From Intimate Wars by MERLE HOFFMAN

Violence is a language, and the antis were becoming more and more articulate. At the encouragement of their leaders the antis began taking their crusade to our clinics, where they could be physically confrontational. Joseph Scheidler of the Pro-Life Action League the "Green Berets of the Pro-Life Movement" published a book on how to harass and intimidate abortion providers and the clinic patients entitled Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion. He quickly became the leader of the activist wing of the anti-abortion movement, bragging that the rate of abortion complications went up when there were demonstrators in front of the clinics.

Nineteen eighty-five alone saw approximately 150 attacks against abortion clinics and family planning providers. The newspapers seemed to report a new attack every day. A woman in Brooklyn was violently thrown against the wall of a clinic by an off-duty police officer screaming, "In the name of Jesus, do you know what they are doing inside there?" An eighteen-year-old perpetrator of what were called the "Christian bombings" against a clinic in Pensacola, Florida, called the blasts a "gift to Jesus on his birthday." In Huntsville, Alabama, a Catholic priest threw red paint into a clinic waiting room and injured two staff members, while "sidewalk counselors thrust photos of dismembered fetuses in women's faces and screamed that they were "murdering their children." A gunshot shattered the living-room window of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the man who wrote the Courts' majority decision legalizing abortion.

Other terrorist-style intimidation methods were even more sinister: a clinic counselor returning home one evening found her cat decapitated. A man drove his war surplus vehicle directly into a clinic, destroying two waiting rooms. Anti-abortionists noted license plate numbers of patients' cars at clinics, used police connects to get their names and phone numbers, and called them in the middle of the night to harass them with a recording of a childish voice crying, "Mommy, mommy, why did you kill me?" This tactic was particularly used against teenagers.

On ABC's Nightline, Cal Thomas, spokesperson for the Moral Majority, approved the violence against clinics, which he said would "stir a national debate on abortion." He claimed that the violence was against "bricks and stones" not people. By denying that the continuous and escalating violence against women's health care centers across the country involved planned and coordinated acts of terrorism, the conservative media, the FBI, and the Reagan Administration callously disregarded women's constitutional rights and fed the fanatical zeal of the terrorists.

God's word was the theory, and bombing clinics and harassing women and doctors was the practice. What we in the pro-choice movement called terrorism, they called battle tactics. Were those who tried to assassinate Hitler and bomb Auschwitz terrorists? Anti-choicers were like today's "freedom fighters" who saw themselves as knights of a higher cause, made even more intense when the cause was a lost one. The womb had become a true battlefield, and we were all soldiers, willing or not.

Each time there was word of another clinic bombing or invasion, each time someone called me Hitler, each day when I walked into Choices past screaming antis and pink plastic fetuses, I travelled further into the trenches. One Monday, a day when many women were there for pre- and post-natal care, Choices received a bomb threat. The male caller allotted us less than fifteen minutes to leave the premises before we'd all be blown up. The call turned out to be a hoax, but that didn't alter the horror we all felt.

I arranged for my staff to work with the Brooklyn Martial Arts Center to learn self-defense. The first thing that they taught was how to scream an exercise that had to be repeated many times, since women were unused to speaking up and speaking out. My secretary attended a course with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to learn how to correctly open my mail so that she could avoid damage from a letter bomb. I got used to checking the bottom of my car for bombs and taking different routes to the clinic, looking over my shoulder the whole way.

Excerpt from "The Politics of Courage," page 146-148

Available NOW

Order your copy from Amazon.com Now

Interview, examine or review copy requests: publicity@feministpress.org