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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?"
Every morning when June Ayers arrives for work, she scans the parking lot for suspicious people and packages before getting out of her car. Ayers owns Reproductive Health Services, one of seven clinics that provide abortions in Alabama. She's been followed home, trailed at the mall and harassed on her front porch.
Ayers was close friends with David Gunn, a doctor who performed abortions at clinics throughout Alabama and Florida. Anti-abortion protesters plastered Gunn's face and home phone number to "Wanted" posters and distributed them at rallies. He answered their harassment by blasting Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down", singing along, and wagging his finger in their direction. In March 1993, Gunn died when a protester shot him three times in the back outside of his clinic in Pensacola, Fla. The doctor on Ayers' staff now wears a bulletproof vest.
Ayers recently invested in a sprinkler system to keep the protesters at bay. She has also installed concrete stepping-stones across the lawn so patients and escorts can avoid the protesters crowding the sidewalk. She bought orange vests for the escorts, so startled patients can distinguish between protesters and volunteers.
"At least once a month, I have women who call me and ask whether abortion is legal. That type of misinformation is rampant," says Ayers. "We're in the middle of the Bible Belt. It's not just religion, it's the fanatical religious aspect that keeps stirring people up who are opposed to us."
It's a place where the Christian Coalition holds sway over politicians, and many people vote the way they're told in church. The legislative climate is "very hostile" toward abortion, says Felicia Brown Williams, who oversees Planned Parenthood's advocacy agenda in Mississippi, one of two states with only one abortion clinic.
Mississippi has passed so many laws governing what abortion clinics can and cannot do that it is virtually impossible to open a second clinic without breaking state law. Mississippi requires permission from both parents for women under 18, except in cases of incest. The state's conscience clause allows pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control. And earlier this year the Mississippi legislature passed a "trigger law," immediately making abortion illegal should Roe v. Wade be overturned.
From 'pro choice' to 'reproductive justice'
In the early-1990s, researcher Loretta Ross noticed the anti-abortion movement was borrowing tactics from the Ku Klux Klan -- things like "Wanted" posters and targeted bombings. Ross now directs SisterSong, a national reproductive health collective in Atlanta. She travels the country, encouraging groups like Planned Parenthood to adopt a philosophy that SisterSong terms "reproductive justice."
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