Hello, and welcome to the e-mail list of the Reproductive Freedom Task Force of Refuse & Resist! We will be sending a message every month or so, containing articles, updates, and commentaries about:
This is not a moderated discussion list. We are collecting key articles and alerts in digest form, and passing them along to those who have expressed interest in the work Refuse & Resist! does in defending access to abortion. You may forward or reprint this digest without requesting permission. If you wish to be taken off the list, just email us at rftf@refuseandresist.org. Submissions, suggestions, criticisms and correspondence are also welcome via email.
The Reproductive Freedom Task Force of Refuse & Resist! involves R&R! members nationwide in focusing on defending abortion rights as part of opposing the whole reactionary agenda in the U.S. today. We organize to support and defend those who provide abortions, and particularly to reach and mobilize youth in that work. For a comprehensive look at the work Refuse & Resist! is doing as a national membership organization to resist the Bush administration's "war on terror," to create space for dissent, and to stop increasing police-state measures, see our website at http://www.refuseandresist.org. You can now become a member online at http://www.refuseandresist.org/order/order.html. We encourage you to support this organization as an important vehicle for bringing many more people into action.
DR. PENDERGRAFT'S CONVICTION OVERTURNED!
We are glad to announce that the federal extortion conviction of Dr. James Pendergraft was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals last week. The court's decision said that no crime had been committed. Dr. P, who was in federal prison from July 2001 until he was released after oral arguments on his case in February, is back at work at his clinics in Florida, providing abortion and other reproductive health care services to women. Federal prosecutors in Florida could bring further charges against him.
Because we knew this prosecution was a dangerous new effort to stop abortion by bringing criminal charges against doctors and priving them from practice, the Reproductive Freedom Task Force of Refuse & Resist! put a great deal of effort and importance into defending Dr. Pendergraft by helping to form a defense committee, sending representatives to his trial, and mobilizing other pro-choice organizations to do so. He was a featured speaker at N.O.W.'s April 2001 March for Women's Lives in Washington D.C. Many in the pro-choice community agreed that criminal prosecution brought against him was cover for a vicious anti-abortion agenda. People looked at the fact that a successful African American physician had opened an abortion clinic in a small mostly white town where a previous clinic had been destroyed by an anti-abortion arson, and knew that this case was political. The array of anti-abortion witnesses in government jobs, and the openly racist taunts of prosecutors, brought even more people to question the bogus prosecution.
We are still outraged that Dr. Pendergraft, his staff, and patients were and continue to be harassed by anti-abortion protesters, including those in government. As even the conservative 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled, no crime was committed. Yet a person widely acknowledged as an excellent doctor, committed to providing abortions, including late term ones not available elsewhere in the region, spent 7 months in prison, hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and had the stress of being unjustly convicted.
It is a wonderful thing that this conviction was reversed, thanks to the efforts of many outraged supporters to expose the injustice done to Dr. Pendergraft, and to women for whom abortion must be accessible. We call on everyone to remain vigilant against efforts to stop abortion providers. We congratulate Dr. Pendergraft, his family, staff, and legal representatives on their courage and persistence in defeating this attack.
For background on the case, see an excellent Nation article at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010618&c=1&s=frey
Planned Parenthood director faces arrest
Published 7/5/2002 11:32 AM
DES MOINES, Iowa, July 5 (UPI) -- The director of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa Friday faced arrest for refusing to comply with a judge's order to give police the names of nearly 1,000 women who took pregnancy tests during a nine-month period ending in May.
Jill June could be sentenced to six months in jail and a $500 fine for contempt of court. Planned Parenthood is appealing the order in the Iowa Supreme Court arguing it would force the organization to open all its records to sheriff's department investigators.
The judge subpoenaed the names of women who took Planned Parenthood pregnancy tests from August 2000 to May after investigators were unable to locate a mother who left her newborn boy in a shredder at a county recycling center.
The baby's body was found May 30. Investigators checked records at the five hospitals and clinics in the Storm Lake area before running out of suspects.
Post-mortem tests will determine whether the infant was born alive.
The judge's order seeks information on the names, addresses and dates of birth of every woman whose test was positive during the nine-month period. Planned Parenthood estimates about 1,000 women took pregnancy tests between August and May.
The county attorney said doctor-patient privilege was not an issue in the judge's order because the pregnancy tests were administered staff members, not health care providers, and were not considered protected medical records whose release would require a patient's written approval.
A lawyer for Planned Parenthood's Storm Lake clinic argued such records are protected by federal privacy laws.
"Part of the mission of the organization is to afford patients the confidentiality and respect they deserve," attorney Sandra Suarez told the Des Moines Register.
Three other area clinics provided similar information to authorities.
IOWA Supreme Court blocks Planned Parenthood order (AP) 08/06/2002
The Iowa Supreme Court today issued an order blocking enforcement of a lower court's order that would have required Planned Parenthood officials to provide the names of women who took pregnancy tests at the organization's clinic in Storm Lake.
The ruling comes in a month-old controversy growing out of the investigation of the death of a newborn boy, whose body was found on May 30 after it had gone through a shredder at a Storm Lake recycling center.
Buena Vista County law officers, in their quest to learn the identity of the baby's mother, attracted nationwide attention with their unprecedented request.
Jill June, Planned Parenthood's Iowa director, faces the possibility of fines or jail time if she refused to abide by the lower court's order directing her organization to provide pregnancy test results from Planned Parenthood's Storm Lake clinic.
The Supreme Court ruling spares her for now from the potential punishment for refusing to abide by the lower court's order.
The legal dispute is likely to continue on for several months as Supreme Court justices decide how to handle the case. The seven-member court can side with the lower court decision, reverse that decision or send it back to the lower court for further consideration. The court has not indicated when a final ruling will be handed down.
Clay County District Judge Frank Nelson has twice ordered Planned Parenthood officials to turn over to investigators the names and addresses of patients whose pregnancy tests were positive between last August and May.
June has vowed to go to jail, rather than divulging what her organization contends are the contents of confidential medical records.
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102%257E8854%257E688695,00.html#
Brattleboro Reformer
A life-and-death fight
Friday, June 21, 2002 -
True to its character, Brattleboro refused to stand quietly by Thursday and allow a touring gang of anti-abortion zealots the unchallenged right to present its graphic denunciations of a woman's right to choose. Setting up camp in a line stretching down Canal Street from the Planned Parenthood office, scores of demonstrators from the Milwaukee-based Missionaries to the Preborn were met by a vocal group of counter-demonstrators willing to confront the Missionaries, their crass rhetoric and their photographs of aborted fetuses. Moralistic and hateful, these fanatics have the arrogance not only to cast the universal yet intensely personal questions of pregnancy and birth in the starkest terms, but to seek to dictate their simplistic convictions to people whose lives they know nothing about – all in a manner that provokes fear and revulsion. As some of the counter-demonstrators found, the Missionaries are not interested in discussing abortion rights. Bearing Bibles and berating opponents, curiously, as homosexuals, they know what's right and what's wrong, and those who do wrong, or support wrong, are going to hell. Thankfully, Vermont is not a welcoming place for such bigotry. Even staunch opponents of abortion such as the Vermont Right to Life Committee and the Evangelical Pastors Fellowship denounced the Missionaries' tactics. "We cannot proclaim that we represent Christ and His teachings while acting in any manner inconsistent with his character or nature," the fellowship stated.
There is a divide between those who support abortion rights and those who oppose them. Beliefs are sincerely held on both sides, and it requires restraint and maturity to argue one's position without demonizing those who disagree. Fringe groups like Missionaries to the Preborn do no service to the debate. They offer no comfort to those who need it, only vicious intolerance. Like the Ku Klux Klan -- whose representatives were famously chased out of town 20 years ago -- they seek to legitimize hatred and bigotry by carrying Bibles. They should not be ignored; they should be vigorously opposed. They have no place here.
From the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy
http://www.reproductiverights.org
August 1, 2002
For Immediate Releas
Contact: Adrianna Montague-Gray (917) 637-3658 adrianna.montague-gray@crlp.org
Emergency Appeal Filed For Pennsylvania Woman Seeking an Abortion
Wilkes-Barre, PA - In an urgent effort to allow a woman access to her legal right to obtain an abortion, an Emergency Appeal was filed in the Superior Court of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. The woman was scheduled to obtain an abortion two days ago when her ex-boyfriend filed a lawsuit to force her to carry the pregnancy to term. In complete disregard of legal precedent, the trial court granted the injunction, and at yesterday's hearing Judge Michael Conahan ordered attorneys to submit additional legal papers on Monday, August 5, 2002. The injunction remains in effect indefinitely.
"We hope this appeal will overturn the injunction and bring the rule of law back to Pennsylvania. The lower court's injunction shows complete disregard for legal precedent. It is not only unconstitutional but also forces my client to endure unnecessary suffering," said Linda Rosenthal, a staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy and lead counsel on the case. "No person--not an abusive ex-boyfriend and not a state court trial judge--has the right to veto an adult woman's decision to terminate her first-trimester pregnancy," added Rosenthal.
The Pennsylvania woman, 22 and the mother of a two-year-old considered all of her options before making the decision to terminate the pregnancy. Her former boyfriend, John Stachokus, repeatedly threatened her physical safety and as a result there is a Temporary Protection from Abuse Order in effect against him.
U.S. Supreme Court precedent establishes that a pregnant woman's right to privacy precludes anyone from preventing her from terminating an abortion prior to viability of the fetus. In 1976, the Court first held that a statute requiring spousal consent before a woman could obtain an abortion violated the right to choose previously established in Roe v. Wade. The Court reiterated its ruling in the 1992 Casey decision and emphasized that the man's interest in the fetus could never outweigh the pregnant woman's liberty interest.
Representing the respondent in the case Stachokus v. Meyers are Linda Rosenthal and Adrienne Lockie of the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, and local counsel Brian Cali. The Women's Law Project is co-counsel in the case.
Decision Allows Woman's Abortion By JOANN LOVIGLIO The Associated Press 8-12-02
PHILADELPHIA (AP) - A judge on Monday overturned an unusual decision that temporarily barred a woman from having an abortion.
The judge dissolved the temporary injunction forbidding Tanya Meyers, from ending her pregnancy. He also dismissed the lawsuit filed by her ex-boyfriend, John Stachokus, who had sought to force her to carry her pregnancy to term.
A woman's right to have an abortion ``is not subject to being vetoed by a woman's husband or partner,'' Common Pleas Judge Michael Conahan said in his decision Monday, one week after another judge ordered the injunction. ``Neither an ex-boyfriend nor a fetus has standing to interfere with a woman's choice to terminate her pregnancy.''
Susan Fritchey, an attorney with the Women's Law Project and co-counsel for Meyers, applauded the decision. ``Her right to privacy has been restored and she is free to go on with her life,'' said Susan Fritchey, an attorney with the Women's Law Project and co-counsel for Meyers. ``It's a great relief for her.''
Stachokus, 27, had said he was willing to take full or partial custody of the child and claimed in his suit that Meyers, 23, was being pressured by her mother to have the abortion. She is 10 weeks pregnant.
The case gained the support of abortion opponents and fathers' rights groups, which said men should have a say in the outcome of a pregnancy they helped create.
"We talk about fathers negatively so often, about how they don't want to be responsible for their children, and this guy is doing everything he can to be sure his unborn child isn't aborted," said Dianna Thompson, executive director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. "Men's rights are trampled on all the time when it comes to reproductive rights."
Fritchey and other women's advocates said the injunction ran counter to legal precedents establishing that the decision whether to have an abortion is the woman's choice alone.
Stachokus' attorney, John P. Williamson, said Meyers, who has a 2-year-old child, had been coerced into deciding on an abortion by her mother, who disliked Stachokus. `They had picked out godparents for the baby, she had picked out names, then there was a sudden turnaround,'' Williamson said. ``We want an injunction that says no abortion is allowed and this baby lives.'' Williamson did not return a telephone call seeking comment Monday.
http://www.thewesterlysun.com/display/inn_news/news5.txt
STUDENTS PROTEST THE PROTESTERS By Tim Ryan and Ryan Blessing - The Sun Staff
PAWCATUCK - When a group of anti-abortion protesters took to the streets of Westerly and Pawcatuck, some of the students of the Pawcatuck School of Hair Design saw the signs with aborted fetuses and decided they'd seen enough - especially when the protesters camped in front of the business.
So the students created their own signs on cardboard and stood in front of the protesters, urging passerby not to take the anti-abortion literature.
Kristen Kimery, 16, of Westerly, who held up a makeshift sign reading "Rated X," said she was given a pamphlet from anti-abortion protesters and was upset by what she saw.
"We took a pamphlet, not knowing what it was," she said. "We thought it was disgusting to see those mutilated babies. We asked them to move."
Kimery said that, while she doesn't inherently disagree with the anti-abortion message, she felt it could be handled in a more tactful way - without the graphic pictures. Kimery said a woman who was pregnant told the students she cried after seeing the graphic photos.
"Do you want to look at that?" Kimery said. "Do you want your kids to look at that? I'm against abortion, but that's way too far. It's too graphic."
People driving by seemed to be listening to the hairdressing school students, said Kimery.
"They're listening," she said. "We told them not to take it."
The girls started chanting, "Don't take the pamphlets," to cars and pedestrians.
Some felt the protesters were being disrespectful to the counter-protest, and that freedom of speech cuts both ways.
"This lady called (one girl) a slut," Hilderth said. "She said we're all going to hell."
"They're goading them into violence," Bennett said. "They're saying how righteous they are, but we don't think it's appropriate. Where's the forgiving nature there?"
Missionaries to the Preborn member Joy Ovadal of Monroe, Wis., said the protest was part of a two-week tour of New England states. The group, which is based in Wisconsin, also had some local support, Ovadal said. Ovadal denied calling any of the girls a slut.
Anti-abortion activist Michael O'Hara, 19, was asked if he believed the protesting girls were hindering his message.
"Hindrance? No," O'Hara said. "They're probably women who killed their children."
O'Hara also defended the use of the graphic photos.
"At the end of World War II, GIs made the German troops march through the Nazi death camps to see the bodies," he said. "What we're doing isn't as graphic as that and it gets our point across."
Hilderth said she was surprised that Stonington police were letting the event continue.
"The police are doing almost nothing about it," she said.
Stonington Police Officer Shannon Weber said the force was notified of the anti-abortion protest two days ago, and that it had been relatively peaceful on both sides.
"They've given each other some grief," Weber said, "but not much."
Bennett said that, while she believes in freedom of expression, she felt the anti-abortion protesters were being antagonistic in their work.
"They said it's their civil rights, but it's our right to not look at it," she said. "If someone wants to get this information, they should be able to get it, but don't push it on people."
Links to two articles and an editorial on clinic harassment that appeared on July 14, 2002 in Texas' Bryan-College Station Eagle newspaper.
The direct address to the main story: http://www.theeagle.com/region/localregional/071402plannedparenthood.htm
The direct address to the second story with the Texas A&M bent: http://www.theeagle.com/region/localregional/071402womanscenter.htm
The direct address to the editorial of the same day/same topic : http://www.theeagle.com/opinions/editorials/071402editorial.htm
WHY I PROVIDE ABORTIONS
William F. Harrison, MD
I provide abortions for my patients and for any other girl or woman who feels this her best option after making what is, for most women and their families, a soul searing self-examination before arriving at the decision to abort a pregnancy. Why would I or any other reputable physician provide abortions? Good question.
First the long answer.
. . . By 1967 I was a third year medical student . . . It was the spring of that year and I was ending my rotation in the Ob-Gyn Service clinic. I was assigned a 40 plus year old, poverty stricken mother of several children. I think she was unmarried but I am not sure of that now. This care worn mother-of-several had a large abdominal mass that I rapidly determined to be a well advanced pregnancy. I asked my resident to come and break the news to this woman; it was very obvious to me that she was not going to be happy about the news of another pregnancy. When told that she - already unable to adequately feed and clothe her family - was again pregnant, she looked up at the resident and me. There we stood, two white males, well clothed, well feed young men with superior educations. We were, in her eyes, stunningly blessed, obviously going places in the world. She began to weep silently. She must have assumed, for good reason, that there was no way that we would, even could, understand her problems; she knew also that there was nothing that we could or would do to relieve her lacerating misery.
"Oh God, doctor," she said quietly weeping, "I was hoping it was cancer."
That mother's anguished whisper eventually became a shriek of despair and hopelessness that has reverberated in my heart and mind and soul for well over thirty years. Before that moment, forever seared like a brand on my memory, I would have described myself as "Pro-Life" had I then known this political term.
Over the next few years, I was exposed to real life as it is lived by millions of people who don't have the sanctification granted in America to those who are white, male, well educated, well gene-ed, well nurtured, well advantaged. I learned that what this woman knew was a personal tragedy for her family and herself, was only one face in a multifaceted problem confronting thousands of girls and women, couples and families every day.
How did I learn this?
I learned it - really made it a part of my essential being – by seeing the repercussions of desperation walk, and crawl, and be carried through our emergency room door three, four, five times, every night for four years. Each night we would admit to the wards of University Hospital in Little Rock (a fairly small hospital, as metropolitan hospitals go) girls and women with raging fevers, extraordinary uterine and pelvic infections, enormous blood loss, and a multitude of serious injuries of the pelvic and intra-abdominal organs as a result of illegal and self-induced abortions. During the years 1971 through the end of my residency in June, 1972 we did in the same hospital perhaps twenty to thirty safe, legal abortions a month on girls and women of various ages for mostly elective reasons. The contrast between the outcomes for these two sets of women was dramatic, not only for what happened to them immediately - that is, the almost total lack of complications in those undergoing legal abortions and the terrible consequences of some of the illegal abortions that we saw - but also for what happened over the next few years to those who had illegal abortions as they discovered that they were sterile, or faced total hysterectomy for the effects of injuries suffered during their illegal procedures.
I could and sometimes do go on for hours about what I saw during those years of training and in early private practice, before abortion became universally legal in the United States and affordable in the first few months of pregnancy for any woman who determined, for a myriad of reasons, that carrying a pregnancy to term and delivering a baby was not in her best interest, or perhaps not in the best interests of her family. (The very poor in those early days of legal abortion were covered by Medicaid.)
. . . No one, neither the patient receiving an abortion, nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life. We just don't believe that a developing embryo or fetus whose mother cannot or will not accept it, has the same moral claims on us, claims to autonomy and justice that an adolescent or adult woman has. I have never seen an abortion decision entered into lightly by anyone involved. The decision to have an abortion is usually made in the time of the first great personal moral crisis that ever faces a girl, a woman, her family and the people who love them. It is only those who stand outside and condemn the women and families who are faced with these dilemmas that take lightly the decisions made in these straits and trivialize the circumstances in which they are made.
. . . Is legal abortion dangerous? I personally have not seen an abortion injury to a woman since 1974, with three exceptions: One was a young women who became sterile after a post legal-abortion infection in 1974 in my practice; another was a woman from my practice who had a ruptured uterus in about 1975 as the result of an abortion done in Little Rock at about twenty-four weeks by a resident using a no-longer-used method of abortion. The last exception was a mother of five whom I admitted to my hospital in about 1991 with a septic abortion at about twenty-six weeks pregnant. She or someone else had obviously tried to abort her. The fetus was alive, but the fetal membranes were ruptured and blood from the uterus was mixed with stinking pus, fouling her body, her clothes, and her bedclothes. (She was the sickest obstetric patient I had seen in a number of years, and the sickest abortion patient I had seen since June 1, 1971.) She had a fever of about 104 on admission and was threatening to go into septic shock. We got her stabilized and loaded her with massive doses of antibiotics. She was lucky. We were able to induce labor, deliver the extremely premature and septic fetus that died almost immediately, and she went home in about three days. Arkansas Medicaid would not pay for a safe abortion for her, but it did pay part of the bill for her recovery from an unsafe and therefore almost disastrous one, which was well over ten times the cost of a first trimester abortion.
I know of only two deaths from legal abortions in the state of Arkansas since 1970. One was in about 1980 or 1981, a young woman from Springdale, Arkansas with severe heart disease who died as a result of complications of her heart disease, who had the abortion done by another physician at my hospital where she died in the recovery room, before she was to go to Houston for open heart surgery; the other was probably a patient of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, an early abortion provider in New York state and maker of The Silent Scream. This was a doctor's daughter from Northeast Arkansas who died after she came home, in about 1970 or 1971, as a result of self-neglected complications of an abortion that Dr. Nathanson may have performed in New York. The girl came home, started having serious problems and died rather than tell her parents of the abortion. The cause of death was only discovered at autopsy, and her story was then told by a friend. There may have been others; if so, I am not aware of them.
There are risks to any medical procedure; however, legal abortion, done by competent medical personnel is among the safest operative procedures performed today in the United States. From 1972 through 1990, there were 563 deaths from abortions of all types - legal, illegal and spontaneous - in the U.S.; fewer than half that number were from legal abortions. In 1990, there were in the United States a total of 5 women who died from legal abortions and another 5 from spontaneous abortions.*
*{Taken from the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report (MMWR) published by the Center for Disease Control. The numbers through 1991 will be published in May, 1997.} (This essay was written in 1996.)
. . . We each have unique skills, talents and abilities to be used in the service of our fellow human beings. What I mean by this is, that I was led into OB-Gyn by my love for delivering babies. Gynecology was really to be only an appendage to my obstetrical practice and I am sure that providing abortions, even thinking about abortions, would never have been a major part of my life had other physicians in my area continued to provide them as was being done prior to 1984. However, I soon found my practice inundated with abortion patients because other physicians who had also been providing abortions stopped doing so. In late 1983 it suddenly became uncomfortable, and very soon dangerous, to provide abortions. I literally had no option but to make a "Sophie's choice" between delivering babies, which I loved, or making what for me would be an immoral and unethical decision, that is, to choose to abandon those girls, women and families who started coming to my office by the dozens. How could I look my children, my wife, my mother, my friends - myself - in the face and say, "I believe that abortion should be legal, safe, and available. But now some people disapprove and it's become very uncomfortable, perhaps even dangerous, to provide them. And so I am going to stop doing what I know to be absolutely right. When it gets uncomfortable or dangerous, it's OK to say, `not me, coach.'"
Was that the morality that I wanted to demonstrate to my children? To parade in front of my wife, my family and friends?
Not me, coach!
Why do I provide abortions?
Here is the short answer.
Like multitudes before me and, I trust, multitudes to come, I eventually heard (Try as I might to avoid hearing it!) in that mother's grief-filled declaration, "Oh God, Doctor, I was hoping it was cancer", a still, small voice asking, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" to which I was at last compelled to reply, "here am I, send me."
William F Harrison, MD, FACOG
Dr. Harrison has been an abortion provider in Arkansas for several decades.
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