Abortion Rights Group Forced to Move Meeting

A South Bay group targeting not only abortion rights advocates but those who rent them meeting rooms picketed a local chapter of Planned Parenthood at a public park Tuesday night after preventing them from meeting at two private Redondo Beach conference rooms.

The group--a gathering of about 75 local church members and supporters of Operation Rescue--chanted “Hail Mary” and waved anti-abortion placards outside the recreation room at Alta Loma Park in Torrance, where they caught up with the South Bay Friends of Planned Parenthood after forcing the group to twice switch the site of its regular meeting.

Pat Collins, co-chair of the Planned Parenthood group, said the demonstrators had seen an ad for the meeting in a local weekly newspaper last week and had inundated the switchboard of the Palos Verdes Inn in Redondo Beach, where the group meets regularly.

“I just asked if they were aware that their business was named in an advertisement for a group that . . . in essence promotes child-killing,” said J. T. Finn of Redondo Beach, a member of Operation Rescue and a parishioner at a local Roman Catholic church that published word of the meeting in the church bulletin.

“The phone lines were jammed for three days,” Collins said. “The staff was threatenend, and the callers said they’d put (the owner) out of business.”

So Collins found a new spot for the group to meet, a conference room in a nearby bank. But within an hour and a half of offering the room, the bank management reneged, Collins said.

Neither the management of the Palos Verdes Inn nor that of the bank, Home Federal in Redondo Beach, was available for comment Tuesday night.

The incident marked the second time in two months that opponents of abortion have forced abortion rights advocates out of South Bay meeting places. Last month, the Palos Verdes-South Bay chapter of the National Organization for Women was told by a Torrance savings and loan that it could no longer use the meeting room because of NOW’s “political” activities.