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Anti-abortion extremist Eric Robert Rudolph was sentenced yesterday to four consecutive life terms in prison plus 120 years without parole for bombings of an abortion clinic, a lesbian and gay nightclub, and the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. Rudolph was also sentenced last month to two consecutive life sentences without parole for the bombing of a women’s health clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. In total, Rudolph has been ordered to pay $3.5 million in restitution to victims of his bombings.

Rudolph read a statement at yesterday’s sentencing hearing apologizing for the Olympic Park bombing, which killed one woman and injured 111 people, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His apology did not mention his other Atlanta bombings, which injured 11 people.

“We are glad to see closure in the Eric Robert Rudolph case,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “However, we are concerned that law enforcement has never charged any other suspects with aiding Rudolph either in planning or carrying out these bombings or in eluding capture for five years. A drawing of a second possible suspect for the Atlanta clinic was circulated widely at the time but no one was ever charged.” The Army of God, a network of anti-abortion extremists who promote violence against abortion providers and are suspected in clinic bombings and attempted assassinations and the murder of abortion providers, clamed credit for the Atlanta abortion clinic and lesbian nightclub bombings. “Experts now know so much more about terrorist organizations,” Smeal continued. “A lone wolf theory is entirely inconsistent with such knowledge.”

The Feminist Majority Foundation, through its National Clinic Access Project, works with law enforcement, tracks and researches anti-abortion extremists, and pursues litigation strategies to bring violent extremists like Rudolph to justice and end violence against women’s health clinics.

DONATE to the Feminist Majority Foundation and support its National Clinic Access Project

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that the US Navy was not responsible for the cost of an abortion for a woman whose fetus had anencephaly. This neural tube defect is always fatal, with only 2 percent of infants surviving more than a week after birth, according to Kaiser. When the Navy refused to cover her abortion, the woman, known as “Jane Doe,” approached the Northwest Women’s Resource Center to challenge the law based on the Navy’s obligation to cover other women’s prenatal care.

While a lower court had ruled in favor of Jane Doe, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled unanimously that the policy, which covers abortion costs only if the woman’s life is in danger, did not violate the rights of military personnel or their spouses. The court cited Harris v. McRae, which established the constitutionality of restrictions on federal funding of abortion procedures. The court recognized that its decision seemed “callous and unfeeling,” but stuck to precedent in its decision.

The Justice Department described the restrictions on military coverage of abortions as designed to advance “the government’s interest in protecting human life in general and promoting respect for life,” reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Lisa Stone, executive director of the Northwest Women’s Resource Center, told the Post-Intelligencer that the application of this restriction in Jane Doe’s case, where there was no chance of life, “irrational, and I would say cruel.” No decision has been made on whether to appeal the case.

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The Pennsylvania State Police has announced that Cynthia Transue, who was removed from her position as deputy commissioner in June, has a new position as deputy for special projects. Transue will have an increase in pay, and is set to retire at the end of the year with a pension equal to what she would have made had she stayed an additional three years at her previous position, reports The Patriot News.

Transue’s new position is effective as of June 24, the same day on which she was removed from her former office. Her departure was widely suspected to be the result of an internal-affairs investigation undertaken in retaliation for her accusations of perjury against Barry Titler, the agency’s disciplinary officer. Her reinstatement has led sources to speculate that the department was facing a discrimination suit in Transue’s case, reports The Patriot News, and decided to rehire her to avoid prosecution. Although her new position carries no rank, Transue was the highest-ranking women in the Pennsylvania police force.

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In a speech at Golden Gate School of Law in San Francisco yesterday, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) laid out her concerns about John Roberts’ record and views on fundamental issues, including Title IX, the right to privacy, and protections against clinic violence. “[Roberts’] views are not just of interest to me, but they are of great importance to me because the stakes are so high, particularly for women,” Senator Boxer said. She pointed to a memo that John Roberts wrote in 1981 referring to the “so-called” right to privacy. “Suppose I said, ‘your so-called right to free speech,’ or, ‘your so-called right to vote’ – that would be a stunning attack on our fundamental rights. I view the term ‘so-called right to privacy,’ as a stunning attack on a basic American value,” she said.

Also troubling for Boxer was Roberts’ involvement in the Supreme Court case Bray v. Alexandria. “In that case, Roberts sided with some of the nation’s most violent anti-choice extremists…When John Roberts and his office sided with dangerous anti-choice extremists in 1991 and 1992, clinic violence was rampant, and he would have known it,” said Boxer. “Now, I’m sure John Roberts does not condone violence. But he played a top leadership role in deciding which cases to appeal, and how. And he must tell us why he used his powerful position to side with Operation Rescue and a convicted bomber.”

In interviews after her speech, Senator Boxer said that if Roberts refuses to answer questions during his hearings, she will “use all the parliamentary tools I’ve been given as a US Senator,” including making it “difficult for other business to get done until we get the information we need,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

LEARN MORE Read the Feminist Majority’s Background Briefing Paper on the Bray case and clinic violence

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Leading women’s groups, including the Feminist Majority, held a press conference at the US Capitol today on John Roberts’ role in a clinic violence case in the early 1990s, when Roberts was deputy solicitor general under the first Bush Administration. The case, Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, involved Operation Rescue-led blockades of clinics in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC. Roberts co-authored the amicus brief and argued the case twice before the Supreme Court (in 1991 and 1992) on behalf of Operation Rescue and six named petitioners, including Michael Bray, a convicted clinic bomber.

At the time of the Bray case, some 50 percent of clinics nationwide were experiencing severe violence. Susan Hill, president of the National Women’s Health Organization, testified to the violence and harassment experienced by clinic workers and patients around the time of the Bray case. By 1991, her nine clinics had experienced 16 firebombings and 500 death threats. In addition, clinic workers and their families were stalked on their way to work, to school, to daycare, and more.

“Roberts clearly did not have the vision to see the importance of a strong federal role in combating nationwide domestic terrorism,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “Instead of supporting federal judges who were granting injunctions to combat escalating violence, the first Bush Administration was undercutting their authority. Roberts was a political appointee and a legal policy maker. We must assume Roberts was an architect of the Bush Administration’s laissez faire stance toward protecting women’s clinics, patients, and health care workers.”

Many of the groups involved in the press conference have come out opposing Roberts, including the National Abortion Federation (NAF), NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Organization for Women (NOW). “We believe Roberts has sufficiently demonstrated that he puts ideology ahead of the facts,” said Kim Gandy, president of NOW. Other speakers included Vicki Saporta, president of NAF; Karen Pearl, interim president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America; Marcia Greenberger, president of the National Women’s Law Center; Lorraine Cole, president of the Black Women’s Health Imperative; and Shelly Pacheco, a clinic provider in Washington state whose clinic was arsoned early this year.

TAKE ACTION Urge your Senators to thoroughly question Roberts on his views on women’s rights, civil rights, and the right to privacy

DONATE Make an emergency contribution to the Feminist Majority’s Save Roe Campaign. We must be a strong voice in this crucial fight to save Roe and the Supreme Court for women’s rights.

A major newspaper in Ohio conducted a three-month investigation into the priest sex abuse cover-up in Ohio, finding that in many cases police and other authorities were complicit. The Toledo Blade investigation found that there was an “unwritten policy” under which police officers treated priests accused of molesting children differently than other pedophiles. Priests accused of sex abuse were sent to treatment centers rather than jail, or were not investigated by the police at all, allowing church leaders to move the priests to different parishes. In three cases that did receive formal investigations, the case files were blocked to the public, so the abusive priests could pass background checks and obtain access to children, the Blade reports. In other instances, the investigations by police and child welfare agencies were delayed, even as recently as May, 2004.

“Now that the church has been dealt with, it’s time to deal with the agencies and the people who let it go on in the communities,” George Keller, a victim of priest sex abuse, told the Blade. Catherine Hoolahan, an attorney in Toledo representing victims, said, “You can’t separate police from the issue. Too many times, they could have arrested priests and sent a message to the church. You have to wonder that if the police did their jobs earlier, the church may have had to deal with cases more in the open.” One former police officer told the Blade that under Police Chief Anthony Bosch, who headed the Toledo police force from 1956 to 1970, “you would have been fired” if you arrested a priest, even for child abuse.

Priest pedophilia was also dealt with more leniently in the court system. In one case, a police officer arrested a priest after witnessing him receiving oral sex from a 16-year-old boy who said he was forced to perform the act. Not only did the priest receive no jail time, but a judge agreed to seal the record on the case, including the priest’s arrest and charge, according to the Blade.

In other news, the Vatican has defrocked two priests in Massachusetts, Eugene O’Sullivan and Paul E. McDonald. O’Sullivan was given probation and prohibited from working with children in 1984 after confessing to sodomizing a 13-year-old boy. However, he was transferred to four New Jersey parishes by Cardinal Bernard Law, who was then Archbishop of Boston, according to the Associated Press. Law has since resigned as archbishop but was transferred to the Vatican in 2004 by the late Pope John Paul II and given the honorary position of archpriest of St. Mary Major, one of Rome’s four main basilicas. Law defended his transfer of O’Sullivan in 2003, saying he wanted to give the abusive priest a chance at “redemption,” AP reports.

John Burt, an anti-abortion extremist, was taken into custody yesterday after losing an appeal of his conviction for molesting a 15-year-old girl who was in his care at his so-called home for “unwed” mothers, Our Father’s House. A three-judge panel of the First District Court of Appeal ruled unanimously to uphold Burt’s conviction, the Associated Press reports. Burt will continue to appeal his conviction and sentence of 18 years in prison, according to the Pensacola News Journal.

In the early 1980s, John Burt, who was the Regional Director of Rescue America at the time, was at the center of disruptions at the Pensacola, Florida clinics. In 1986, Burt led an invasion into the Ladies Center Clinic in Pensacola, which led to his arrest and conviction along with Joan Andrews Bell, an associate of James Kopp, who was convicted of assassinating Dr. Barnett Slepian. Joseph Scheidler was touring at the time on his book, “99 Ways to Close an Abortion Clinic.” Scheidler was on the lawn in front of the clinic at the time of the invasion. This incident was the impetus for the NOW v. Scheidler case, which will be heard by the US Supreme Court for the third time this fall.

In 1993, Burt was leading a Rescue America protest outside the second Pensacola clinic when an Our Father’s House volunteer, Michael Griffin, shot and killed Dr. David Gunn in the rear of the clinic. Burt was also an associate of Paul Hill, who murdered Dr. Bayard Britton and volunteer escort James Barrett outside the Ladies Center Clinic in Pensacola in 1994. Burt was videotaped helping Paul Hill identify Dr. Britton outside the clinic in the weeks before Hill shot and killed Dr. Britton and his clinic escort.

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Eric Robert Rudolph was sentenced to two life sentences without parole on Monday for the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama women’s health clinic, which killed an off-duty police officer and critically injured a nurse. Judge C. Lynwood also ordered Rudolph to pay restitution to the bombing victims in the amount of $1.2 million. Rudolph will be sentenced next month to two more life terms for bombings in Atlanta, including a lesbian and gay nightclub and the Atlanta Olympic Park in 1996. The Olympic Park bombing killed one person and injured 111 others. Under an agreement reached with federal prosecutors, Rudolph pled guilty to all four bombings and disclosed the location of 250 pounds of explosives he had hidden in a populated area of Western North Carolina in exchange for prosecutors waiving the death penalty.

At the sentencing, victims had the opportunity to address Rudolph, including Birmingham, Alabama clinic nurse Emily Lyons, who underwent 21 operations to treat injuries from the bombing. She told Rudolph at the hearing, “I faced 5 pounds of dynamite and hundreds of nails yet I survived. Do I look afraid? You damaged my body, but you did not create the fear you sought,” reports the Associated Press. While Lyons’ injuries prevent her from returning to work, she has publicly spoken out against clinic violence and has raised money to support abortion clinics.

“We are glad to see closure in the Eric Robert Rudolph case,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “However, we are concerned that law enforcement has never charged any other suspects with aiding Rudolph either in planning or carrying out these bombings or in eluding capture for five years. A drawing of a second possible suspect for the Atlanta clinic was circulated widely at the time but no one was ever charged.” The Army of God, a network of anti-abortion extremists who promote violence against abortion providers and are suspected in clinic bombings and attempted assassinations and the murder of abortion providers, claimed credit for the Atlanta abortion clinic and lesbian nightclub bombings. “Experts now know so much more about terrorist organizations,” Smeal continued. “A lone wolf theory is entirely inconsistent with such knowledge.”

The Feminist Majority Foundation, through its National Clinic Access Project, continues to work with law enforcement, tracks and researches anti-abortion extremists, and pursues litigation strategies to bring violent extremists like Rudolph to justice and end violence against women’s health clinics.

DONATE to the Feminist Majority Foundation and support its National Clinic Access Project

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week heard an appeal by anti-abortion groups in the “Nuremberg Files” case. The case, American Coalition of Life Activists v. Planned Parenthood, originated as a suit filed in 1999 by Planned Parenthood of Oregon and four Oregon doctors listed on WANTED-style posters on the Nuremberg Files website against 13 anti-abortion extremists and the anti-abortion groups American Coalition of Life Activists and Advocates for Life Ministries.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had previously ruled that the extremists were liable for threats under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE), and a jury had awarded the plaintiffs $107.5 million. In 2003, the US Supreme Court let the Ninth Circuit’s ruling stand. However, the defendants in the case are arguing that other recent Supreme Court decisions, including NOW v. Scheidler, have changed the definition of what constitutes a threat of violence, according to the Associated Press.

Maria Vullo, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, said that the anti-abortion defendants have been “refiling the case over and over again,” but she does not “believe that the court…is accepting their efforts to relitigate the case,” AP reports.

The Feminist Majority Foundation filed the major amicus brief on clinic violence in the case.

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Anti-abortion extremist Clayton Waagner was sentenced to 19 years in prison without parole for sending fake anthrax mailings to over women’s health clinics and reproductive rights organizations at the height of the anthrax scare following September 11, 2001. The threatening letters that accompanied the anthrax hoax mailings were signed by the Army of God, the group that claimed credit for bombings at abortion clinics in Birmingham and Atlanta, among other violent acts. Waagner, 48, is already serving more than 48 years in prison for other charges, including escaping from prison and eluding authorities for ten months, during which time he threatened to kill abortion providers and was named one of the FBI’s “Most Wanted” fugitives.

Waagner expressed no remorse for his actions in federal court on Thursday in Philadelphia, according to The Morning Call. He was convicted by a federal jury in 2003 of 51 charges, including the threatening use of a weapon of mass destruction, violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinics Entrances (FACE) Act, extortion, and mailing threatening communication.

In 2001, when Waagner mailed his anthrax threats, Congress and media outlets had just received real anthrax by mail. Therefore, Waagner’s threats were taken very seriously. When the fake anthrax was mailed to abortion clinics nationwide, the Feminist Majority Foundation, Planned Parenthood, and the National Abortion Federation immediately alerted clinics to prevent clinic workers from opening mail they thought was contaminated. These alerts helped law enforcement by directing them to the “scope of the investigation,” allowing the FBI to immediately “declare it a national investigation and start the collection of evidence across the nation,” according to Margaret Moore, director of law enforcement for the Feminist Majority Foundation.

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A fire that started late Monday night has forced the Presidential Women’s Clinic in West Palm Beach, Florida to close due to damage. There were no injuries, and the clinic hopes to reopen within a week, according to the Palm Beach Post. Suspicions were raised because of evidence that lighter fluid or another substance was used to accelerate the blaze, reports the Miami Herald, and local law enforcement is joined by the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in investigating the scene. The Feminist Majority Foundation’s Clinic Access Project is working with both the clinic and federal law enforcement on this case.

The apparent arson may have been a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a federal law prohibiting the intentional injury, intimidation or obstruction of people seeking abortion services, which also applies to cases of damage or destruction of a reproductive health facility. Furthermore, the Herald reports that authorities are searching for possible connections to fires set at clinics in the area in 2003 and 2004.

Lou Silber, the clinic’s attorney, told the Post, “It was an act of terrorism, an act of arson that did a great deal of damage,” but went on to say “this is not going to close us down. We are going to open up as soon as possible and provide women medical services.”

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