Intimidation and demonstration

Tom asked a great question: When is a boycott considered intimidation?

Many people who have attended to some business near (or in) a supermarket (in SoCal) in the last month or so can answer that. I've seen (and heard) complaints about the protests from all kinds of people, including those you'd expect embrace this sort of protest. When the protesters start yelling at someone (you, or someone near you) with no provocation and the mood turns ugly, that's moving towards "intimidation and harassment".

I have some personal experience with this, specific to pro-life protesters. For more than a year (most of 1984, early 1985), we lived in a small apartment complex across the street from a strip mall in Norfolk, VA that contained a NCNB branch (I think that was the name, it would now be BofA), an insurance company, an abortion clinic and a couple other small businesses. Every weekend the local chapter of Right to Life would be out and five to fifteen people would be working the corner of Bison and Little Creek. They had a message and they were relentless in delivering it. They made some noise and were pretty visible, but no one had become a problem. Over time, these folks become more and more bold, to the point where they started heckling people who were doing nothing more than using the shopping center. It became harassment just to use the ATM at the bank on the wrong day. A group of people once followed us into the parking area of our apartment building on the other side of Bison (I guess we lived too close). This was the same clinic that John Salvi shot up ten years later.

So that's my little story, now the disclaimer. I'm pro-choice. Partly because I'm not a woman and it feels wrong for me to make choices for others that have no direct affect on me (pregnancy is not a gender neutral question). The other part is fiscal, I'm not interested in funding an unwanted child if I can avoid it. That may seem cold to some, but I've been comfortable with that view of things since I was sixteen (Jan '75 was the timeframe, Saturday Night Live was the talk of the hallways and I'd finally figured out a big part of a very confusing adolescent picture by observing others).

Getting back to the original question....

Was there intimidation in the case in Austin? That's hard to say. The calls to a subcontractor warning him not to participate sound a bit like it (more so if they come from other parts of the country). Having churches circulate a list of companies that do work on the clinic is an interesting (and intimidating perhaps) tactic. There wasn't anything physical, but when churches become political things get messy quickly (and yes, we also scold churches when they don't).

Austin is a pretty youthful city, so I'd guess these kinds of services are needed more frequently than in other parts of Texas. One thing that always seems to get left out of these articles is a discussion of other choices available in the area. These types of clinics are often a good choice for certain kinds of testing (pregnancy, STDs and AIDS as examples), especially for people without insurance (mostly young singles and families) and those who don't want their doctors to know (like young almost families who skipped the vows part, including a lot of people on the fringes of the military).