Anti-Abortion Protestors Stymie Police With Lawsuits

[ismnotwasm]

First in a series on escalating abortion clinic violence in the aftermath of Dr. George Tiller’s murder

“In the old days, at least we knew what they were up to. If they were blockading us or firebombing us, we knew it. This is more insidious, more like a stealth strategy. And it is making life a living hell for the providers.”

The speaker is Susan Hill, president of the National Women’s Health Organization, the owner of several abortion clinics, mainly in the South. She is telling Ms. about a newly aggressive legal campaign on the part of the antiabortion movement. Though abortion rights and antiabortion forces have long faced each other in court, recently the latter have focused on directly suing the cities in which abortion facilities are located, often naming the local police chief as a defendant and sometimes individual police officers as well. This is particularly troubling to abortion providers as extremist actions are escalating in the wake of the murder of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller in May, hence the need for more police protection, not less.

Hill, who started her career in abortion provision shortly after Roe v Wade in 1973, is no stranger to the worst excesses of the anti-abortion movement. David Gunn, the first abortion doctor murdered by an anti-abortion extremist, worked at one of her clinics. She herself has been subjected to numerous threats and harassment at her clinics as well as her home. But these legal actions, typically brought by religious-right affiliated organizations, such as the Alliance Defense Fund and the Thomas More Law Center, are extremely worrisome. Lawsuits, or even threatened lawsuits, against cities and police departments, typically charging interference with free speech, can often result in diminished police protection at the clinics—a crucial loss for the beleaguered abortion provider community.

The cash settlements that antiabortion protestors have been able to win in some instances have been particularly galling to providers, and no doubt sobering to cash-strapped local city governments. Consider the case of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Mississippi, a clinic owned by Hill. For years, this clinic—the last remaining in the state—has been a particular target of anti-abortion forces, given the powerful symbolism that would result should it be closed down. A few years ago a threat by Operation Save America to storm the “Gates of Hell in Jackson” for a series of protests, as the organization’s website put it, did not result in the thousands of participants the organization had promised. Only about one hundred materialized, and local police were out in force, keeping order.

http://msmagazine.com/summer2009/antiabortion_protestors.asp

And meanwhile, in Peru;

As a Peruvian congressional committee met Tuesday to review a bill allowing limited exceptions to the country's ban on abortion, hundreds of protestors both for and against the measure demonstrated outside. The proposed law would legalize abortion in cases of rape, incest, or fetal deformity, according to the BBC. Currently abortion is illegal except when the mother's life or health is endangered by the pregnancy.

The Roman Catholic Church's strong opposition to the bill led the committee to backtrack on its original October 7 vote to send the bill to Congress for debate and instead complete a "technical" review of the legislation this week, reports the Agence France-Presse. On Tuesday the committee again voted to send the bill to Congress
http://www.feminist.org/news/newsbyte/uswirestory.asp?id=12006