When abortion was illegal in the United States, women resorted to drastic measures, and deaths
from back-alley abortions were common.
In 1973, when the Supreme Court reached its landmark decision in the case of Roe v. Wade,
casualties declined dramatically.
In recent years, those opposed to abortion have been working to make it illegal once
again.
The result is a return to the fear and danger of the back-alleys.
We're hearing about knitting needles again.
We're hearing about bleach, douches again.
And they may not be reporting it to their physician or to the judge that they end up
talking to, or to the clinic worker at the hospital, but there are girls out there doing
that.
I hope that my daughter never has to worry about something like this.
That the battle was won and fought by her mom to preserve a right for her to make those
own decisions for herself and nobody tell her what she has to do.
If Roe v. Wade is undone, women will still go and look for abortions, whether they are
legal or not.
So what we're going to see is the same number of abortions, but with an increase in the
fatalities for women of childbearing age.
The majority of Americans support choice.
They believe that a woman has a right to make her own decision.
Through the efforts of a vocal anti-choice minority, access to abortion in the United
States is being eroded.
Spurred by religious conviction, opponents of abortion carry out their mission on two
fronts.
One is through legislation, where state by state, laws are being passed that create barriers
for women seeking abortions.
The other is through clinic protests, where some of the most vehement attacks are being
carried out.
Please don't let them hurt you!
He killed a woman!
You're going to stand before Almighty God for murder, young lady.
Murder of a baby.
Right now you're the mother of a life baby.
When you leave here you'll be the mother of a dead baby.
I tell you that every one of you will be responsible before a righteous God at the throne of judgment.
When I went for the abortion, the thing that frightened me was this one woman, and she
was saying, you know, the blood's still on your fingers, turn back now.
And they were just really cruel, they were just, I don't know, they were saying this
is murder and how can you do a thing like this?
But I don't know, I just, I don't think they realized what I was going through.
And I mean they were pushing me and when I was trying to get the doors and everything,
it was awful.
It was really awful.
When I left the clinic and walked outside, I got real sick.
And there were protesters out on the sidewalk and said, you know, one guy was carrying a
sign that says, mommy, please don't kill me.
And I still remember that, it was a long time ago, but I still remember that sign.
I'll probably never forget.
The tactics of those protesting abortion have been escalating from sidewalk picketing to
a reign of terror.
Police at an abortion clinic in Florida.
He just went up, chased the doctor there and just shot him point blank.
Dr. David Gunn was shot and killed outside a Pensacola clinic on his way to work.
Tiller, one of the few doctors to perform late term abortions, was shot in both arms
last night as he got into his car outside of his Wichita abortion clinic.
It took just two minutes for Paul Hill to fire off more than six rounds and kill two
people.
A Canadian gynecologist who performs abortions was shot in his home this morning.
Police say Garson Romales was sitting at his breakfast table when he was shot by an assailant
armed with an assault rifle.
A man burst into a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic and opened fire with a rifle.
Minutes later, an identical attack occurred at a second clinic a mile and a half away.
He was right behind me here.
He stopped gunning.
I jumped over the wall.
He was shooting everybody.
The murders, which stunned most of the country, were condoned as justifiable homicide by a
handful of religious extremists.
God wants us to do what is right and killing abortion doctors may be for some people what
is right.
The recent wave of terrorism has left abortion providers across the nation facing the difficult
decision of whether or not to continue.
This doctor lives with his wife and their child in a small New England village.
Their life, however, has been far from quiet.
Like so many other providers throughout the country, this physician has been the target
of picketers for years.
He went away over Christmas and came back to find a letter in my mailbox that said,
you better check your baby killing facility and then any questions, the big question mark.
And underneath it, it showed a picture of a.357 Magnum pointing directly out of the
page being held by hand.
I came to work with my husband every day and when the picketers started coming, they would
be outside lined up on the street and that feeling of dread as we drove towards work
would always be there.
So you're working under enormous pressure of people outside harassing women you're trying
to help, women that are there because they need or want to be there.
That feeling of dread just carried over when we'd come home.
Will there be a phone call?
Will there be another piece of hate mail?
What's next?
Well approximately nine months before I closed my practice, there was a bullet fired into
the waiting room of my office as time progressed from that shooting and we found that the law
enforcement agencies and there were many involved really were not putting much effort into trying
to solve this case.
It became apparent to me that we were in real danger.
They know where we live, we could move, they could find us again.
What kind of harm is out there for my child?
Throughout the country, abortion clinics face threats and harassment on a regular basis.
Since 1977, there have been more than 12,000 incidents of violence and disruption.
Those facilities which offer services in this atmosphere have had to learn to cope.
Demonstrators were arrested Tuesday for trespassing after they forced themselves into an abortion
clinic where they chained themselves together.
What you take on when you provide abortion services is all of the anti-choice protesting,
picketing.
We have had bomb threats throughout our history.
Then we had a long period of time where there would be a car parked in the driveway and
men would have locked their necks to the chassis of the car from underneath and the police
and the rescue would have to come to remove the protesters.
Another time we came in, three of them were locked together at the front door of the health
center with a huge lock system that was encased in cement and then they had destroyed the
lock so that the police would not be able to get them apart.
This is one of the most creative responses I think on the Burlington Police Department's
part.
We came and picked the three individuals who were locked together up, walked them across
the street, left them on the front lawn of the Catholic Diocese who had been allowing
them to park there and supporting their activity and we found them at 8 o'clock in the morning.
They couldn't get themselves apart until midnight that night.
You are now being given notice that you are trespassing on this property and if you fail
to leave you will be arrested for unlawful trespass.
We weathered the period of blockades and invasions.
At times we were in tears, at times we found humor to carry ourselves through and I think
what's really been unfortunate in the media is that everything is so polarized and they
represent the women in this society, women in this country as two groups of women, women
who have abortions and women who have babies and when you provide all those services you
recognize that we are the same women at different times in our life.
More than a hundred fires of suspicious origin have struck women's health centers.
Sometimes the same location more than once.
The staff of one California clinic has weathered a series of arsons.
The first fire that I recall was a fire that started, we were told it was started by a
cigarette and we were told that the cigarette traveled about 20 feet down the cement walkway
and around a cement guardrail and up a 10 inch cement lip and down underneath the house
and then it somehow gathered debris and started a fire.
And that was our first fire and we, you know, were very suspicious and I think we were more
surprised that the local powers that be weren't suspicious.
Over the next five years this clinic suffered three more arsons.
After one of these the facility had to close for eight months and women were forced to
travel an additional hundred miles to the nearest provider.
It's very difficult to have this happen four times, all of them unsolved.
And you put it on speakerphone so the police heard his voice and what kind of threats was
he making at the time?
The day before we arrived to film at this Minnesota clinic they received a series of
threatening phone calls.
There's a bomb, stop killing little babies.
There's a bomb, stop killing little babies.
He called back about 30 different times, talked to one of the nurses, told her that he had
a high powered rifle with a scope and that he was going to kill her when she went out
to get her car.
The police came and we said put a trace on it and they still wouldn't do anything.
Many clinics report that law enforcement agents do not respond sufficiently to threats.
As a result staff members feel they must always be on guard.
It's probably not a day that goes by that I don't think of my own safety or the safety
of my family when it comes to abortion and the risks that are involved, the political
fallout that you have seen taking place every day.
My children are 10 and 12 years of age and my 10 year old daughter when she sees my bullet
proof vest will say well daddy I hope no one kills you or wants to kill you and that's
what makes it real for me.
You going to kill our baby?
We're going to kill a couple of babies today doc?
I hope the Lord burns your hands off.
You murderer.
In this embattled environment fewer and fewer doctors are willing to provide abortion services.
An increasing number of communities have no local providers.
Many clinics, especially those in rural areas, are forced to fly doctors in from out of state.
This physician travels hundreds of miles every week.
I never intended to be a full time abortion doctor.
I provided abortion services because doctors were needed.
I was told that before Dr. Tiller got shot in the hand up in Wichita, Kansas that I was
an alternative target.
Shortly after that we were approached by the FBI and by the US Marshals Service and it
was their decision to provide me with protection.
If everybody dropped out of doing this because they were being intimidated then there would
be no abortion providers.
Perhaps I'd feel different if I was in my 40s, a young doctor, but I'm 64 years old.
I'm going to be retiring soon and I'm not going to quit what I'm doing.
This clinic is 100 miles from Pensacola, Florida where two doctors and an escort were killed.
We've really experienced some horror at the clinics in the nearby area.
We've experienced some pretty scary things here with people who are opposed to women
having safe and legal choice.
Individuals who continue to work in this climate are often motivated by personal memories of
the back alley days.
This all began for me in the mid 60s and I had a good friend and she was pregnant and
couldn't take care of any more children and kept asking the doctor to help her and he
knew exactly what she meant and he couldn't.
I got a phone call and she had been taken to the hospital hemorrhaging and she bled
to death.
I went back to where she worked and told her boss and she said come back here.
We went into the restroom and there was blood everywhere.
We started cleaning it up because we didn't know if the police would be involved.
We just didn't know what was going on.
I found a screwdriver behind the commode that had blood all over it and she did it to herself.
Before abortion was legal, many women died from self induced abortions.
Now once again, hospital emergency rooms report treating women who resort to unsafe methods.
Chris was a sociology major in her senior year at a state university when she discovered
she was pregnant.
Like many young women her age, she was not ready to have a child.
She obtained an abortion at a clinic during a wave of protests.
Her friends describe what they remember.
I went down with her and we waited in the waiting room for I don't know how long and
there was people outside marching around and then we were inside of there and there was
all sorts of weird tension inside the waiting room and she had a really bad experience there.
I think she didn't understand why she felt so ashamed of herself.
Exactly, totally.
And I think it took her years to figure out that it had something to do with that experience
but I don't think she ever knew exactly what.
That she didn't feel like she should have felt ashamed.
Chris became pregnant again after her birth control failed.
She did not want to go back to a clinic because her first experience had been so disturbing.
Please consider the life that you're carrying.
Don't snuff it out.
You'll never forget this.
This day will go down in the rest of your life.
You'll never get over it.
Chris had been studying natural medicine and decided to use herbs as an abortifacient.
Soon afterwards she began to cramp.
When the cramping got really bad she thought she was aborting.
And so she didn't go to a doctor, she didn't go to see anyone.
The night, the 12th of August, I got a call at 4 o'clock in the morning and she had gone
into convulsions in the bathtub.
She was taken to the hospital and she'd had cardiac arrest and then they'd found out that
she'd had an ectopic pregnancy.
And that the cramping that she was feeling was that she'd been hemorrhaging probably
for two weeks because they said that there was dried blood in and around her fallopian
tubes and in her uterus.
And that that's what killed her.
I think that she really wanted to go to somebody.
We talked about it.
She didn't want to be in charge and take all this responsibility.
I think if there had been somebody for her to go to that she would still be alive.
To abortion rights advocates who fought to save women's lives by changing the laws,
history seems to be repeating itself.
I can remember the last time we had a march and walking down the street and thinking,
you know, I thought that we wouldn't have to do this anymore.
And I think what happened is that when the Supreme Court decision was won, we all went,
that's it, we won.
And we relaxed.
But at the same time you had these groups that were organizing to repeal it.
And what they did was chip away a little bit at a time over the years because then Medicaid
funding wasn't allowed for poor women.
And then there was spousal consent that came up.
And then you couldn't provide services to unmarried minors without parental notification
or parental consent.
So there's been a lot of chipping away at the decision, which I think is unfortunate.
But it means that you can never relax.
As new restrictions are being enacted throughout the country, a generation that does not remember
the history is becoming aware of the current threat to reproductive rights.
I vividly remember the moment that I became an abortion activist.
And that was the evening of July 3rd, 1989, when I was watching the news and heard of
the Webster decision.
Rights could now restrict abortion rights on a case-by-case basis.
And what happened directly after that was some 500 anti-choice measures and bills were
introduced.
So it had a tremendous impact.
It was a gateway to anti-choice legislation.
Bills inspired or drafted by anti-abortion politicians are now pending or have passed
in almost every state.
In Kentucky, as in 30 other states, abortion funding is only available in cases of rape,
incest or life endangerment.
This young woman faced serious obstacles when she applied for subsidized medical care after
learning she had an abnormal pregnancy.
We went for the ultrasound.
And then she lifted down the cover and she said, you need to go over to Dr. White's office
and I said, why is there something wrong?
She said, you just need to go over there.
Well, she was, Dr. White was telling me how some babies were born without a kidney, some
babies were born without a heart or arm, you know, an organ.
And then she said, well, your baby was without a brain tissue.
So that was the hardest thing I've ever heard in my life.
It was obvious that the baby was anencephalic, which an anencephalic baby is a baby that
when the neural tube or the spinal cord brain segment begins to develop, there is no development
at the top of the spinal cord.
So you have up to the brain stem, which is the base of the brain back here that controls
breathing the heart rate, but nothing above it.
So above from the ears and the eyebrows up, there is nothing, there is no brain.
Well, Angela just cried and cried and cried because we wanted this baby so much.
And I asked the doctor, I said, what do we do now?
You know, and she said she can carry the baby for nine months and take a risk on Angela's
life and knowing that the baby had no chance.
Or we could go and take the baby now and just do it this way because of Angela's life.
If I continued the pregnancy, the child would not, the child would not, you know, survive
not even a minute.
So she said that the dangers were that the placenta, I would like, I could, there would
be a chance where I could hemorrhage to death if I just went ahead and did that.
And so I say no, I didn't see what, you know, why would I want to go through a whole nine
months giving birth to a baby that wasn't going to be alive?
To spare Angela the medical risk of carrying to term and the trauma of giving birth to
a baby with no chance of survival, the family decided to end the pregnancy.
They soon discovered that the several thousand dollar cost of the operation would not be
covered by Medicaid.
It was not an option for them to pay for this out of pocket.
They would have had to stay within the medical card system, would have gone through the pregnancy,
would have gone through the delivery, and then would have gone through the loss.
And so Dr. White was telling me about this organization where they were trying to pass
a law that people on Medicaid could, um, didn't have, you know, shouldn't have to do it because,
you know, they know we didn't have the money, then the baby wouldn't survive and my life
was in danger.
The ACLU took up this case to bring attention to the injustice of a law that does not take
dangerous high risk pregnancies into account.
I think there's a very, um, passionate group in this state who are against abortion for
any reason at all, ever, period, never.
Um, there's nothing in this world that's that black and white.
And you're dealing with people who are not involved with a medical situation trying to
make blanket decisions.
If you've ever looked into a woman's eyes when you've just told her that her baby is
doomed, it's, if they could see that, they would know why this has to be kept safe and
legal and why we don't need more barriers for these women.
Before we went through with this, I was against abortion.
But when the situation comes up as much as this, there's got to be somebody to help these
people, mothers that's gone through this.
And I don't care what anybody says, you know, they, how could you do this?
And they're not in my shoes.
They went in Angela's shoes.
If a poor woman has an unplanned pregnancy, her options are limited.
Medicaid restrictions on abortion funding combined with cuts in family planning and
reduced welfare allocations place a heavy burden on low income families.
This nurse and midwife works in a county hospital.
Many of her patients are women on assistance.
Poor women are used to struggling.
They know struggling to have enough food, struggling to take care of the other children.
They don't think immediately, I don't have enough resources, because they don't have
enough resources for their life.
So that first they think about, what do I want to do?
And the first thing is, I want to have a baby.
And then, harsh reality sets in and they begin to think, I've got three other kids, it's
so hard.
I'm struggling to make ends meet.
I'm struggling.
And you know, 15th and the check comes and there's not enough money for the last five
days for food or transportation.
And they begin to think, no, this is too much.
When women in that situation say, no more, when they say, one more child is too much,
when that woman says, I can't.
This is not said lightly.
This is real.
It means that they truly are at the end of their resources.
The next barrier that comes up is getting to a place if they want an abortion to have
it.
And like, if they go to a clinic, it can be $300.
That's a lot of money.
That may be close to what her check is, you know?
And so she doesn't have that.
So then she begins to think.
She goes to the county hospital.
That's where I work.
She calls the county to make an appointment because you can't just walk in.
It can take two to three weeks to get an appointment.
Then in terms of scheduling it, it can be three to four weeks before we can schedule
her in because of the press of other surgery.
So that we're talking about women who are being pushed into second trimester abortion.
While some laws impact low income families, others are specifically aimed at young women.
In a series of decisions starting in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that states could
require a minor to inform her parents before getting an abortion.
Mental involvement laws are on the books and strictly enforced in 27 states.
In 11 others, they are in place and could be activated at any time.
One of the major problems that I see in educating teenagers about their rights in terms of abstinence
or contraceptives or their right to abortion or to give up for adoption is the fact that
there is legislation that specifically prohibits a teenager from making those choices on their
own in many states.
Especially when it comes to abortion, we present them with this maze of laws.
You must go before a judge here in Minnesota if you don't wish to tell both of your biological
parents.
That's assuming a functioning nuclear family and we know that's not a reality.
These kids are being frightened away from asking for help.
States that have parental involvement laws are required to provide the option of a waiver,
such as a judicial bypass.
Meanwhile, anti-abortion forces are working to make these laws stricter, placing an additional
burden on teens with difficult home situations.
There certainly are some young women who, for a variety of reasons and unfortunately
physical abuse is one of them, that absolutely cannot tell their parents.
And we talked to them then about judicial bypass.
There are some counties in this state that have judges that are just absolutely opposed
to abortion, no matter what the circumstances.
And when a young woman comes to them seeking the judicial bypass, they're put off.
And it drives some young women to either go to an incompetent abortion provider, an illegal
provider, they're still out there, or to try to do a home remedy.
And there's still plenty of that going on in Alabama.
The one that really comes to my mind first when I think back about this was a 15-year-old
girl and someone told her that if she would douche with bleach that she would abort on
her own.
So that's what she'd been doing for about a week when she came to us.
The vaginal tissue had caustic burns that were just phenomenal.
Her vagina was just blistered to the point that it had swollen shut all the way.
She couldn't be examined.
The desperation level is already here.
It's the young women, it's the poor women.
It's the women who feel like they can't tell anybody, who feel so socially ostracized because
of the dilemma that they find themselves in in the first place.
As the states pass more and more restrictive laws that make it harder and harder, that
shrink access more and more, we see those numbers growing.
Over the past 25 years, religious activists have been working to elect anti-choice candidates
to local, state, and federal positions.
Based on their moral convictions, these officials then propose legislation which restricts access.
The idea that life begins at conception is a particular theological idea.
It's a belief.
We have states that are passing into their laws that theological, that religious belief
that life begins at conception.
That means that the Catholic Church or the fundamentalist churches now have their religious
beliefs passed into civil law.
For me, for other Protestants, for Jews, for Unitarians, for atheists, for Buddhists, for
Muslims, for all the wide variety of religious beliefs we have in this country, now we have
an infringement, an infraction of the idea of freedom of and from religion.
Among the most influential forces behind these new laws is the Catholic hierarchy.
Within church membership, however, there's a clear split.
According to a Gallup survey, more than 80% think that most abortion services should remain
legal.
Some of those who disagree with the Vatican's position formed Catholics for a free choice.
There is such a residual respect for religion in the country and such a belief that religious
leaders don't lie, religious leaders don't play politics.
And over the past 10 years, as the bishops saw that the abortion issue would move from
the federal arena to the state arena, the bishops established and in cases where they
already existed, beefed up statewide lobbying offices in 28 states in the United States.
So I always had this profound sense of sadness at the way in which the hierarchy of the Roman
Catholic Church has invested so much of its power and authority on this issue in the political
world that it has denied itself the opportunity to speak from a pastoral perspective.
Another way in which the Catholic Church exerts its influence is by using punitive measures
against people with whom it disagrees.
This woman was the chief administrator of a women's health clinic in Texas, which provided
a full range of services including adoption and abortion.
She was threatened with excommunication from the Catholic Church when she refused to abandon
her position on this issue.
I came in to focus with the media, speaking the pro-choice side and defending our clinic
and defending the patients and their right to choose and their right to have access to
these services.
In one of those interviews, I was asked what religion I practiced and I of course said
that I was a pro-choice Catholic.
This special interest group petitioned the bishop and said, you cannot allow this woman
to publicly state that she's a pro-choice Catholic.
That just can't be done.
And sure enough, two months down the road, I received my first letter of warning saying
that I was in jeopardy of excommunicating myself automatically and that as my bishop, that
he was warning me and giving me information regarding the evils of abortion.
All involved in the deliberate and successful effort to eject a non-viable fetus from the
mother's womb incur excommunication.
The most frightening thing about my excommunication was that had it been another time, I would
have been burned at the stake.
I wouldn't have had a piece of paper to tell me you're no longer a Catholic and you can
no longer be buried in the Catholic Church or you can no longer receive communion.
But I would have been burned at the stake.
But it's not going to silence me.
And I'm going to continue to speak and I want to be that force.
I want to be that person that says, but we are affected by this.
Abortion come to clinics like reproductive services and clinics, other abortion providers
across this country with the most incredible circumstances.
And we treat them with respect and we give them the quality medical care that they deserve.
Over the last decade, a religious minority has promoted a concept that equates being
religious with being anti-abortion.
In truth, people of many faiths support a woman's right to choose.
This United Methodist minister works in the Los Angeles area.
He grew up in Mexico where he saw women die from illegal abortions.
There are some religious people that oversimplify the issue and they seem to claim the high
moral ground and say that the rest of us who disagree with them are not moral.
The more you narrow the options, the less moral you are.
I just think freedom is absolutely essential for moral and ethical decisions to be made.
I believe in a loving God and I believe that all of the religions of the world primarily
have as a task to convey the idea that God is loving.
And we have a loving, caring, forgiving God that will understand better than any one of
us the specific reasons why a woman finally decides to go and have an abortion.
In this synagogue, people from many faiths have gathered to honor those who suffered
before legal abortions were available.
To those who were taken blindfolded to a hotel room or a deserted warehouse, to those
who could not afford a legal abortion, to those whose doctors were prevented by law
in counseling them, to those who ended up in an emergency room averaging, to those who
ended up sterile.
Part of why I got involved in this particular service and even I think the larger issue
of the religious statement is religion serves as a vehicle for memory.
We argue these political issues or even the theological issues of abortion without remembering
that real people are involved and not just the real people in the present but also the
real people of the past.
Hundreds and thousands of women, when I was in rabbinical school, each of us had an opportunity
to give a sermon and I gave my sermon on abortion rights, on reproductive rights.
And afterwards, other rabbinical students came to me and told me that they had had abortions
and that they had felt that this was something that they could never, never talk about there
and it could never be mentioned.
And so by mentioning it, by speaking it, every place that we speak it, we make a little safer
for women to speak the truths of their lives.
To all the women who lie silent in the dust, to all the women who live to tell their stories,
to all those who died and those who survived.
The constitutional right to an abortion was guaranteed by the Supreme Court with their
decision in the case of Roe vs. Wade.
The struggle to protect that right is ongoing.
Some local governments are enacting counter legislation to protect doctors and clinic
workers.
Efforts have resulted in buffer zones, restraining orders, and injunctions.
In 1994, the federal government enacted the FACE law, which protects freedom of access
to clinic entrances.
Despite these gains, the onslaught continues.
We are in fact the majority.
Individuals unwilling to yield to pressure from anti-abortion forces are stepping forward
and speaking out.
We've come too far, we've marched too long, we prayed too hard, we wept too bitterly, we
bled too profusely, and we've died too young to let Jesse Helms or Jerry Caldwell or any
legislature turn back the clock on our march for freedom.
As former co-chair of the Republican National Committee, I'm proud to stand here and say
that 68 percent of my party is pro-choice.
We will lift our voices from this day henceforth, from coast to coast, from sea to shining
sea, America the beautiful stands for choice.
A group of medical students in California took a stand when they realized that abortion
procedures were not being taught in most medical schools.
Less than 15 percent of the obstetrics and gynecology programs in the country offer the
training.
We looked into our medical education and said we're not learning about abortion.
It has not been mentioned.
There have been a few places where it should have been mentioned and it hadn't.
We started talking to medical students who were second, third, and fourth years and just
asked them the simple question, have you heard about abortion?
And they all said that they hadn't.
When I got into medical school in my second year in 1993, Dr. Gunn was shot in Florida
and a deep, deep sadness just went through my heart.
And I think people throughout the nation were absolutely shocked and I felt that deep sadness.
At that point I decided that I'd like to learn to do the procedure.
The chief of the department found out that I was doing this and called me into his office.
It was a late afternoon and I was in the middle of assisting a twin delivery.
It was incredibly excited and we were waiting for the second twin and I was called down
to his office.
I walked in and he had me sit down and immediately he started screaming at me.
He told me that he was very much against abortion and this is a quote he said, who do you think
you are as a third year medical student deciding what your education should be?
I felt like saying back to him, who do you think you are to let your religious views
and your personal views interfere with my education?
A cartoon book of crude jokes about abortion doctors was mailed anonymously to more than
3,000 medical students across the country.
Refusing to be intimidated, a group of them formed Medical Students for Choice, an organization
committed to increasing the availability of abortion training.
We were going around the country to all these different meetings of other organizations
where we knew students would be.
At one place we had to use ironing boards.
I had to haul my ironing board to the hotel and set up with table class over it to have
a space.
We just had to put a few things down, put our petitions, sign up sheets.
All the other booths were kind of like not much was going on but students were swarming
around our booth, around our ironing boards.
Grassroots efforts are succeeding and have led to more than 100 chapters nationwide.
As medical students we demand this training.
We absolutely think that it would be irresponsible medicine to not include abortion training
in obstetrics and gynecology programs.
After meeting the challenge of getting their medical training, these young doctors join
the ranks of those who face hardships every day.
In Mississippi, one of the few in-state providers is battling a barrage of legislation aimed
at forcing him to quit his practice.
He continues, however, because of what he saw when abortion was illegal.
I was in medical school before Roe vs. Wade.
I saw women come through the emergency room who had had back alley abortions, botched
abortions with gas gangrene, perforation of the uterus, sepsis.
And once you see one picture like that it remains in your mind forever.
And I promised myself if I could ever get the opportunity to change that and make abortion
safer than I would.
Mississippi recently passed a law requiring physicians to tell their patients about a
highly disputed study that links abortion with breast cancer.
This doctor would rather risk arrest than obey a law based on inconclusive evidence.
I'm not giving my patients misinformation and if everyone gets that kind of conviction
and we get people to wake up and see what's going on and how government is intruding into
women's lives and doctors' lives, maybe something can be done in this country.
In Montana, this physician's assistant was confronted with a new law which would take
away her right to provide abortions.
For almost two decades, she's been working with the same doctor, serving people of all
ages in their family practice.
This last legislative session in Montana, there was a bill brought to the legislature
that basically prevented physician assistants from doing abortions.
And I am a physician assistant and the only one in Montana who does abortions.
This legislation was brought to government by the Right to Life Organization and passed
so as of October 1st, I can no longer perform the abortions that I've been doing for 18
years.
Okay, so what we need to do is set you up for a time.
Your mom came with you today.
She's welcome to come back with you and be here with you throughout the procedure.
Okay, and you'll be in here also with the doctor?
Right, I'll be here to help.
No chance of you doing it with him.
I'm not allowed to do it right now, but I won't leave you.
Prior to the law passing, their office was set on fire.
Despite these setbacks, she's not lost courage.
Represented by the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, she's appealing her case to
the federal courts.
After the firebombing in our office, our whole office and my family went through a lot of
struggle about whether I should continue to do that.
And for me, it was a combination of making my own decisions about my life and also having
to make them because I am not alone.
I have a family who I have to be sensitive to, their emotions and their feelings are
very important to me.
My child, I also did not want him to live in fear.
I don't want him to become paranoid.
He's a very happy person, but yet I wanted him to understand that there are people in
our lives that can harm us and we need to be sensitive to that.
And my husband worried a lot, did not want me to continue and we had to talk and he came
around interestingly enough to the same thing that I came around, which is that if you don't
live by what you believe, what are you living for?
The domestic terrorism that has plagued the nation comes as a particular shock when it
occurs in a small town where people know each other.
After the fire gutted their office, the doctor spoke out in support of the principles which
he felt had been violated.
It's a disrespect for society, for laws, for religious freedom, democracy, the things that
we stand for in our country.
The members of this community rose above their differences to take a stand against the violence.
People on all sides of the issue of abortion telephoned our daughter and said, you know,
isn't there something we can do?
I mean, this is our community too.
There must be something.
And after, I don't know how many such telephone calls, our daughter organized a meeting and
called ourselves the Flathead Safe Place Project.
Our first major event was a rally.
Speakers from the Medical Society, our mayor, police chief, fire chief, school teachers,
school superintendent, plain people such as we are spoke saying that in our community
there are certain values which we hold.
They are the glue for us as a community.
We may have different styles of religious practice or no religious practice at all.
We may hold different beliefs very strongly about any number of issues and we may differ
in our minds almost vehemently.
But no matter that, as a community we will have discourse in a civil manner and that
as the Flathead Safe Place Project mission statement says, a crime against one of us
is a crime against us all.
The first step toward healing is understanding.
Few people understand the full impact of anti-abortion activities, harassment that targets providers
and their families, aggressive picketing that hinders access to safe abortions, funding
restrictions that burden people with low incomes, religious leaders who punish individuals with
dissident views, laws that limit the rights of trained providers, violence that threatens
and endangers doctors and clinic workers.
With understanding come the seeds of compassion.
All providers are on the battle lines, on the front lines.
I've worked with most of the doctors who've been killed.
I knew them personally.
When those horrible things happen and we are feeling so isolated and so alone and so vulnerable
and I lock the door and walk out at night and think maybe I just won't go back tomorrow.
It's just not worth it.
Maybe I just won't go back.
And then I drive home and it never fails.
The face of my friend who died from a self-induced abortion comes to me and it won't go away.
And I know if I don't come back the next day there will be another one.
We still have it going on.
Even as hard as we try it's still going on.
The picketers fail to realize that the number of abortions is not going to change.
These women will either travel to other clinics as fewer and fewer clinics become available.
Then it's going to go back to the back alley days.
I mean they all seem to have forgotten about what this whole issue is about.
This is about keeping women from dying again.