VANS, ABORTION CLINICS, HIT LISTS AND BEIRUT

I want to take a quick moment to make it clear that a van driving into a Planned Parenthood office must be considered to be an act of terrorism even though nobody was hurt. Abortion providers and their staffs live in a constant state of seige and fear. The longtime judicial injunction against mass Operation Rescue style protests and clinic blockades have eased the anxiety a bit but that injunction has recently been lifted by the Republican dominated Supreme Court (this by itself may have encouraged this van guy). Furthermore, during the time of the injunction, clinic bombings and murders have continued virtually unabated. I hope that everyone knows of the "hit list" on a website called the "Nuremberg Files" that compares abortion clinics to Nazi concentration camps: despite the denials of the people who run the site, the list is clearly a call to kill abortion providers; they cross off the names of doctors that have been murdered by the site's readers. Yesterday's van attack takes place within this context. The attack also invokes the ghost of the Beirut truck bomb attack that killed sixty three Americans in 1983. Clearly, Frank Lafayette Bird Jr.'s very loud unspoken message was something like, "We've got you in our sniper scope; we used blanks this time, but we can kill you and your patients any time we want. Be afraid."

Bird's "protest" was, without a doubt, designed to create fear and anxiety on the part of clinic staff and would be patients. Perhaps next time, Bird will have his van full of explosives.

These psycho-fundamentalist acts of intimidation and violence are having an effect, too (I mean, apart from the violence itself). Many doctors and nurses, fearing for their lives, are getting out of the business. The ultimate effect is that it is increasingly difficult for women to find doctors willing to perform abortions. Where politics have failed, from the point of view of pro-lifers, terrorism has succeeded.

Driving vans into abortion clinics is not a "protest;" it is terrorism, pure and simple. KHOU is wildly irresponsible in euphemizing this.

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