Abortion Rights Advocates Want Action

Open Letter to Police Chief Gary Johansen

Palos Verdes Estates Police Department

Re: April 10, 1993, Anti-choice Picket

Dear Chief Johansen:

We are writing to express our deep concern with your department’s failure to enforce the Palos Verdes Estates ordinance that prohibits picketing such as that which occurred in connection with the April 10 demonstration of Dr. (Myung) Rha. Since that demonstration, the anti-choice demonstrators have said they will picket again. Because they met with little or no resistance to their illegal activities, we fear that they have been emboldened to target other physicians as well.

We understand that such circumstances make your job and your position difficult, especially when they concern an issue considered so volatile and divisive. However, you must understand our position as women who have a legal right to safe medical care. Our lives are difficult enough in facing a crisis such as an unwanted pregnancy. We do not need our problems compounded by having to face an unruly mob or by being left without a physician to care for us because his or her life and property are being threatened by law breakers.

The only purpose to what these demonstrators are doing is to harass law-abiding citizens. Their campaign is called “No Place to Hide,” implying that what the physicians they target are doing is unknown to the general public or somehow improper. On the contrary, these physicians have no need to hide, for they are doing nothing more than providing safe, legal medical care to women who have a constitutional right to it. Their true aim, which they have openly stated, is to make physicians so uncomfortable, even fearful, that they will stop providing these services to women altogether.

Women’s rights advocates, such as ourselves, have worked long and hard within the system to secure our rights. We have used the electoral process, lobbied our elected representatives and brought actions in the courts. As a result, the Supreme Court has ultimately decided that existing human life must take precedence over potential life and that women, therefore, have a legal right to abortion. To the extent that states, counties and municipalities have enacted laws and ordinances to safeguard these rights, such laws must be enforced. To do otherwise renders a woman’s right to choose meaningless.

DEBORAH BLAIR PORTER,

coordinator

DEBRA BERMAN,

coordinator

National Organization for Women

Palos Verdes/South Bay Chapter