Anti-Abortion Movement Borrows Tactics from the KKK

[marmar]

from In These Times, via AlterNet:



Anti-Abortion Movement Borrows Tactics from the KKK

By Carrie Kilman, In These Times. Posted October 10, 2007.


In the South, grassroots activists are fighting back against an increasingly hostile anti-abortion movement.



Every Wednesday and Friday morning, two or three volunteers wearing bright green shirts that read "Pro-Choice, Y'all" assemble in front of Reproductive Health Services in Montgomery, Ala., to escort patients from the parking lot to the front door, past a small sea of anti-abortion protesters.

The protesters carry handmade signs and pictures of fetuses sucking their thumbs. They play violins and blow loudly into horns. They thrust graphic pamphlets at the patients, form prayer circles on the sidewalk, and teach their children to plead with women to not murder their babies. The protesters are mostly women. They look like Sunday school teachers, housewives and hip grandmas. And, during the past few months, they have grown more vocal and more organized, emboldened by the recent closure of the only clinic in Mobile.

Every state in the Deep South -- Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina -- restricts low-income women's access to abortion. Most ban abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. None explicitly protect heath care facilities from harassment or violence. All have mandatory delay laws that unfairly burden women who have limited access to transportation and time off work, and Louisiana and South Carolina both passed unconstitutional laws requiring a husband's consent for a married woman's abortion. In the past 16 months, two abortion clinics in Alabama have closed, and new regulations are making it difficult for other clinics to stay open. Now, anti-abortion groups are strategizing ways to outlaw birth control and eliminate sex education.

Michelle Colon, president of the National Organization for Women's (NOW) Mid-South region (Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee) calls it a "war on women" -- the gravity of which citizens in more progressive parts of the country don't appreciate. "The rest of the country kind of writes off the South -- people feel the battle has been lost here," Colon says.

Colon is part of a vocal, scrappy cadre of grassroots activists challenging the well-funded, entrenched anti-abortion movement that has long dominated state legislatures and local pulpits across the region. One Southern feminist put it this way: "Women here are sick and tired of being sick and tired." "It's not legal, is it?" ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/64551/

[noamnety]

1. I love the sprinkler system!

"Ayers recently invested in a sprinkler system to keep the protesters at bay."