theocracy watch

Meanwhile, south of the border - way south - the only medical facility in the state of Mississippi that provides abortions is under siege. This from a fundraising letter forwarded to me by my former comrades at the Haven Coalition, which I helped run during my last years in the US.
As summer begins, your Feminist Majority Foundation is preparing to protect the lone remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi. The Jackson Women's Health Organization is facing a week-long siege by Operation Save America (formerly Operation Rescue) from July 15-22 to make Mississippi "the first 'abortion-free' state in America."

Flip Benham, the director of Operation Save America, has said "We will not wait for the President, Congress, or the Supreme Court to end abortion."

Your Feminist Majority Foundation is determined to help this clinic and protect women's access to abortion in Mississippi. We are sending organizing staff to help the clinic withstand the protests this July and to work with law enforcement to ensure the safety of the clinic and its healthcare workers. We need your help to ensure that doctors, healthcare workers, and volunteer clinic escorts are safe and the clinic remains open.

We need to immediately raise $25,000 for security equipment and staff. Half of your emergency tax-deductible contribution will help the Jackson Women's Health Organization get the security assistance they need.

The other half of your tax-deductible gift will support the Feminist Majority Foundation's Clinic Defense Project, which will be working closely with the Jackson clinic and with other targeted clinics across the country.

We need your help now to keep the Jackson clinic open and keep the Feminist Majority Foundation strong in our struggle to stop this domestic terrorism against women's health care providers. We cannot allow anti-abortion zealots to win through violence and intimidation.
Operation Rescue, as they were then known, invaded New York City in 1992, trying to shut down several family planning clinics. I was involved in clinic defense, at that time the most exciting activism I had ever done. But it was easy for us: the police, the city government and the general population was on our side. Outside the clinics, sanitation workers and taxi drivers would honk their horns and raise their fists in support. There was a pro-choice march through the city, and thousands of people helped fund, organize and staff round-the-clock clinic access teams.

But this is Mississippi.

If you can, donate here.

Comments

  1. James Redekop26 June 2006 at 06:07

    Mississippi: the state that makes Alabama look good.

    ReplyDelete
  2. barefoot hiker26 June 2006 at 06:55

    Oh, the reversals in the United States these days; they're truly frightening. Liberty and justice and democracy are being redefined daily in so many places down there in ways so narrow that so many ordinary folks just can't pass through sideways. How did it happen? When I was a kid in the 70s, the place was a beacon. Now it's a warning buoy.

    Right now I'm reading a biography of Ben Franklin, and in the late 1760s, though trouble was brewing in the colonies, he still could not bring himself to really imagine the people would break their ties with England; mentally speaking, he just wasn't there yet. I keep wondering if the same might not be true of the US today. There was a lot of joking about the North joining Canada and leaving "Jesusland" behind back in 2004... but I'm wondering if an amicable separation of the two cultures might not be something that needs to be considered. If not...

    To the people of the United States:

    You seem of late to have grown tired of civil liberties, regard for inalienable justice, and immigration. As such, if you have no more use for the Statue of Liberty, we would be honoured to give her a good home. We think she would look smashing in Halifax Harbour, perched on Anticosti at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, tall and welcoming on the Toronto Islands (where New Yorkers might still glimpse her fondly with binoculars!), serene set in jemlike Lake Louise, or facing westward just off the coast of Victoria in recognition of the new realities of immigration. Such a symbol is a terrible thing to waste in hollow mockery; and so we open our own golden door... for the Lady with the Lamp herself, who seems in need of shelter.

    Yours in hopeful anticipation, the people of Canada.

    ReplyDelete
  3. laura k26 June 2006 at 07:08

    Such a symbol is a terrible thing to waste in hollow mockery

    So very true. At times, it breaks my heart. Other times, I laugh cynically, and think, it was always a mockery.

    Mississippi: the state that makes Alabama look good.

    There's a state motto for ya.

    ReplyDelete

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