Anti-Abortion Group Vows to Halt Planned Parenthood’s Clinic : Protest: Operation Rescue maps strategy to fight family planning clinic in Torrance. Planned Parenthood officials say it will open in six to eight months.

Anti-abortion activists and their opponents are gearing up for a confrontation in the South Bay on the heels of Planned Parenthood’s announcement last week that it will create a family planning clinic in Torrance to serve low-income residents.

Members of Operation Rescue’s local chapter vowed at a regularly scheduled meeting Friday night to fight the facility’s opening and to prevent abortions from occurring there if it does open.

The proposed clinic will offer birth control, prenatal care and cancer screening as well as first- and second-trimester abortions.

“What we are here for is literally a matter of life and death,” said the Rev. Rich Buhler, a radio personality on a Costa Mesa-based Christian station. “South Bay is about to be invaded and I have a question for the residents of South Bay: Are you going to allow yourself to be invaded?”

There were scattered cries of “No!” from the audience of more than 250 people gathered at the Peninsula Baptist Church in Rancho Palos Verdes. At the meeting, a choir sang hymns and several speakers urged audience members to continue their fight against abortion.

Monika Moreno, a spokeswoman for the local Operation Rescue group, said anti-abortion forces began planning strategy soon after hearing of the proposed Torrance facility. A petition drive was begun at Friday’s meeting and Moreno urged Operation Rescue members to lobby Torrance elected officials in the coming weeks to prevent the facility from opening. She declined to reveal other strategies.

Planned Parenthood officials said they are aware that anti-abortion protesters have been extremely active in the South Bay. Anticipating demonstrations at the proposed Torrance facility, the officials said they will lease or buy a secure facility that has multiple entrances and exits. That will make it more difficult for protesters to close the facility by chaining themselves to the entrance doors, a strategy Operation Rescue has used at other clinics, officials said.

“We hope that they will be somewhat reasonable,” said Ann Fair Branagan, president of the board of Planned Parenthood’s Los Angeles chapter and a member of the organization’s South Bay support group. “We certainly can’t plan our lives based on the views of the least reasonable among us.”

Abortion foes launched a phone and letter-writing campaign against the Torrance office of Mercury Savings & Loan in April when they discovered that the local chapter of the National Organization for Women was meeting there to discuss ways to counter Operation Rescue.

After the activists picketed, the S&L;’s officials refused to renew NOW’s contract for the meeting room.

The same tactic was used the following month against the Palos Verdes Inn and HomeFederal Bank when members of the South Bay Friends of Planned Parenthood scheduled meetings at the two Redondo Beach businesses. The Planned Parenthood group finally moved to the recreation room at Alta Loma Park in Torrance, where protesters chanted “Hail Mary” and waved placards outside.

In October, thousands of abortion foes gathered in Redondo Beach to form a 26-mile-long “life chain” to show solidarity against abortion.

Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Marie Paris said past experience with the anti-abortion protesters makes it clear that selecting the building for the new clinic will be subject to political pressures.

She would not cite possible locations, saying only that the new facility will be in the center of Torrance away from existing health care facilities and close to public transportation. The clinic will open in about six to eight months, she said.

The proposed Torrance clinic, announced Wednesday, will be Planned Parenthood’s 11th in Los Angeles County and the first to open in seven years. The group began operating a mobile non-surgical clinic housed in a recreational vehicle in December.

Officials said the South Bay was chosen because of the large pockets of low-income residents who are not currently offered women’s health and family planning services.

Planned Parenthood research found that one in four families in the South Bay area earns less than $15,000 a year and that many are going without health care.

“There is so much need all over L.A. County that it is incredible,” particularly in the South Bay, said Fair Branagan.

Shirley Smith, director of the Harbor-UCLA Women’s Health Care Clinic, said she welcomes the Planned Parenthood facility as another service for the “significant number of women in the South Bay who have no access to family planning.”

Paris said the proposed clinic will offer many services besides abortions, which made up less than 10% of the 350,000 annual visits to Planned Parenthood clinics in Los Angeles County last year.

But those numbers were not comforting to Moreno, the Operation Rescue spokeswoman.

“We do not want this very negative element in our community,” said Moreno, a Redondo Beach resident. “They say they are trying to help thousands of poor residents. Actually they want to exploit these poor minority women by telling them that their offspring are better off dead.”

The proposed clinic will be funded by a $750,000 grant from the Mark Taper Foundation. About $250,000 of the grant will go to open the Torrance clinic. Planned Parenthood will seek matching donations for the balance.