On December 30, two Brookline (Boston), Massachusetts, reproductive health clinics suffered the cold-blooded murders of two women. The women fatally shot were 25-year-old Shannon Lowney and 38-year-old Lee Ann Nichols, who worked as receptionists for the clinics that were attacked. The suspect, John Salvi, allegedly pulled a .22 calibre rifle out of a duffel bag and murdered the two women and wounded clinic employees and volunteers.
Pro-choice activists in the USA have repeatedly tried to get people to pay attention to this terror. Many activists and health workers feel that they are under siege, that women's reproductive lives are a war zone. The anti-choice opponents admit it. "We are in a war", stated Don Treshman, the national director of Rescue America, "the only thing is that until recently the casualties have only been on one side. There are 30 million dead babies and only five people on the other side, so it's really nothing to get excited about."(New York Times, January 1)
Wyeth McAdam interviewed Valerie Gintis, an independent community organiser in western Massachusetts who has been active in the reproductive rights movement for about 10 years.
What is the significance of the events that occurred in Boston?
The first thing that needs to be recognised is that this is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern of terrorism. It is a campaign that has been carefully crafted by the anti-choice movement. The events in Boston are connected not only to the other murders but also to other attacks, threats and harassment of clinics throughout the years.
Throughout the last decade, violence aimed at clinics has been escalating. Clinics have been fire-bombed over the last 20 years. Acid and glue have been put in locks. A clinic worker was kidnapped. A pregnant clinic worker was kicked in the stomach and miscarried. Clinic staffers and doctors been harassed at home and their children and spouses followed.
This is just the next stage of the lengths the so-called right to life movement will go to.
One of the undertones of this event and of any violence directed towards clinics and/or activists is an attempt to silence us. To some extent that works, but I think the overwhelming response is actually quite different. It brings out the reality that abortion and the right to health care is not guaranteed. The local and the national government certainly have not made a priority of providing or protecting health care and certainly not health care clinics.
Do you have any comments about the way the national media are covering this issue?
It is familiar to us that the press misses the issues. They focus on the radical fringe on either side, presenting the recent attack as an isolated incident, not connecting it to the history of violence at clinics and the broader issues of reproductive freedom.
I would like to challenge the press to say, "These are the issues that are all really interconnected" and "This is how these people in the anti-abortion movement are related to the Klan". Why don't they ask, "Why is it that 89% of counties in the US do not have abortion facilities? Why is it that abortion, a legal medical procedure, has such terror surrounding it?".
We as a movement must push the press to make the connections and to not allow abortion to be separated from health care as we saw during the health care debate [about President Clinton's health care insurance plan]. Abortion is health care, not an addendum to health care.
Do you think Janet Reno [US attorney general] and other government officials' comments that we cannot afford to protect the clinics are true?
No, that's bullshit. They have something like 40 agents on welfare fraud and none on clinic violence. Why are they investigating fraud involving impoverished individuals rather than the Medicaid fraud of major institutions like the medical establishment? It is very deliberate where they make their choices to put their staff time and energy. There has been a slow response to hate directed at an oppressed or disenfranchised group.
What do you think about the claims that this act of murder was unrelated to the anti-abortion movement?
I hold the anti-abortion movement responsible. While certainly it takes someone quite deranged to murder, I think the anti-abortion movement has encouraged this climate of terrorism and violence. By not speaking out against the violence, they encourage its escalation. It is important to hold them accountable.
It is too late to say this was awful to have happened. It needed to be said the first time a woman was reduced to tears by a harassing anti-choicer. The response of the anti-choice movement is political. They are not responding from compassion. That movement has encouraged this kind of terrorism.
Do these events make it difficult for the mainstream feminist movement to broaden the movement to be about reproductive freedom as well as abortion?
That's a good question. I think the movement right now is at a crossroads. Up until the late 1980s, abortion politics was single-issue organising led mostly by white middle-class women. There has been a shift in the movement to not only broaden the base but also to broaden the issues to be about reproductive freedom for all women.
What is a challenge for us is that when abortion is so directly threatened it's hard to take our attention off abortion politics and remember our broadest vision for social change, for revolutionary change, for reproductive freedom, for whatever our broadest vision is, because we are in this crisis point.
I am not sure what the solution to that is. I do know that we are reacting, over and over again. I would like to see our movement think about how to best respond to the issues of the day and also take the time to build coalitions, to build strong leadership, and the time to decide what our agenda is on our own terms and to go after that vision.
Do you think the reproductive rights movement will grow again, where it seemed to decline after Clinton's election?
Yes. As our environment changes, our challenges are going to look different and our struggles are going to feel different. Nonetheless, there will continue to be a growing number of people committed to figuring out where this movement needs to go. This will require us to reflect and evaluate where we have been, the mistakes we've made and gains we have won in order to continue to pull people in and to be an open movement.
People are starting to understand the interconnectedness. As the issues become more intertwined and intersect, the struggle becomes clearer. Then our movements will join together, whether it's the gay rights movement and leftists, whether it's the sterilisation abuse movement and welfare reform, those things are all connected. Our responsibility is to make clear those links that may not appear to be so apparent. We also need to continue to dialogue and find common goals, and not only when we are in crisis.
[Abridged from an article that will appear in the March/April issue of the US magazine Independent Politics. This will be the first issue of Independent Politics since its merger with left turn, the youth publication of the US socialist organisation Solidarity. The new editorial address is Independent Politics, PO Box 1729, Pacifica, CA 94044-1729. Subscriptions are US$12/year (six issues) in the US and Canada, $24 elsewhere, $36 institutions and should be directed to the business address, Independent Politics, PO Box 55247, Hayward, CA 94545-0247. Email: indpolitics@igc.apc.org.]