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Antiabortion Militants Open Training Facility in Memphis, Aim to Restart Large-Scale Clinic Blockades
Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, is trying to make a comeback by teaming up with antiabortion extremist group PAAU (the so-called “Progressive” Anti-Abortion Uprising group associated with dozens of clinic and pharmacy invasions), to kick off “Rescue Resurrection.” Their stated goal is to revive large-scale clinic blockades with a formal kick-off training and series of events starting Dec. 3 in Memphis, Tenn.
Terry was one of the leaders of mass clinic blockades that took antiabortion extremism to a new level in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Operation Rescue’s (OR’s) orchestrated blockades in Atlanta, Memphis and Wichita drew massive media coverage. During the sieges, accessing a targeted abortion clinic meant getting through a gauntlet of bodies blocking clinic doors and driveways. Antiabortion activists traveled state to state in order to participate, blockading clinics, going limp when arrested (to represent the “unborn”) and requiring three to four police officers to remove each protester arrested and carry them to waiting police buses.
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Twenty Thousand Stillbirths a Year, and No Federal Plan to Prevent Them
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We Can No Longer Tinker With the Machinery of Death: New ACLU Report Exposes Fatal Flaws in Capital Punishment
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Are We Ever Off Work, or Just Out of Office? The OOO Messages Exposing America’s Care Crisis
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‘Liberation’ Playwright Bess Wohl on Theater as Resistance: ‘Theater Is Dialogue. Autocracy Is a Monologue.’
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On Surviving Epstein—Part I (with Jess Michaels)
Over the past several months, the Epstein files have been extensively covered by the media. But too often, the voices of actual survivors are missing. In this episode, we’re filling that gap and shifting the focus to where it belongs: to the survivors and what justice means to them. Dr. Michele Goodwin is joined by Jessica Michaels, a sexual assault awareness advocate and Epstein survivor. Dr. Goodwin speaks with Jess about her experience as a survivor of sexual assault, her work as an advocate, and what she wants the public to know about sexual violence as news about Epstein and his connections to powerful men and women continues to come to light.
Content warning: this episode contains discussions of sexual assault.
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Murder, Pardons and Impunity: How Antiabortion Violence Escalated Under Trump [Part 1 of 4]
Her friend Melissa Hortman, a longtime Minnesota lawmaker, was murdered at home in June—shot by a man posing as a police officer who had also wounded two others and left behind a hit list of dozens of abortion-rights supporters. Among the names was Ruth Richardson, CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States. “It was one thing to get a threat; it’s another to have confirmed threats where you have a friend and colleague who is assassinated,” she told Ms.
This tragedy unfolded against a backdrop of federal retreat: Trump pardoned extremists convicted of clinic blockades and violence, and his Justice Department declared it would largely stop enforcing the FACE Act, the law meant to protect providers. Advocates warn these decisions have emboldened extremists, leaving abortion providers more vulnerable than at any time in decades.
Scott Olson / Getty Images
The Resistance Is Everywhere
These past 10 months have been tough. Every day a fresh outrage, more trampling of the Constitution and a new attack on common decency. Taking a page from Hollywood, Trump and his administration seem to have embraced a strategy of “everything, everywhere all at once.”
But, unfortunately for them: The resistance has also been everywhere all at once, too.
There is no doubt that when historians look back on this sordid moment in history, they will conclude that it was women, and feminists, who led the way out of it.
