Mississippi's Last Clinic Still Standing, Barely

After years of violently blockading abortion clinics, terrorizing women and doctors, and agitating for biblical rule, there is a smug sense of triumphalism coming from the pro-life organization Operation Save America/Operation Rescue.

From July 15 to 20, OSA/OR has been staging an extended protest in Jackson, Miss., aimed at closing the state's last abortion clinic -- a move the group hopes will "send a message" to abortion providers and lawmakers throughout the country.

(Check out a video in which the group's president, Flip Benham, talks with unabashed glee about shuttering the "abortion mill.")

Operation Rescue, you may remember, was the organization responsible for the infamous "No Place to Hide" campaign during the 1990s that distributed the home addresses and travel routines of abortion providers in the period before the first killing of an abortion doctor. (Background here and here)

Rather than being permanently discredited by those actions, the organization has survived, and even prospered. Indeed, with George W. Bush in the White House, OSA/OR and its ideological kin have cause to be optimistic about their prospects. After all, one of Bush's first presidential pen strokes prohibited U.S.-funded international organizations from mentioning abortion to the people they served. Since then there has been a torrent of nearly 2,000 restrictions and challenges to abortion introduced by legislatures nationwide, most notably the statewide abortion bans in South Dakota and Louisiana. During the same period, individuals in two states have been sent to prison for their involvement with self-induced abortions. (More info here and here)

On the other hand, polls indicate that most of the U.S. population still believes women should have the right to abortion. And if pro-choice people respond decisively, this week's protests in Mississippi (and counter-protests, which I will be joining) could serve as a rallying point for millions to not only push back against this assault on abortion but to unleash a movement against the whole Bush program of repression, empire and theocracy -- a movement capable of driving out the regime.

But any effective response hinges on abandoning the paralyzing and demobilizing search -- led by the Democratic Party and far too many pro-choice "leaders" -- for a mythical "reasonable center position" or "common ground" with the anti-abortion movement.

No matter how many people have been duped into joining the anti-abortion movement on the basis of "saving babies," as Bob Avakian has pointed out in his book "Preaching From a Pulpit of Bones," "The essence of the anti-abortion 'movement' has been to assert patriarchal control over women, including to insist on the defining role of women as breeders of children. The fundamentalist foot-soldiers of this 'movement' make this very clear. The following prayer offered at an Operation Rescue rally, cited in Life magazine (July 1992), typifies this: "Oh please, Lord, break the curse on women's hearts that says we don't need our men. Break that independence.'"

Besides, a fetus is not a baby. With its assault on basic science, including evolution, and its intentionally misleading and grotesque signs, the fundamentalist movement has misled many into imagining that aborted fetuses are cute little babies just waiting to be cuddled. In fact, 90 percent of abortions take place when the fetus is no longer than this string of o's: oooooooooooooo. Since there is no way these fetuses could become fully formed, independent human beings except as a subordinate part of a woman's overall biological processes for nine months, declaring that they all should be preserved means reducing women to incubators and slaves to their biology.

In some ways, OSA/OR does us a favor by being more open about its views than its brethren in the White House, Congress and, increasingly, the judiciary under the Bush regime. One of Operation Save America's T-shirts reads: "Homosexuality is a sin. Islam is a lie. Abortion is murder."