Everything about this story makes me a little bit nauseous. While I am one of the people who feels pretty comfortable about being an “out” abortion provider, it’s taken me a long time to get comfortable and I still disclose that information on a case-by-case basis in my daily life (of course if you google me, all you get is abortion, but assuming I just met you on a plane, you might not have immediate google access and I probably didn’t give you my whole name anyway).
Some folks in abortion care are worried about stigma and harassment and those concerns often at least make them careful about when and to whom they disclose their work. With physicians, not only are they concerned about stigma, but most are concerned about their physical safety as well. It’s not every line of work where you need to be worried about assassination attempts and violence following you to your home, but when you’re an abortion providing physician, that is often exactly what you are concerned with. So, it’s not surprising that this physician would be concerned for her safety after being “outed” publicly by Operation Rescue.
Sadly, this type of public exposure is exactly the type of tactic that groups like Operation Rescue use to try to force doctors to stop providing abortion care. And while their website officially asks members to “pray” that this doctor (and others) stop providing abortions, history (and murders of 6 abortion providing physicians and the attempted murders and assaults of 5 others) shows us that this type of publicity and extreme language leads to increased violence against abortion providers. Hence my nausea.
See below for the complete story.
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By Erin Gloria Ryan
Operation Rescue, the radical anti-abortion terrorism group responsible for the murder of Dr. Tiller, has not-so-subtley found a new target. This time around, they’re focused on an anonymous female doctor who travels in a mask to underserved areas to perform abortions to women in need. They’ve released her name, sketches of her face, and information on how to find her mom. Nobody’s more classy than those anti-choice terrorists.
The doctor in question travels to dangerous and hostile parts of the country, but she does so in a mask so her picture can’t be plastered all over the internet by homicidal weirdos. She also operates under an assumed name. It’s hard to harass someone performing a legal medical procedure that benefits women when thy don’t have a real name or a picture!
Operation Rescue to the (operation) rescue! They’ve found out who the Mystery Doctor is and basically told their maniacal followers to sic ’er. They take time to emphasize that the doctor is unmarried, isn’t from the US, and was educated at Yale (pretty much the SHE IS A WITCH trifecta, right there). But the whole bit gets even creepier when they start talking about how the doctor’s mom looks. Her aging, elderly mother. Out of respect to the doctor’s wish to remain anonymous, we’ve omitted the names that Operation Rescue published.
Freedom from relationships made it easy for Dr. X to travel abroad providing abortions in third-world African and South American countries. But in 2004, it was her relationship with her aging mother, who she strongly resembles, that brought her home. X continues to stay with her mother, X Mom, Professor of Anthropology, Emerita at Harvard University, at her home in Cambridge, Massachsetts.
Whoa, what the everloving fuck? Are you people out of your minds? (Don’t answer that.)
Their justification for revealing the doctor’s identity of the doctor and where the doctor’s mother lives is that no “abortionist” deserves anonymity. Says the organization’s post,
Abortionists don’t deserve anonymity,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “It keeps them from being held accountable for their actions. In some states, patients aren’t even told the full names of their abortionists and when things go wrong, women don’t even know who to file a complaint against.”
Identifying abortionists has helped Operation Rescue and other pro-life groups to warn women of abortionists with histories of abortion abuses.
Newman then goes on to say that no one would possibly wear a mask unless they were doing something bad or illegal, and therefore abortion must be bad and the doctors must know it. But the cherry?
People who are proud of their work are willing to put their names on it. People who are ashamed or are trying to get away with something, like bank robbers and abortionists, wear masks
Yes, abortionists are just like bank robbers. If an unhinged group of gun toting anti bank robbing activists traveled the country shooting them. And if robbing banks were legal.
Operation Rescue Unmasks the ‘Fly In Abortionista’ [Operation Rescue]
Image via Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Shutterstock
