Clinic shootings were still an unfamiliar horror 25 years ago. On December 30, 1994, John Salvi terrorized two women’s health centers in Brookline, Massachusetts, killing two women--Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols--and injuring five. He went on to shoot up a Virginia clinic before being arrested.
Murderer John Salvi’s obvious obsessive, violent, and conspiratorial thinking was ignored or overlooked until he had killed with the twisted excuse of protecting “innocent lives”. Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols were vibrant, caring women who were truly “innocent lives”. Shannon Lowney was the receptionist at Planned Parenthood, and Leanne Nichols was the receptionist at Preterm Health Services.
Bernard Law was cardinal of Boston at the time of the shootings. He was a vocal forced-birther, starting with his first public statement that abortion was "the primordial evil of our time." He gave rhetorical aid and comfort to the angry sidewalk “counselors” spitting and yelling at people going in and out of the local clinics. Meanwhile, Cardinal Law was protecting predator priests and covering up their sexual abuse of children.
A poignant, infuriating contrast in true virtue vs. false piety: Lowney vs Law—who cared about lives? Who lived a virtuous life?
Shannon Lowney protected women’s lives and health by helping to provide reproductive healthcare. She cared passionately about rights for everyone, abhorred violence, was vocally anti-gun, and a vegetarian. Lowney also worked for Advocates for Children, a child abuse prevention council. She gave classroom talks to high school kids about sexual abuse, fighting what Cardinal Law was enabling.
PBS FRONTLINE made a documentary in 1996 on the Brookline shootings, Murder on Abortion Row. It’s worth watching here. Transcript here. The documentary includes footage of Shannon Lowney talking to a high school class about sexual abuse:
SHANNON LOWNEY: If you see the kinds of stuff that can happen to kids who are abused-- you feel alone. You feel like you don't have anybody to talk to, as we said. You're afraid you won't be believed.
MEGHAN LOWNEY: She was really having a sense of impact with the people that she was working with. At the same time, she was growing herself and saying, "I'm pretty good at this and I think I can find a place in this world for me to talk about the truth, to empower people to move themselves from situations of oppression and abuse" and, you know, whatever it was that was keeping them from really developing themselves.
SHANNON LOWNEY: You have a right to say no to any unwanted sexual touch,okay? What's important to remember, though, is that it's not your responsibility to say no. It is not your responsibility to tell someone. It is not your responsibility to get away or to say no, but these are your rights,okay? (this segment starts ~1 hr 6 min into documentary)
Clinics providing abortion had long been subjected to violence (arson, bombing, stalking, sabotage, assault). The intimidation and danger clinic workers faced did not register with the wider public, though, until the 1993 wounding of George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, the 1993 murder of Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida, and the 1994 murder (also in Pensacola) of Dr. John Britton and clinic escort James Barrett.
The killings of two doctors, two clinic staff members and a voluntary escort over the past 22 months have captured national attention. But the tally of violence over the past 12 years includes 123 cases of arson and 37 bombings in 33 states, and more than 1,500 cases of stalking, assault, sabotage and burglary, according to records compiled by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the clinics themselves. (WaPo, Jan. 1995)
The deaths of Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols occurred in a climate of impunity for forced-birther violence:
Abortion rights supporters say there have been 3,000 reports of violence, vandalism and harassment at clinics, including bombings and death threats. [...] Survey by Feminist Majority Foundation of 819 U.S.clinics that perform at least some abortions (at 441 clinics, abortions account for half or more of visits) indicates that more than half experienced some form of violence in the first seven months of 1994. (WaPo, Dec. 1994)
Yesterday, the Boston Globe’s Yvonne Abraham marked the anniversary with the words of six who remember:
This was 1994, before cellphones and easy Web searches and instant news, when families gathered, desperately waiting for word that took forever to come. Mass shootings were still rare enough in this country to bring us to a standstill. Violence at abortion clinics happened elsewhere, not in reasonable Brookline.
In the years since, the pathology, and the loss, has become sickeningly familiar: the lone terrorist, isolated, unhinged, and radicalized; the recollections of relatives and co-workers who knew enough to fear him; the easy access to weapons and ammunition designed for maximum carnage; the scores of lives ripped apart by unimaginable loss. (BostonGlobe)
Forced-birther violence is still with us. NARAL has a paper on the subject here. The problem is exacerbated by forced-birthers’ successful isolating intimidation which has segregated vital women’s reproductive healthcare from the larger healthcare system:
Three years after Roe, 70 percent of non-Catholic general hospitals and 80 percent of public hospitals did not perform abortions, according to a Planned Parenthood study at the time. Today, hospitals provide just 4 percent of the abortions in the U.S., according to the Guttmacher Institute, the non-profit organization’s research arm.
Doctors, too, were complicit in the marginalization of abortion services. In 2011, a study by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists found that 97 percent of those specialists had met with a patient seeking an abortion, but only 14 percent performed the procedure. (Eileen McNamara, WBUR)
I’m still waiting for women to be treated like human beings. (I apologize for this disordered, disjointed diary. I wanted to note this day in some way, however inadequate.)