In the United States, women's right to choose abortion has been limited not only by court rulings and legislation, but also by a series of terrorist attacks on abortion clinics. CLAUDETTE BGIN is a leader of the San Francisco Area Pro-Choice Coalition, and co-chair of the Task Force on Reproductive Rights of East Bay NOW (National Organization for Women). Her comments on the abortion struggle in the US are abridged from an interview in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.
About 100 of us from the Bay Area just returned from a clinic support rally in Redding. We were moved to go to Redding — a small city about 200 miles north of San Francisco — because it was the site of one of the especially brutal attacks that have been taking place against clinics in northern California and Oregon.
When the Feminist Women's Health Centre in Redding was fire-
bombed — for the third time — in June, the clinic requested community assistance in rebuilding the facility and showing support for its services.
[There was] a mailing to initiate a statewide network for the defence of clinics and abortion providers. The meeting launching the network involved representatives of pro-choice coalitions from Orange County and San Diego in southern California, and from the San Francisco, Alameda/Contra Costa, and Shasta County coalitions in northern California. There were also participants from Planned Parenthood and other organisations. Out of this meeting came the idea for a support rally in Redding.
We wanted to focus statewide and national attention on the Redding situation. City authorities were setting unusual and difficult preconditions for allowing the clinic to rebuild. Operation Rescue (OR) was continuing to harass even while the clinic was rebuilding.
In order to participate, about 100 pro-choice activists drove four hours from the Bay Area to Redding. When we got there, our 35-car caravan drove at a snail's pace through the entire small city — with signs displaying slogans like "Pro-Union Pro-Choice" — promoted by the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Our caravan then drove to the indoor rally at Shasta College, where we joined over 100 local residents. We heard personal testimony from women who had been forced to undergo illegal abortions, and there were speakers from various northern California organisations building the rally. The clinic announced a reopening date of February 19. The Siskiyou Pro-Choice Coalition reported that they raised $6000 from a raffle to pay for the Redding clinic's sprinkler system — an expensive installation demanded by the insurance company. After the rally,
there was clinic defence training for local residents in anticipation of problems from anti-abortion forces.
Our goal is to organise activities which will lead to a federal investigation and prosecution of all the attacks taking place across the US. The San Francisco Area Pro-Choice Coalition is currently circulating a petition as part of this campaign. The petition reads:
"In 1992, at least seven family planning facilities in northern California and Oregon were damaged or destroyed. No government agency, federal, state or local, has conducted a serious investigation into these violent attacks; indeed, they do not consider them to be acts of terrorism! We call upon the proper authorities to recognise these acts as part of a concerted campaign of terrorism, to conduct thorough investigations into these crimes, and to bring the perpetrators to justice."
The major problem at this time in terms of women's reproductive rights is definitely access. Violence is cutting off access to abortion facilities. But in addition, there are economic restraints on women's reproductive rights due to the lack of clinics — a situation contributed to by Operation Rescue and other reactionary groups which have forced the closure of clinics and reduced access across the country — and the legacy of Supreme Court rulings allowing states to cut funds and to mandate waiting periods and so on.
Anti-abortion forces are feeling desperate because they no longer have the visible federal support they had before. But they do have access to tremendous resources and are supported by local and state officials, including the police. They continue to be a force we have to deal with and fight against. There are reports from around the country about attacks against clinics, pressures on abortion providers, efforts to get more anti-abortion laws passed.
[After President Clinton's executive orders removing many restrictions on abortion rights], the feeling of imminent danger to abortion rights, which fuelled the tremendous mobilisation of the pro-choice movement over the past few years, has definitely diminished.
To move out of the very real crisis of access, the pro-choice movement needs to continue to mobilise beyond Clinton's limitations. We can't afford to stop with partial restoration of our rights abrogated by the Supreme Court. Our agenda should be reproductive rights for all women.
This means we should be ready to fight battles which will require educating the majority of pro-choice Americans about the unacceptable burden caused by the legacy of limitations on our rights. We will need to fight Operation Rescue and defeat them
tactic by tactic. We will need to fight state by state against the new laws attempting to curb abortion rights. And lastly, we will need to press at a national level for the return of federal funding and full federal protection for abortion rights.