Clinic Offering Abortions to Open in Spring : Medicine: Planned Parenthood follows through with proposal for South Bay facility, inspiring vows of support and protest. Location is not disclosed.

Planned Parenthood Los Angeles announced this week that it is moving ahead with long-stalled plans to open a South Bay clinic that will offer a variety of services, including abortions.

The agency will sign a lease within days but is not yet disclosing the location of the new office, citing security reasons.

It will be the first new Planned Parenthood Los Angeles clinic in eight years to offer abortions, which the agency said account for less than 10% of its services.

Abortion opponents, who have long criticized plans for the facility, promised Thursday to renew their campaign with leaflets, advertising and other tactics.

“We’re anticipating a lot of heated activity,” said Monika Moreno, spokeswoman for Operation Rescue South Bay, who predicted her group may attempt human blockades at the new clinic.

Added J. T. Finn, director of the South Bay Pro-Life Coalition: “We feel that Planned Parenthood is like the Nazis of the ‘90s. They have their goal and their agenda to promote their child-killing business, and they will stop at nothing.”

In response, Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Marie Paris said Finn’s statement “shows more than anything else how extreme and intolerant these people are of different beliefs and different religions.”

And local abortion-rights advocates promised to rally community support for the clinic.

“This is not just about abortion. This is about basic health care for women,” said Debra Berman, co-coordinator with the Palos Verdes/South Bay chapter of the National Organization for Women.

Local abortion foes mobilized nearly 20 months ago when Planned Parenthood disclosed plans for its first South Bay clinic. Agency officials said then the clinic would open in late 1991 in the Torrance area. But those plans were delayed when the agency failed to find a suitable building to purchase.

Planned Parenthood has since decided to lease clinic space. Paris said the lease will be signed “any day” and, after renovations, the clinic could open by late spring.

Paris said the location of the new clinic will be revealed later. “We’re very concerned about being targeted for harassment by anti-choice groups before all the security measures are in place,” she said.

The new South Bay clinic will serve a range of patients, including low-income ones, and will offer a fee schedule on a sliding scale. It will provide a range of family planning including services involving contraception, premarital blood testing, pregnancy testing, prenatal care, testing for HIV and counseling, and testing and treatment for other sexually transmitted diseases.

It will also provide abortions during the first trimester, vasectomies and treatment for cervical cancer, Paris said.

The South Bay clinic will be among three of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles’ 12 facilities that provide abortions.

Two South Bay facilities recently announced that they would stop providing abortions on their premises.

Surgicenter of South Bay, a privately owned outpatient surgery center in Torrance, halted abortions in August, 1991, after anti-abortion forces threatened to protest outside its offices.

Abortions are also being banned at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital in San Pedro because it is affiliating with the Catholic nonprofit Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance. Catholic directives do not permit abortions or sterilization techniques intended for contraception.

Meanwhile, South Bay anti-abortion forces have generated headlines with a series of actions in recent months, including pickets outside the Lomita Boulevard offices of some private Torrance obstetricians and gynecologists who perform abortions.

And nearly 200 abortion foes staged a protest outside a San Pedro synagogue during a Sept. 16 gathering of abortion-rights advocates, some of whom were angered by protesters’ description of legalized abortion as “the American Holocaust.”

Finn said Thursday that by comparing Planned Parenthood to the Nazis, he is saying that “this Holocaust today in America has destroyed more innocent lives than the Nazis destroyed in Germany.”

He said he is concerned that Planned Parenthood’s arrival in the South Bay will promote sexual promiscuity among teen-agers, and in turn lead to more teen-age pregnancy and abortion. He said abortion foes will organize quickly.

“We’re going to sound the alarm in the churches of the South Bay,” he said. “We hope that owners of buildings would realize that Planned Parenthood is in the business of killing babies. . . . “

“We are not going to be threatened by a few extremists,” Paris said. “What we are doing is very needed, and we won’t be intimidated by people who use terrorist tactics.”

Paris said the clinic would serve the area well.

The more knowledge that families have, “the more informed choices they can make,” she said.