Omaha August 28/29: Protect Dr. Carhart & Stand Up for Abortion Rights!

Wichita KS’ religious right and fringe anti-abortion groups are trying to bully a Nebraska abortion provider who wants to start a practice in Wichita. They use the same tactics that the right has been using to try and stop health care. They create mobs that claim to represent the majority of opinion when the majority of us know they are clearly a fringe element of the right. They believe they can use the legal system and stall tactics they used on Tiller to try and stop him.
Now there is an effort to try and counter their bullying. Many local Wichita groups will be involved. There will also be pro-choice activist from other parts of the country going to Omaha, Nebraska August 28/29.

From:
The World Can’t Wait:

19 August 2009
Dr. George Tiller’s Wichita clinic, which cared for tens of thousands of women over thirty-six years, was closed a week after he was assassinated on May 31, shot in the head at close range. One of his colleagues, Dr. Leroy Carhart, an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, immediately stepped forward to say that he will care for Dr. Tiller’s patients and continue the provision of late-abortion services, to fill the great need left by Tiller’s absence. He worked at Dr. Tiller’s clinic, and maintains his own clinic in Bellevue, Nebraska. In 1991, his home and barn were burned to the ground in an arson claimed by anti-abortion activists. This spurred Dr. Carhart to devote more of his practice to providing abortions, and to challenge federal laws restricting abortion access….

The Wichita section of Operation Rescue, the group dedicated to ending women’s right to abortion and birth control, employs people like Cheryl Sullenger, their “senior policy advisor,” who served two years in prison for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic in California. After moving to Wichita in order to make Dr. Tiller target number one for the national anti-abortion movement, they celebrated when their years of harassment, threats and violent attacks culminated in Tiller’s assassination………

. The question at hand is whether Dr. Leroy Carhart will be standing alone to face the angry, mobilized forces of patriarchy at the end of the month or whether enough us us will stand with him.........

Come to Nebraska!

What more do you need to know? Join us in Nebraska on August 28th and 29. Help to draw the line and defend Dr. Carhart and women’s lives.

As Sunsara Taylor wrote after Dr. Tiller was shot, “Either this killing will succeed in creating a climate where abortion providers cannot do their work and no one else joins them in that work, or it will be answered by growing numbers of people waking up, coming off the sidelines, defending our doctors and our clinics, and reversing the whole dynamic that has led to this situation where not only abortion, but birth control too, is imperiled.”

Lina Thorne is an activist with World Can’t Wait, and one of 45 million women in the U.S. who has had an abortion. She traveled to Dr. Tiller’s Wichita clinic in 2001 to defend him from a major anti-abortion mobilization, and once again to Wichita this past June for his funeral. This year she and a fellow abortion-rights activist won first place at Chicago’s Bughouse Square soapbox debates in making the case that access to abortion saves womens’ lives.