Clinic in Charlotte Faces Continued Threats of Violence

Editor’s Note:

The following report was filed by a World Can’t Wait activist from North Carolina, where a local man was arrested last week for his plans to bomb an abortion clinc. See the article from the Charlotte Observer for background info.

Charlotte NC, 9/11/2010

By Scott Trent

There’s the article I was going to write, and then there’s this one.
 
I was going to write about driving to Charlotte to join in the defense of a beloved abortion clinic there, and about how naïve I was.

I thought that since the FBI arrested Justin Carl Moose in Concord, NC, on charges of conspiring to blow up a clinic in North Carolina, that the Operation Save America (OSA) creeps would lay low today. Moose is a self-confessed “Army of God” member who openly called for the murder of abortion providers on his facebook page, and who is rumored to have participated in the OSA siege of Family Reproductive Health clinics this summer in Charlotte.
 
I thought they’d figure that with Moose being busted, that the heat would be on them to leave that clinic and it clients the hell alone, at least for a day.
 
Boy was I naïve.
 
Then I was going to write how naïve I was about what it means for “the heat” to be on in Charlotte. How I found out that Charlotte cops apparently could give half a shit about enforcing the FACE Act that prevents anti-abortion protesters from blocking clinic entrances. How the fanatical, aggressive OSA climbed and destroyed trees, dressed up in reflective vests and pretended to be clinic escorts, shouted in the faces of the real clinic escorts, while the cops just sat in their cars and watched.
 
I thought in the wake of a bombing attempt that the cops would be more on their toes against people who are known associates of previous clinic bombers, who post up “Wanted” posters with abortion doctors’ names, and some of whom have long histories of violence against women. I was going to write about how naïve I was to think that.
 
But something else happened at another clinic in NC this morning, and now I’m not sure what to write about.
 
A little after 7am, as my fellow World Can’t Wait activist and I were on our way to Charlotte to participate in the defense of Family Reproductive Health, a staff person at the Planned Parenthood Clinic in Winston-Salem noticed a blue storage bin outside the clinic. I assume they quickly thought of Justin Moose, and the presence of an organized anti-abortion terrorist movement in NC. Anyway, they called the cops.
 
But it wasn’t a bomb. It was a dead infant girl.
 
How do you write about something like that? How do you even understand it? There’s too much mystery there, happening when it did, and far too much sadness.
 
But I have to try, for a lot of reasons.
 
I think about the mother who’s out there somewhere right now. The only thing we know about her is that she had to have been desperate. But we do know about the conditions that make women become desperate, even if we don’t always act to change those conditions. I know that it has everything to do with a system that pays some cops to evict single mothers and their children from their homes, and others to sit and watch anti-woman creeps block a clinic driveway, scream in the faces of clinic patients that they are terrorists for “murdering their baby on September 11th,” thereby violating any number of federal laws, and doing nothing to stop them.
 
Then I think of what these unhinged OSA militants are saying right now. If they flipped out this morning about the poster I made that read, “ABORTION PROVIDERS ARE HEROES”, they must be absolutely apoplectic at the news that a dead infant girl—a true innocent, of the type they simultaneously exalt and defile with their violent rhetoric—was found today. Outside an abortion clinic. What must that mean to them? I can imagine what they are saying; the conclusions they’re drawing, the actions they may be justifying. It’s scary.
 
I think about who needed to be there for that mother; how the last thing she would have needed was some Bible-thumping rant from someone who wants her and all women to be back “in their place”. I think about the fact that when Operation Save America and groups like them are treated with such deference by the cops, the Democratic Party politicians, and the mainstream abortion rights movement, that she was more likely to hear that insidious nonsense than the fact that she had a choice to have an abortion instead, to have a life.
 
I’m worried about what the OSA creeps will do. I’m worried about the people who do care about the rights of women being too disoriented, too small in number, and too demobilized to turn things around before they do it. But I’m going to figure out—we have to figure out—how to write about it, agitate about and expose it, and organize people to turn it completely around.

Also see the previous reports on the situation at this clinic: Abortion Providers are Heroes: Opposing “Operation Fascist Theocracy” in Charlotte, NC and Report from Threatened Abortion Clinic in Charlotte.