California never lacks for culture wars of one sort or another.
It’s either Gov. Gavin Newsom threatening to sanction and heavily fine a school district for not embracing elementary school curriculum that mentions gay rights icon Harvey Milk.
Or it’s (Newsom again) closing California churches during the pandemic while allowing the film industry to stay open; an action that led to a Supreme Court decision against him.
Or it’s a clinic in Beverly Hills that was all set to allow third-trimester abortions until a group of activists —whose identity remains rather murky – prevented it from opening. The more I dug into this story, the more I realized this was a major take-down of an abortion clinic by protestors of faith.
First, the setting of it all, or part of the story, from the Los Angeles Times:
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade last summer, Beverly Hills officials protested by lighting up the plaza in front of City Hall in a glow of pink.
Council members had already voted 5 to 0 for a resolution backing abortion rights. “We have stood up and spoken out when we’ve seen human rights taken away,” then-Mayor Lili Bosse stated after the vote. “This is something I wholeheartedly support with all my soul.”
But little more than a year later, the affluent city has become a battleground over reproductive rights.
An abortion provider that planned to open a clinic in Beverly Hills offering procedures beyond 24 weeks of pregnancy is alleging that the city “colluded and conspired” with antiabortion activists to force out the clinic.
What I find a bit disingenuous about such pieces is they don’t say what “beyond 24 weeks of pregnancy” means. Twenty-four weeks is when a child could — a conditional “could,” but a solid chance — live outside the womb. And beyond that, the chances get better with each week.
(The Centers for Disease Control, in its 2020 figures, estimated about 1% of all abortions occurred after 21 weeks; that is still 6,203 babies; if you accept the higher Guttmacher figures for that year, that is 9,301 births that never happened.)
Because the unborn child is fairly good size at this point, he or she must be dismembered piece by piece to aborted. You won’t find a description of this in current articles on abortion access, but it’s the inconvenient truth, to paraphrase Al Gore. Or the child gets an injection of lidocaine into its heart.
Which is why local residents — not to mention the landlord — may have had a slight problem with this happening in their neighborhood. Back to the Times:
DuPont Clinic, a Washington, D.C.-based provider, said it has spent millions of dollars updating the medical facility on Wilshire Boulevard with the goal of expanding to the West Coast. Its letter to the city — a required precursor in California to a lawsuit — alleges that four city officials, including Mayor Julian Gold, acted to withhold permits to the facility after antiabortion protests.
It claims the city — where voters in 2020 chose Joe Biden by 17 percentage points over Donald Trump — pressured the landlord to back out of the lease; held “secret meetings” with members of the group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust and “promised them it would stop DuPont from opening.”
So what is this DuPont group?
Look to its adversaries, who are behind a stopdupontclinic.org site, who explain it’s a Washington, D.C.-based group that performs abortions up to the end of the seventh month, that is, 31 weeks and six days. At this point, you have a child weighing close to 4 pounds, as my daughter was when she was born at 32 weeks.
Dupont advertises itself as providing “all-trimester abortion care” and it describes third-trimester abortion as a three-day procedure for “evacuation of the uterus.”
I could go into the specifics of what the Dupont clinic could do –- if it offered abortions past 27 weeks (the start of the third trimester), it would be the first clinic in the state to do so –- but I am going to skip over the almost complete void in reporting on whom these opponents were and how they managed to persuade a city council to back off at the last minute.
Looking at their site, I see a letter from the Rabbinical Council of California, a group of Orthodox rabbis, opposing the clinic.
In April, protesters projected “MURDER MILL” on the side of the building on Wilshire. A week later, three spoke at a City Council meeting.
Tasha Barker, a Sacramento paralegal and harp instructor, called in to argue that the clinic was different from others in California because it performed abortions past fetal viability. “Right on their website, it says they’ll perform these abortions for no reason at all.”
“That’s their mission — to offer abortions in the third trimester at will — and most people, whether they be pro-life or pro-choice, agree that that is abhorrent,” Barker said, urging a pause in building permits. “I’m asking you to consider how extreme this clinic is.”
A few days later, DuPont found out the city had suddenly withheld permits for the clinic.
Barker, by the way, got her legal certification from Oak Brook College of Law and Government Policy, a Christian institution in Fresno. And according to the Survivors Facebook page, she was aided in her fight against the proposed clinic by Omid Shabani, a Jewish lawyer.
On July 18, a handful of protesters attended the City Council meeting.
“Unfortunately, DuPont has come into the city and it’s an all-trimester abortion clinic that has caused the dark cloud to creep in and sweep over the city,” Tim Clement, outreach director for Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, told the mayor and council members. “I would like to have a sit-down with you and talk about maybe celebrating rather than protesting.”
More than a week later, Clement said, he and his attorney met the mayor, deputy city manager, city attorney and a detective via Zoom.
“Everything is supposed to be hush — like, I can’t speak about it,” Clement told protesters at a July 29 public rally. “But we came to an agreement.”
Now that’s interesting. Who is this guy?
Well, he has a seminary degree from a Reformed institution and once helped a girlfriend get an abortion. If you want to watch Clement saying these exact words, click on the above video starting around the 34th minute. Also listen to the very Christian nature of the music sung after he spoke.
Reading further in a pro-life publication, there are some two dozen abortion clinics already in the Beverly Hills area; where this one stood out was in the lateness of the procedure. Reading the Beverly Press gives one more details about the matter, but little about the protestors themselves. Quoting an anonymous doctor, it said:
By appearing to influence Douglas Emmett’s reversal in a state and city that projects a pro-choice image, the anti-abortion activists have logged a big win, she added.
“It’s a feather in their cap showing they had power to shut down a clinic literally on the brink of opening,” the doctor said. “It really does dishearten me … the precedent this might set for other clinics that want to open up in liberal parts of the country.”
Again, who were these folks and didn’t any reporter have the shoe leather to interview a few of them? We are talking Journalism 101, at this point.
To maintain a steady stream of protestors outside the building for the proposed clinic took months of cooperation among anti-abortion groups — and who else? The above video shows there were a bunch of people apparently representing multiple churches — and maybe a few synagogues — involved. But I didn’t see any of that reflected in the coverage.
There’s been enough abortion protests in the past 50 years for reporters to know there’s a faith community in there somewhere. It never hurts to look for them.
FIRST IMAGE: From the Facebook page of Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust.