Clinic Shootings as a Call to Activism

Recorded:
Apr 2023
Speaker
Susan Yanow
Duration
00:01:35
AUDIO CLIP
TRANSCRIPT

Susan Yanow: I came from a family of activists. I was involved in high school in anti-Vietnam War organizing. After I went to social work school — I’m a social worker — became involved in reproductive rights organizing. Was part of a group here that — we didn’t have the language of reproductive justice, but it was a multi-issue reproductive rights group. And then in the late ’80s, early ’90s, Operation Rescue [an American anti-abortion organization] came to Boston. And it was very violent. They were blockading the clinics, it was a mess. We were out there every Saturday morning by 5:30 AM to try to get to the doors before they did so that we could let staff in. And it was quite a mess. And our organization started a project called the Abortion Access Project. And we were all volunteers, we all had other jobs. And I said, “Oh I’ll run that. That sounds interesting, we’ll get more hospitals in Massachusetts to do abortions. And we’ll get more people — midwives, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners — to be able to do abortions the way they can in Vermont and New Hampshire.” And we had some other parts of the project, and it was all fine. But I had a full-time job, as did everybody else. And then, in 1994, the clinic shootings happened here. And one of the people who was murdered was somebody I was mentoring to go to social work school. And I decided I needed to do more. So started putting more time into the Abortion Access Project. It got bigger and bigger, so I essentially had 2 full-time jobs for quite a while. And then, in 2000, I closed my social work practice and started doing that full-time. We had staff in 17 states — it got really big.

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