Hollywood Women’s Clinic Carries On Despite Blaze

The morning after their Hollywood clinic was heavily damaged by fire, operators of the Feminist Women’s Health Center set up shop Tuesday in borrowed quarters on Hollywood Boulevard and vowed that their work, which includes about 18 abortions a week, would not be deterred.

“We have been here since 1973,” said Edith Berg, clinic director, “and we are going to be here for another 15 years . . . . There is no way that a woman’s right to control over her reproduction can be burned down. We are still here.”

Investigators, meanwhile, were not certain that arson was the cause of the $900,000 blaze Monday night. They traced its origin to a room off the kitchen in a restaurant, which is located on the ground floor beneath the second-story clinic at 6411 Hollywood Blvd.

“We have nothing to say now that, No. 1, it was an arson fire, or that, No. 2, the arson was directed at the abortion clinic,” Robert Skopeck, special agent in charge of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said Tuesday.

Witnesses said the fire broke out shortly before 8 p.m. The owner of the ground-floor restaurant, the New Corinas, said his daughter had spotted it first, and it seemed to have begun in the clinic. The restaurant had been closed for two hours when the fire broke out.

The fire extensively damaged the New Corinas. Investigators theorized that the flames began in the restaurant and then moved to the second story, essentially dropping the floor of the clinic onto the restaurant. A T-shirt shop and a health food store neighboring the restaurant incurred lesser damages.

Federal investigators joined with Los Angeles Fire Department personnel in the search to determine the cause of the fire, in part out of suspicion that the fire might have been one of a series of attacks against abortion clinics across the country. In the last three years, about 30 of the clinics--none in Los Angeles--have been targets of arson and bombings, the work of more radical elements of the anti-abortion movement.

Operated with both state and private funds, the clinic provided a range of services to an estimated 100 patients a week.

At a news conference, Berg said the clinic had installed guards around the clock after receiving threats in January. The threats, however, had ceased, and no guards were on duty when the fire broke out.

Portrait of Sanger

It was possible Tuesday to look up from the sidewalk through the clinic’s broken windows and see hanging on a wall a portrait of a stern-looking Margaret Sanger, who in the early 1900s founded the birth control movement in the United States.

“Yes, that’s Margaret Sanger,” Berg said. “She’s still hanging. She made it.”

Berg said women were being screened beside a van parked in front of the clinic. Telephone calls were being taken at a pay telephone in offices of a small studio down the street. Certain procedures basic to pregnancy tests were administered in other loaned quarters.

Other cases, including abortions, were being referred to other clinics, Berg said.

Behind the building, a clinic worker sifted among stacks of patient histories in blue paper binders. Most of the records were blackened or soaked.