At around 10:00 a.m. on March 10, 1993, 30 years ago this Friday, a fanatic named Michael David Griffin shot 47-year-old doctor David Gunn three times in the back with a .38 caliber revolver as he was arriving to the clinic where he worked in Pensacola.
Over and over again, the killer yelled, “You will kill no more babies!”
Later, he turned himself in to the police.
Gunn, a father of two, was the only doctor performing legal abortions in northeast Florida.
It also covered an area of 1,000 miles in radius, which included parts of Georgia and Alabama.
That day he was received, as every morning, by some vociferous activists who had been waiting for him for an hour.
He knew that his work involved risks, which is why he always kept three weapons in the car.
Months ago, his portrait had appeared on one of those Western outlaw posters with the caption "Wanted" at a demonstration called in Montgomery, Alabama by Operation Rescue, one of the first and most radical anti-abortion organizations. from the country.
Founded in 1986, their slogan read: "If you think it's murder, act like it is."
Griffin, a Christian fundamentalist who had seen Gunn's face in a photograph in the garage of his mentor, a white supremacist named Paul Burt whom he would later accuse in court of having brainwashed him, entered the history of American terrorism by committing in the first documented murder of a reproductive health service provider.
His act contributed to triggering the so-called "abortion wars", which had already registered skirmishes such as kidnappings, assaults and attacks on clinics.
At 31, he was sentenced to life in prison and, if a hearing of his case scheduled for next year does not review his sentence, he is scheduled to remain in the shadows until 2043.
March 1, 1994. Michael Griffin, accused of the murder of abortion doctor David Gunn, during a moment of the trial in Pensacola (Florida). Associated Press
In memory of Gunn, National Abortion Provider Recognition Day has been celebrated in the United States every March 10 since 1996.
It's also a way to remember that harassment continues outside many clinics across the country.
Not only because of the round anniversary, this time is different: it is the first commemoration since the Supreme Court's decision in June last year to strike down the precedent set in 1973 by the Roe v. Wade judgment,
which
gave federal protection to the termination of pregnancy until the time of viability of the fetus.
The ruling returns to the States the power to legislate on the subject.
At least 18 have decided to ban or severely restrict it.
And in a dozen, such as Texas and Louisiana, the new laws threaten jail terms of up to 15 years for doctors or nurses who perform abortions outside of the permitted assumptions, which has caused the doctor-patient conversation to precede in many hospitals another, between the doctor and his lawyers, and that professionals find themselves in the most uncertain cases pushed to have to choose between the Hippocratic oath and the penal code.
Shelly Tien performs an abortion on March 14, 2022 at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. EVELYN HOCKSTEIN / Reuters / Contact Photo
Shelly Tien, 41, is one of the doctors whose work is recognized this Friday.
In a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS, she told this week that she intends to celebrate her day "working", and that, no matter how many threats she receives (although she declared herself lucky: "I have never been physically attacked", she said) she will not leave her practice, for “respect for science, love for society and pure responsibility”.
Tien, who is also a specialist in high-risk pregnancies, is divided between a clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, and others in Arizona and Kansas.
She used to travel to offer her services in Alabama and Oklahoma, until the law prevented her.
The one in Jacksonville is one of the 18 clinics that Florida Planned Parenthood has, the largest provider of abortion services in the United States, which manages around half of the centers in the country.
In the 18 of Florida, a legislative initiative presented in the state Parliament in Tallahassee is pending these days to reduce the legal limit to perform abortions, surgical or chemical, to six weeks.
It is one of the many battles of the ultra-conservative war declared by the governor, Ron DeSantis, more than likely a candidate for the White House in 2024.
almost total ban
If successful, it would amount to a near-total ban: "Most women don't even know they're pregnant by then," recalls Dr. Tien.
“A restriction of this type will have a great impact on those who are pregnant and do not want to be, but also for those who are desired and develop complications.
It would force many to travel to other parts of the country.”
And that would include herself, if she wants to keep practicing.
In Pensacola, where Gunn was killed, there is no longer any reproductive health center standing, after the last one closed in 2022, which was also the last clinic in the region known as the Panhandle, because, indeed, it looks like the mango of the Florida map pan.
The closure by administrative order came after complaints about complications arising from the intervention on two women.
Julie Gallagher, a lawyer for the center, explained in a written statement that "there are two, and only two, cases among more than 100,000 patients treated."
The clinic had been open, under different names, for 45 years, and entered the infamous history of the abortion wars when in 1994 a guy, who was sentenced to death, murdered a doctor, John Britton, and one of those volunteers. who work at the doors of the centers to escort the patients.
His name was James Barrett, and his wife was injured.
The nineties were the lead years of anti-abortion violence in the United States.
"In this escalation, he had to see the frustration of the most radical agents of the movement when they became convinced that the legal route was not going to work for them," considers legal historian Mary Ziegler, author of several books on the subject.
The most recent is titled
Roe: The History of a National Obsession
(2023)
.
Ziegler refers to the setback that these groups suffered when the Supreme Court established the
Roe
precedent , by a vote of 5 to 4, with the
Planned Parenthood v. Casey
(1992) ruling.
"When they found themselves defeated, they resorted to violence," she adds.
During that decade, fanatics killed another doctor, Barnett Slepian, in 1998, as well as two receptionists and a guard in two separate attacks.
In 2009, George Tiller, who had survived another shooting 26 years earlier, became the fourth and last doctor to be assassinated.
Since 1977, "11 people have died, including patients, providers, and volunteers," and there have been "42 bomb attacks, 196 arson, 491 assaults, and thousands of incidents," according to the 2021 accounts of the National Abortion organization. Federation.
"The Gunn murder was important, because it served to humanize specialists, demonized in previous decades by those who wanted to pass them off as murderers who did not practice medicine," argues Ziegler.
“In the American psyche, the provider went from being an abstract entity to being identified with Dr. Gunn, the person of flesh and blood.
He also served to expose the links of the most extreme faction of the anti-abortion movement with white supremacism and the extreme right.
"For women's choice advocates, Gunn's death signaled a new frontier," adds Florida State University professor Deanna Rohlinger, author of Abortion Politics, Mass Media, and Social, in an email
. Movements in America
(2014).
“On the other side of that border, vendors were literally risking their lives.
For anti-abortion extremists, Griffin [the murderer] became a symbol and an aspiration: to end the 'murder' of the unborn by any means, including violence.
And while the mainstream anti-abortion movement rejected such violence, it also kept quiet about other tactics related to closing clinics because direct action drew supporters to the cause.”
Protest at the gates of the Supreme Court for the murder of David Gunn, shortly after his death. Jeffrey Markowitz (Sygma via Getty Images)
These "tactics" continued and became more sophisticated over time, after a law, known by the acronym PACE, was enacted in reaction to Gunn's death, making it a federal crime to use force, threats and physical obstruction at the entrance to the clinics.
Each state later designed its own rules, but in many, the centers choose to be located in areas with little traffic and to hide behind a large parking lot at the door, to keep protesters off the property and away from the patients.
“The attacks on our clinics have increased in recent years,” says Clara Trullenque, who works as a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood in Miami and recalls two vandal attacks suffered last year at two of her centers.
“In the one in Jacksonville, for example, there are fences around the building to protect them,” she adds.
The advances in the fight of the anti-abortion movement, whose great victory was granted last year by the Supreme Court, have not served to loosen the harassment.
“Rather to the contrary,” says Ziegler, “those protests have moved from the most conservative places, where abortion has already been banned, to others, where it is still allowed.”
The movement does not seem willing to give up in court either.
A federal judge in Texas is about to rule on the legality of mifepristone, a drug that, in combination with another, is used to terminate a pregnancy.
If the lawsuit is successful, it will no longer be available nationwide, including in states where abortion is legal.
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