believe will aid in bringing about a culture of life.

The next time you hear someone from the National Right to Life Committee proudly claim “another important victory,” sit down and think real hard and see if you can convince yourself that even one baby in the womb is going to be saved as a result of that claim. Think about the thousands of embryonic children who are dying because NRLC’s friends, like Senator Bill Frist, can condone murder and still get a “wink” from their pals.

As long as powerful organizations like NRLC continue to put politics ahead of principle — and refuse to face the truth about abortion-causing methods of birth control — babies will continue to die at alarming rates.

. . . but – oh, my God and hers, too! – she’s going to the wall, and throwing down against the whole Republican Party.  

Is National Right to Life’s recent announcement surprising? No, it’s to be expected. It’s part of a long pattern. But it’s time for their frivolous, irresponsible embrace of all that is Republican to stop.

For too long the folks at NRLC have introduced themselves as 100 percent pro-life and gotten away with it. If there ever was a case of mistaken identity, this has got to be it. Once again, it seems more important for the National Right to Life Committee to be pro-Republican than to be pro-life.

The American Life League has spoken, and no mistake.  

So where will the membership of the largest anti-abortion and anti-contraception organization in the United States – and next to the Army of God itself, the one with most radically extremist agenda — funnel the overflow from its deep pockets now?  Nobody but God’s own angels and Mrs. Judie Brown can know for sure, but since we’ve still got at least a nominal two-party system, it will behoove all of us to remember ALL’s fury against “all that is Republican” the next time we hear the phrase Democrats for Life.

Dr. Warren Hern of Boulder, Colorado–anthropologist, public health physician and specialist in abortion care–has attracted a great deal of attention by publicly exposing and denouncing the threat directed at him a couple of weeks ago by Operation Save America.  

When Dr. Hern read the piece about events in Boulder that I wrote and posted here and elsewhere, he responded with an appreciative but to-the-point letter that briefly touched on his views about what is wrong with Democratic politics and how to fix it.

And now Dr. Hern gives us more.

From Dr. Hern’s letter published yesterday:

As long as the Republicans under current leadership are running anything, there is no hope.  Wherever possible, we must convert this energy into solidifying Democratic control over any political institution (such as a state legislature or governor’s office) and to restore Democratic control where it has been lost (legislatures; both houses of Congress).  

There is no other solution, and it can’t happen too fast. Some Democrats, particularly among the national leaders such as Howard Dean, do not understand this and are irrelevant to this process, which must come from below.  Anti-choice Democrats must be blocked.  The political message must be: vote with us, and you get elected; vote against us, you don’t get to be precinct captain next time. Nothing else will do.  

Republicans who are not part of the current fascist leadership of that party must throw those bastards out, and that is the most important and difficult task.  Only then can we get back to civil discourse and bipartisan consideration of important public issues, particularly on issues of reproductive freedom.  It has happened before.  We can make it happen again.

I added that:

Dr. Hern isn’t a politician. He doesn’t buy and sell abstractions. He lives in an all-too-physical world, one awash with the daily sweat and tears of living, breathing and bleeding women to whom reproductive freedom has suddenly become more than just a poll-tweaking talking point.  He and all the other physicians who are still hanging in and providing skillful and compassionate abortion care in this country–come hell, high water or the ground troops, fifth column or otherwise, for the Culture of Life–don’t spend their mornings spinning policy, their lunchtimes eating rubber chicken or their afternoons counting their bargaining chips.  

They live in my world, the real world, where this is the way it is.

Still, some readers of the letter expressed concern that Dr. Hern didn’t seem to appreciate sufficiently Howard Dean’s efforts to preserve reproductive freedom for women. Last May, Dr. Hern addressed his own concerns to Dr. Dean directly, and has kindly given his permission for that letter to be published.  

No further introduction is necessary.  As Flip Benham of Operation Save America now knows, Dr. Warren Hern is more than capable of speaking for himself.

22 May 2005   

Howard Dean, M.D.
Chairman
Democratic National Committee
Washington, D.C.

Dear Howard:

Congratulations on your election to the Chair of the Democratic National Committee.   I appreciate the energy that you bring to this job.

Each time I see you on Meet The Press, I get more agitated with your use of anti-abortion propaganda terms to discuss the issue of abortion.   You really have no excuse for this deplorable practice.  

You are a physician, and you know something about this issue from a health perspective that most people don’t know.  You know very well that physicians like me who specialize in abortion services are not “pro-death” or “anti-life.”  But that is exactly what you imply when you use the anti-abortion propaganda term “pro-life” to describe people who are opposed to abortion.  These are some of the same people who have assassinated physicians Bernard Slepian, David Gunn, and John Britton, who have assassinated other people working in abortion services, and who have attempted to assassinate yet other physicians and clinic workers.  

In using this reflexively pejorative term as though it were neutral and descriptive, you have lost my support. To me it represents a thoughtlessness, carelessness and superficiality about this critical issue that is really inexcusable for a person in your position.

You surely don’t remember the occasions as well as I do, but we met first at the NARAL event in Washington in January, 2003 in Boulder at [name redacted]’s house, and at a Boulder fund-raising breakfast for you in 2004.   You have published papers of mine in your possession.  

Let’s get a few things straight:

• The principal reason for having abortion services legally available in the United States is for the health and safety of women.  During the 1950’s and 1960’s, this was the main reason why physicians were on the forefront in advocating changes in the abortion laws.   The Doe v. Bolton case, companion to Roe v. Wade, was brought by physicians and other health professionals from Atlanta.

 

• Abortion is a fundamental component of health care for women in the 21st century, just as it was in the last 25 years of the 20th century.  You, as a physician, ought to be one of the strongest exponents of this fact in the public arena, and you have an exceptional opportunity to do that as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee.   So far, you have abandoned that idea in favor of fawning comments designed to satisfy the most radical right-wing religious and political opponents of abortion.
• The idea that abortion will ever be “rare” is ridiculous, and you should know that from basic education as a physician.   Abortion has been practiced by women in every human society for as far back as anthropologists can determine (cf: Abortion in Primitive Society by George Devereaux).   There have probably been not fewer than one million abortions per year in the United States for the past 60 or 70 years. The main difference between 1935 and 2005 is that abortions are now safely done by physicians (and, in a few cases, by physician assistants, as in Vermont) who can provide proper surgical and follow-up care.

 

• The idea that we can reduce the number of abortions by providing adequate contraceptive care for women and their partners is a superb and fundamental idea which the Democratic Party  should (as it does) support at every opportunity, and which was eloquently stated by Senator Hillary Clinton earlier this year.  But this is a position that is opposed by anti-abortion Democrats such as Robert Casey, Jr.   That opposition doesn’t make any medical, public health, logical, political or legal sense.
• There is no such thing as “abortion on demand.”   That is silly.   There is “abortion on request,” and why not?   But any woman who walks into my office and “demands” an abortion as though I were an abortion-dispensing machine will not get one, at least from me.   I am a person, not an ATM or pop machine.
• Your idea of setting up “medical practice boards” to decide who gets late abortions was ruled unconstitutional in Doe v. Bolton in 1973.   Look it up.  You have no excuse for not knowing this.   It is also an invitation for the anti-abortion nut case doctors to take over the process.   Terrible idea.  Drop it.

 

• The correct identification for late abortion is “late abortion,” not “late-term abortion” or “third term” abortions.  The phrase “late-term abortion” was invented by anti-abortion people to imply that we are doing abortions “at term” (i.e. 40 weeks of pregnancy).   Abortions late in the third trimester do occur, exceptionally, due to extreme circumstances, all of them health-related.   But “late” abortions (after 26 weeks, approximately) account for less than 0.1% of all abortions. And these are done by very few doctors.  As you may remember from our conversations, I am one of them.   If you have a question about this subject, pick up the phone and call me at any time day or night (phone number redacted).    For your information, I am sending you my latest research paper on this subject, “Misoprostol as an adjunctive medication in late surgical abortion” published in the International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics in February, 2005, in which I describe the results in over 1000 patients having late abortions, many of them for terrible fetal disorders.   The major complication rate was zero.  If the Republicans and anti-abortion Democrats have their way, doctors like me will be unable to help women, and the complication rates and death rates due to abortion will go back to where they were in the 19th century.
• For your interest and information, I am also enclosing an article of mine, published in Anthropology News in February, 2005, called “Anthropologists, abortion, and the cultural war in America.”  The online version of this may be found at  www.drhern.com/ abanthropologists.htm.

 

• The idea that you are going to make the Democratic Party candidates more acceptable to anti-abortion fanatics, evangelicals, rock-ribbed Republicans etc. by getting rid of the words “choice” and “abortion” is absurd.  See my second point.   George Lakoff is right: “choice” is a consumer value word, but it carries a lot of meaning for people who vote Democratic because they have understood, up till now, that the Democratic Party stands up for women’s rights.   Abandon that constituency and that language at your peril.  For one thing, it makes you look obsequious, and being obsequious did not put you where you are.

 

• “Choice” is not just a consumer value word about a material possession.  It has real meaning in terms of people’s lives. In this instance, it has real meaning in terms of women’s lives.  If abortion is legal and safe, a woman may choose whether to reproduce or not, or she may choose to have an abortion rather than to have a higher risk of death in childbirth.  That is not “gimme more stuff” choice, that is a choice about being.  This is about a choice to be.

 

If women are not free to be, in what way are they free?  

If this country is not about the freedom to be, what it is about?

Abortion is an essential medical service that is necessary for women. It saves their lives.  People who think that safe, legal abortion services should not be available to women should vote Republican.

There are a lot of reasons why John Kerry and the Democrats lost the last presidential election, but support for reproductive freedom is not one of them.   There are more people who support reproductive freedom in this country than there are people who don’t support it.  Our challenge is to get the people who support reproductive freedom to vote, and to get them to vote on this issue.

Abortion has been the critical issue in American politics since Bob Dole disgracefully used the abortion issue to get re-elected in 1974 and since Ronald Reagan announced that he would try to make abortion a political crime against the state in 1980.   Saying that we won’t talk about this won’t make it go away.

Are you for freedom for women, or aren’t you?

If women are not free to have safe abortions by physicians, they are not free.  If women are not free, none of us are free.  

Best personal regards,

Warren M. Hern, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.
Director
Boulder Abortion Clinic

Cc: George Lakoff, Ph.D.
       Pat Waak, Chair, Colorado Democratic Party
       Hon. Hillary Clinton
       Hon. John Kerry
       Hon. Ted Kennedy
       Hon. Harry Reid
       Hon. Nancy Pelosi
       Hon. Chuck Schumer
       Hon. Barbara Boxer
       Hon. Ken Salazar
       Hon. Diana DeGette
       Hon. Mark Udall
       Hon. John Salazar
       Vanessa Cullins, M.D., M.B.A., Vice President for Medical Affairs Planned Parenthood Federation of America
       Ellie Smeal, Feminist Majority Foundation
       National Abortion Federation
       NARAL Pro-Choice America
       Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health

Hmmm.  Maybe it’s a shame that Dr. Hern isn’t a politician.  Whether you agree with him or not, you don’t have to wonder where he stands: shoulder to shoulder with me.

Every summer Operation Save America takes a massive, weeklong protest to some fortunate city in America where their director, Flip Benham, leads them in “storming the gates of hell.”  A couple of weeks ago, OSA swarmed Colorado in Operation Save Denver.  But when Benham’s “saints” and “gentle Christian warriors” pack up to go marauding, they carry along so much hellfire and brimstone that they had plenty left over for Boulder, where they focused the wrath of their angry God upon Dr. Warren Hern.

Dr. Hern is a provider of exemplary abortion care.  He is also a renowned anthropologist, as well as an internationally recognized authority in his highly specialized field of medicine.  Together with Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Dr. Hern has been at the top of the antiabortion mob’s hit list for over 20 years.  

And this time was no exception.

OSA besieged various Colorado targets for a week–abortion-providing clinics, gay and lesbian groups, mosques, and even a school of theology–but they singled out Dr. Hern for some viciously personal attention by papering his North Boulder neighborhood with what looked very much like “wanted” posters.

Scary stuff. But if the “Reverend” Flip and his “gentle Christians” thought that Warren Hern would bolt for the basement and lay low until they left town, they mistook their man.

The indomitable Dr. Hern came out swinging, immediately purchasing a newspaper ad that gave the OSA flyer far greater exposure than Flip Benham could have dreamed of, along with some well chosen words of his own.

PAID ADVERTISEMENT
STATEMENT TO THE PEOPLE OF COLORADO
By DR.WARREN HERN
Director, Boulder Abortion Clinic
23 July 2005

This flyer was placed in the doors of all my neighbors in North Boulder on Wednesday afternoon (7/20/05) by the antiabortion fanatics who have been screaming at the people of Colorado this week. The purpose of the flyer is to cause hate and fear. Its purpose is to get someone to kill me.

This kind of flyer has preceded the assassination of each abortion doctor in the United States.  It is terrorism. Its authors hate freedom.  Its authors hate thought.  Its authors hate what America means.

On Wednesday afternoon, after demonstrating at my office and another clinic for two days, after harassing abortion doctors in Denver in their private homes, the leaders of “Operation Save America” came to my neighborhood to place these leaflets at every house.

“Operation Save America” wants all my neighbors to hate me. This despicable, threatening, outrageous personal attack is anonymous, although we know who did it, and it is cowardly, because they won’t admit it.  It is a dangerous action, and the authors know it. That’s what they intend.

The fundamentalist “Christians” who make up “Operation Save America” are fascists. “Operation Save America” is the face of fascism in America.  Americans need to understand fascism.  This is how fascists create an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, intolerance, hatred, bigotry, repression, destruction of individual lives, and the destruction of a free society.

It is right out of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” or “1984.”  “Big Brother Is Watching You.” The name of this gang, “Operation Save America,” is a fulfillment of Orwell’s prophecy: a lie in the service of totalitarian repression.  

How is “Operation Save America’s hatred and demonization of abortion doctors different from the Nazi’s persecution of Jews in the Germany of the mid-1930’s?  How is it different from how white racists and the Ku Klux Klan treated black people in the South before the lynching began?  How is it different from the Salem witch-hunts, and how is it different from the hysterical anti-communist McCarthyism of the 1950’s?  How is it different from the Taliban’s puritanical repression?  It isn’t.

If you think it’s different, just give “Operation Save America” more power. Their friends are already running the federal government.  American women who want to have reproductive health and freedom and who want to live in the 21st century instead of going back to the 9th century have less to fear from the overturn of Roe vs.Wade by the Supreme Court than from “Operation Save America.”

A little more of this, and doctors just won’t do abortions. Would you?

“A little more of this, and doctors just won’t do abortions. Would you?”

That’s a fair question. If you were an average, everyday OB/GYN with a wife, 2.4 kids, a country club membership and a Golden Retriever, and couldn’t even attend your annual ACOG conference without facing down the menacing presence of dozens of Army of God goons every year, would you go out on a limb and risk losing all you’d worked for by providing your patients with abortion care?

 

Like OSA, the Army of God understands the power of fear: “Abortionists should remember that there could always be another Paul Hill or James Kopp who will do more than just talk. To make that point clear, signs were displayed praising both Paul Hill and James Kopp, both convicted of killing abortion doctors, and other signs calling for the execution of abortionists.”

So if your answer to Dr. Hern’s question is no, don’t feel guilty, because this ever-present threat of violence, or even death, is a big part of why most other physicians don’t provide abortion care, either.  

But something kind of wonderful happened when Dr. Hern went public with the threat directed at him by OSA.  In fact, it was so wonderful that he bought some more newspaper space just to say thank you.

THANKS TO THE PEOPLE OF COLORADO!

We have received many messages of support by phone, fax, email, and letters since our two full-page ads were published in the Rocky Mountain News (7/23/05) and Sunday Camera (7/24/05) denouncing the hate-message flyer attacking me that was distributed in Boulder on 7/20/05 by the leaders of “Operation Save America.”  Most respondents left their names and contact information, which we have omitted to protect their privacy.

This ad is to thank all those many people who have expressed their support. Many have sent unsolicited contributions wishing to help pay for those ads and to help women who need abortions but have limited resources.  We do not and will not solicit contributions from the public, but will use these contributions specified for those two purposes.

This statement is paid for by Warren M.Hern, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.
Director, Boulder Abortion Clinic,1130 Alpine, Boulder, Colorado 80304
Tel:303 447-1361.
More information on this subject may be found at
www.drhern.com/abanthropologists.htm

If you are interested in knowing how you can work to protect reproductive freedom in Colorado, please call or write to me at the address and telephone number above. I will return all phone calls and respond to all written messages from those seeking to help, and I will help you find the ways of helping that are most appropriate to your beliefs and means.
Warren M. Hern, M.D.

Dr. Hern needed a full page of extremely fine print, but here are just a few messages from the copy of his ad that I received.

“I live in Denver….but would gladly show you to offer support, security, anything. You bear the brunt of this sad, right-wing jihad and I salute your bravery. Thank you for being who you are.”

“Use the enclosed in a way that represents your beliefs. … I abhor the path our government is taking and the crazies who support the `Operation Save America.’  I admire your wording in your ad, admire you as a human being and support what you believe and are doing. Seldom do I reach out like this but Lord knows we must kiss you for your stand.” (Check for $25.00 enclosed).

“Sorry these Nazis are giving you trouble. I was in WWII and know how they operated. Call me if I can assist in some way.”

[Husband] “My wife and I have never had an abortion, nor do we plan to, but we support someone’s right to choose. Operation Save America represents the worst that right wing America has to offer.  …  PS: You have some big cojones to run that ad. Thank you for doing it.”
[Wife] “We support what you do and your dedication to keeping women healthy. Thank you for taking such a big risk to provide your services. I know our [$25.00] donation is small, but we both felt very strongly that this is the most important donation we’ve ever made.”

“So many thoughts run through my mind as I sit down to write this. … The first election I was old enough to vote in, I voted to legalize abortion in Washington state. By then my roommate had had an illegal abortion. I will never forget calling her family after I had taken her to the E.R. Her complications were serious. The work you do is important to women; please know that many of us support you. … You are a very courageous man. My heart goes out to you and all those who love you. The abuse you are subjected to is really unjust. Be safe. Thank you, K.”

“Thank you for helping women every day, and having the courage to do so in the face of all the threats you receive. I appreciated you publishing the notice in the paper today to shed light on the sleazy work that Operation Save America and others are doing. I’m writing to let you know that I support you as do millions of other women on whose behalf you are working. My thoughts are with you in this dangerous time.”

“Thank you! We love America and as women we need our RIGHT TO CHOOSE! Babies need to be born BECAUSE THEY ARE WANTED! I am a Christian and I am disgusted by the Operation Save America movement. They and the Dobson camp seem to love the word HATE. Jesus would not do what they are doing. Thank you for your courageous article.”

“I was disgusted to read in Saturday’s Rocky Mountain News of the recent picketing of your clinic (although that is not news, I am sure) and of your home and of the flyer that “Operation Save America” has been distributing. I fear that there is a moderate possibility that this country will within a few years regress to the time of coat hangers. I am ashamed of my country. Please find a check for $50.00 to be used toward reimbursing yourself for the cost of the ad you placed in the same issue of the News. If you would rather, this contribution can be used for pro bono work done at the clinic.”

“Many years ago you helped me when I needed it. Right after my abortion procedure I began to cry, you touched my face and comforted me. I have thought of that through the years and felt grateful. … Whenever there is a discussion about abortion I speak up and state my beliefs but I haven’t had to defend my life because of it. I want you to know I think you are a very courageous man. Thank you. Sincerely, S.”

“First I want to thank you for standing up to a religion that is full of hate, they are hiding under God’s name. If you don’t thump a bible and yell what a good Christian you are, you are their enemy. I’m 70 years old and believe we are supposed to have freedom of choice in America, but our government is making it into an Iron Curtain. … Our religion has become Bush `Taliban.’  I understand because I live in the bible thumper country, also called `Christian.’ Also I was lucky not to ever had an abortion, but know some special people who had to. If only people could walk in their shoes during their painful situation. Thanks for being there when they needed you and you didn’t judge them.”

“You probably don’t need my support, but I need to give it. I am a Christian Senior citizen a resident of Lakewood Colorado. I am sick and tired of listening to `fascists’ claiming to be `Christians.’  Christians do not judge other persons based on their choices, medical or otherwise! Christ gave us the gift of `free will’ that includes making choices in all areas of our lives, and the consequences of those choices are ours alone with Christ as our only judge. I do NOT support `abortion,’ I DO support our freedom as citizens of this country to make our own choices. I do support your work because you are also free to make your own choices, so women do not need to go to butchers. I was in an illegal clinic in the `50’s. I pray we never go back to that! Be careful my Brother!”

“Thank you for having the courage to operate your clinic. … You were right to compare the OSA people to the Ku Klux Klan. They don’t even try to hide who they are. Please use this [$20.00] to help pay for the newspaper ad or to help an indigent woman.”

“Dear Dr. Hern: I am 79 years old  and … I have some thoughts to share with you regarding your recent publication that I feel are important.  After reading your announcement in the Rocky Mountain News, I feel obligated to submit the following: In describing the thugs who would do you harm, you omitted three appropriate adjectives: `zealots, gangers and criminals.’  The problem you are dealing with if not fomented by our current administration, is at least being given the nod by default.  Abortion and other emotional subjects are being used as wedge issues to advance their own political agenda. Our constitution is not the rule and guide of their thinking.  Don’t look for support or even sympathy from the occupants of the white house.  And I believe the recent nominee for the Supreme Court is a callous indication of the contempt that our president holds for the people who made him our leader.”

When Dr. Hern read this piece at LSF, he forwarded to me, through a mutual friend, a letter of his own.

My thanks to moiv for giving an account of our problem with OSA and responses here in Boulder, Colorado.  We appreciate this very much, and we also appreciate the support from moiv and others who have made comments.  

This is good, but we need to make the next step.  As long as the Republicans under current leadership are running anything, there is no hope.  Wherever possible, we must convert this energy into solidifying Democratic control over any political institution (such as a state legislature or governor’s office) and to restore Democratic control where it has been lost (legislatures; both houses of Congress).  

There is no other solution, and it can’t happen too fast. Some Democrats, particularly among the national leaders such as Howard Dean, do not understand this and are irrelevant to this process, which must come from below.  Anti-choice Democrats must be blocked.  The political message must be: vote with us, and you get elected; vote against us, you don’t get to be precinct captain next time. Nothing else will do.  

Republicans who are not part of the current fascist leadership of that party must throw those bastards out, and that is the most important and difficult task.  Only then can we get back to civil discourse and bipartisan consideration of important public issues, particularly on issues of reproductive freedom.  It has happened before.  We can make it happen again.

Warren M. Hern, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D.
Director, Boulder Abortion Clinic

Dr. Hern isn’t a politician. He doesn’t buy and sell abstractions. He lives in an all-too-physical world, one awash with the daily sweat and tears of living, breathing and bleeding women to whom reproductive freedom has suddenly become more than just a poll-tweaking talking point.  He and all the other physicians who are still hanging in and providing skillful and compassionate abortion care in this country–come hell, high water or the ground troops, fifth column or otherwise, for the Culture of Life–don’t spend their mornings spinning policy, their lunchtimes eating rubber chicken or their afternoons counting their bargaining chips.  

They live in my world, the real world, where this is the way it is.