Abortion Protest Leader Arrested In Birmingham

Continuing coverage of the weeklong siege of Birmingham by anti-choice protestors, I just got off the phone with Nancy Kohsin-Kintigh, field director for Feminist Majority’s National Access Project. I got a tip that there had been some arrests of anti-abortion protestors this morning.

Nancy was inside the New Woman, All Women clinic when we spoke, having worked all week with the clinic staff as they dealt with the protestors. She confirmed that Flip Benham, director of Operation Save America (formerly known as Operation Rescue), was arrested between 9:30 and 10 a.m. this morning. She hasn't yet learned, she told me, exactly why he was arrested, or whether Benham's arrest involved a 12-year-old injunction governing activities outside the clinic.

Since 1995, even before the clinic was bombed by Eric Robert Rudolph, Nancy explained, a federal injunction specific to the New Woman location has been in effect requiring protestors to stay behind a 25-foot buffer around the clinic. The injunction also includes a provision against noise reaching certain levels, she asserted. Nancy said she and the clinic staff have been encouraging the Birmingham police to enforce the noise violations of the federal injunction and today they seemed to have done so.

Benham and his group had previously been warned by the police that they were too loud. Yet today the anti-choice protest organizer had turned up his sound amplifier—even louder than it had been before, she related—so that that his "preaching" was could be heard inside the clinic.

After Benham's arrest, Nancy said, all the protestors from his group left to join him at the courthouse.

“For the moment, it’s very quiet here,” she told me. She said that she and the other 50-some pro-choice supporters were waiting to see if Benham and his OSA supporters were going to return. As of 2:30 p.m. they still hadn't returned.

I’ll post news reports and updates as I get them.

---Rachel Joy Larris

First-Hand Account Of Clinic Protest in Tuscaloosa

As part of Operation Save America’s siege of Birmingham, as I reported yesterday, the group moved their camp to a Tuscaloosa clinic, West Alabama Women’s Center. The group was crowing about the arrest of the Center's director Gloria Gray on their Web site, and since news accounts about Tuesday’s protest in Tuscaloosa didn’t really explain why it was the director who got arrested, I called the Center myself in order to figure out what happened.

I spoke to the Center's registered nurse, Lorrie Foss-McGaha. She said that Tuscaloosa police had told the clinic staff earlier that the anti-abortion group had applied for a permit to demonstrate, but that the permit was for Wednesday, July 18.

“We were excited about that because we’re closed on Wednesdays,” Lorrie explained. But, she said, the Center started getting a bunch of calls from women needing appointments that, according to the callers, could only be on Wednesday. “That’s how the protestors found out we were closed on Wednesdays,” she said.

The clinic opens at 8 a.m. and by 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 17, Lorrie said, the protestors showed up and "swarmed" all over the property, including the parking lot, which is on private property. Clinic staff, Lorrie asserted, have dozens of pictures of the antichoice protestors on the private property, as close as 12 feet from the front door, despite news coverage saying they were only standing on the “right of way.” (A "right of way" is generally treated as public property by a court of law.)

Protestors, said Lorrie, actually came inside the clinic, as well.

"Two young females [protestors] came inside looking like patients," Lorrie asserted. "And one of receptionists notified us that they walked in. They just asked for a price list and sat down, but they also handed out pamphlets to a patient and they gave one to me. Myself and a policeman escorted them out."

Lorrie described the protestors as having taken over most of the parking lot so that the patients of other health care facilities same complex—a dentist's and an ophthalmologist’s office—couldn’t park, and couldn't avoid looking at the group’s gruesome photos, which they typically carry on oversized signs.

By the time the police arrived, "my director [Gloria Gray] had given them the warning that they were trespassing," Lorrie said. She continued: "We called the police when they first arrived and at first a policewoman arrived. She was very nice, but [the protestors] completely ignored her."

Shortly thereafter, according to Lorrie, more police came but, she said, they were mostly focused on keeping the peace. She said the police didn't seem concerned with the fact the protestors were on private property and lacked a permit.

David Lackey, an Operation Save America official and an organizer of the Tuscaloosa protest, was talking to the officers, Lorrie related, when Gloria Gray, executive director of the clinic, walked over to the where the police and Lackey were talking to explain the situation. That's when Gloria Gray, according to Lorrie, called Lackey a “liar.”

"And then the one cop said to her 'Ma’am, I’m telling you to back off or I’m going to arrest you,'" Lorrie said. Gray then replied, according to Lorrie, "That’s bullshit." At that point, Lorrie explained, the police officer arrested Gray, charging her with disorderly conduct.

Despite the fact that Gray was physically compromised by a medical test she was undergoing (she had a tube inserted into her nose) the officer handcuffed her. Clinic staffers stood nearby, Lorrie said, holding cups of water for Gray to drink because she was getting dry-mouth from the tube.

After being taken to the police department and booked, Gray was released on a signature bond. Lorrie said when she and Gray returned from the station, which was roughly 10:30 a.m., the protestors had moved off the private property. But she relates they also had printed up pamphlets featuring a picture of the doctor at the Center saying: "BEWARE of this [person]; he murders children in your neighborhood" and they had put them on every car in the lot.

The protestors left around noon, Lorrie said, even though the clinic was open until 5 p.m.

The Center normally enjoys good relations with the police department, Lorrie said. She confirmed what Tuscaloosa News reported that the West Alabama Women’s Center is looking into possible legal action against the protesters.

--Rachel Joy Larris

From Birmingham to Tuscaloosa

As my colleague, Rachel Joy Larris, mentioned below, Operation Rescue, a.k.a., Operation Save America (OSA), is reporting that a woman named Gloria (but referred to as "Jezebel" by the Operation Rescue blogger), who is described as the director of a woman's health clinic in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was arrested today when she confronted the anti-choice group's protestors as they convened outside the West Alabama Women's Center clinic. Now comes confirmation, via an Associated Press dispatch in the Tuscaloosa Times Daily, that a clinic worker (not described as the director), one Gloria Gray, was indeed arrested during the course of the protest:

Police Capt. Greg Kosloff said Gray was outside the clinic during a demonstration when an argument began. Gray disobeyed officers who told her to go back inside and was arrested, he said.

The question that remains to be answered is whether Gray's First Amendment right of free speech was abridged by the arrest. Gray, according to the AP, was released on $500 bond.

--Adele M. Stan

Dispatches From The Birmingham Protests

In light of Gloria Feldt’s excellent column detailing the ongoing Operation Rescue/Operation Save America weeklong protest in Birmingham, Alabama, I wanted to post some first-person blogger reportage of the scene. So far the local paper, The Birmingham News, only offers a few, very dry dispatches. Today’s headline “Abortion protest trouble-free.”

Various reproductive rights groups are in the area counter-protesting (or as I like to think of it, making sure the women in Alabama are allowed to figure out their own lives without judgmental, violent protestors harassing them every step of the way.) The National Abortion Federation has a staffer in the field, but that’s about all I could find so far for scene coverage. I’m happy to post links to any bloggers covering the protest.

This is from the Birmingham News.

Kim Adams, coordinator of the Alabama Reproductive Freedom Summer counter-protest and president of the Greater Birmingham National Organization for Women.

The clinics were open, with more than a dozen supporters standing guard, she said.

"There was no engagement between the two sides," Adams said. "We consider it a bust. They haven't had that many people out today."

I spoke to Larry Rodick, president/CEO of Planned Parenthood of Alabama. He told me the protestors have been divided between the local Planned Parenthood clinic and the New Woman All Women Health Care site, with latter getting most of them.

But so far his impression is that Operation Rescue didn’t get nearly the numbers of protestors reported by The Birmingham News. For example, Rodick says there were roughly 20 protestors outside the Planned Parenthood site, all of whom then left when it started raining.

But there’s also a breaking development today in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The group is reporting they managed to stir up some trouble for West Alabama's Women’s Center, which seems to have been ambushed by the group. I’ll post news coverage as it become available.

---Rachel Joy Larris