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In 2009, Dea Deujsch participates in Wichita to a vigil of the doctor George Tiller, assassinated by an extremist anti-abortion. (Kelly Glasscock / Getty Images)
Julie Burkhart was barely 20 years old when she responded to the person shouting at her as she was getting into work. How did she get a job in a place like this? the woman wanted to know. Burkhart did not realize it at the time, but she would have had the same argument for decades.
In 1991, Burkhart had returned to university and had discovered that his hometown, Wichita, had become the first line of the religious right's fight against abortion. She went straight to the trenches.
In a local clinic, she took calls from women who wanted an abortion and made an appointment. That's where she met the protesters, and they were numerous that year.
These stifling months would be known as the summer of mercy, when members of the anti-abortion Operation Rescue campaign went to the Midwestern town en masse. serial abortion clinics. The next month and a half has dramatically changed the politics of abortion in Kansas.
Burkhart, on the other hand, perfects her ideology and strengthens her resolve.
"It is further rooted in me that people have to decide for themselves whether they will have a baby or not," she said in an interview with the Washington Post. "It has become the job of my life."
The founder of Operation Rescue, Randall Terry, prays in front of the Wichita Women's Health Services Abortion Clinic in 1991. (Steve Rasmussen / AP)
Nearly three decades later, Burkhart sat at his office in a women's clinic not far from where she first met with anti-abortion activists. Friday, The Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state constitution fundamentally protected the right to abortion.
The news went through her screen and her staff rushed to read it with her.
Kansans have "the ability to control their own body, to assert their physical integrity and to self-determine. This entitlement allows a woman to make her own decisions about her body, health, family formation and family life, which may include whether to maintain the pregnancy. "
Anti-abortion groups have described it as "horrible and extreme that we would have expected". Burkhart had to read it twice.
"I'm not sure the problem is still fine," she said Friday night. "It means for me. . . it was worth it. "
And there have been moments, over the past 20 or so years, when she wondered if it was worth it, as in 2009, when an anti-abortionist extremist murdered her mentor, the George Tiller, who also ran a clinic in Wichita. She said that she would like that he could live to read the court's announcement.
[Kansas Supreme Court rules state constitution protects abortion rights, a decision that could lead to challenges in other states]
The historic decision, in many ways, goes back to the summer of Mercy.
"The demonstrations are pretty much what got people out of the pews, into the streets, then into the political arena," said Judy Thomas, a journalist who has covered the story and is now working to the Kansas City Star, in an interview with the podcast My Kansans comrades.
They resumed the bitter run in the 1974 Senate between incumbent President Bob Dole (right) and his future presidential candidate, and his Democratic opponent Bill Roy, stopped. It was the year after the landmark Roe v. Wade legalized decision abortion at the national level, and anti-abortion groups were galvanized. Abortion has become a problem in the corner.
Groups opposed to the right to abortion called Roy "an abortionist," while praising Dole for "pro-life," told My Fellow Kansans. Years later, Roy would say that this campaign tactic tipped the elections in favor of Dole.
But it was not until 1991 that the party started beating Kansas – and with it the Republican Party.
In their wake, the leaders of Operation Rescue have left a network of right-wing activists across the state, energetic and ready to engage politically. Some argue that politicians elected in the years following the summer paved the way for the "real experience" of Governor Gordon Brown's hyper-conservative governance of red state governance.
Burkhart will later describe this period as 46 days of "nothing less than chaos and chaos".
By the end of August, police had arrested more than 2,500 protesters, many of whom had perpetrated a series of aggressive blockades. President George H. W. Bush criticized their tactics.
Burkhart remembered going through the crowd on his way to the clinic. They threw themselves under the cars, chained themselves to the doors and shouted the scriptures to patients and doctors. When she was inside, the danger did not stop. Protesters threw stones at the building, smashed windows and threatened the bomb.
When the clinic had to perform abortions on the same day as a large Operation Rescue rally, Burkhart and his colleagues sometimes arrived at work before sunrise to beat the protesters. Sometimes the staff had to sleep at the clinic.
But Burkhart said she did not remember being scared – she was just angry.
"It made me angry to see someone stand on a sidewalk and pretend to understand what I was as a person and my situation, or that of someone else." Another life, "she said. "Patients who wanted an abortion at that time really had to have steel spines."
A protestor, who had gone to Wichita from Ohio that summer, repeated his arrest in a chilling interview with a Post reporter.
"I opened my Bible and began preaching from Psalm 37 on how God will eliminate the evildoers," said Phil Vollman, who was arrested while delivering an improvised sermon in front of the Tiller Clinic. "I said at one point, George Tiller, your days are numbered. George Tiller, your family is in danger. God will take care of George Tiller and all those who are with him. "
Vollman was charged with threatening Tiller's life, but when he appeared in court, a judge dismissed the charges, saying the diatribe was "an expression of the First Amendment's embodied rights."
Tiller was one of the only doctors in the country to have performed abortions in late pregnancy. His work makes him a constant target of violent threats. His clinic was bombed. In 1993, he was shot in the arm. Anti-abortion groups have launched vigorous court challenges to block its practice.
In 2009, while Tiller was working as a bailiff in his church, the anti-abortionist extremist Scott Roeder shot him, the first murder of an abortion provider for a decade.
Jennifer D'Souza, left, and Haylee Burke, second from left, along with other abortion advocates, stand in front of George Tiller's abortion clinic to counter an appearance of Operation Rescue on June 20, 2009. (Charlie Riedel / AP)
Tiller's death has left a void in the community and in the health care landscape of the region, Burkhart said. It was "one of the darkest periods of my life". There was now an empty clinic and one less place for women wishing to have an abortion. That's why Burkhart said he decided to help found the Trust Women, which, four years after Tiller's death, opened a clinic in his former building.
When it opened, he was the only abortion provider within a radius of 200 km.
Since then, Trust Women has opened two other sites in Seattle and Oklahoma City. Following the decision of the Kansas Supreme Court, Ms. Burkhart stated that she was now optimistic about the abortion right movement and that she hoped that high court judges would not be able to do so. other states would turn to Kansas.
The decision overturned a 2015 law to ban the most common second trimester abortion procedure. It was one of the many state-sponsored abortion restraint measures Brownback enacted in law during his tenure.
Now, anti-abortion activists are concerned that the ruling will remove some of these legislative restrictions, including those requiring women to undergo ultrasound and pre-abortion counseling, which require parental consent before they can abort. .
"This decision opens the door to new challenges for further restrictions on harmful abortion in the state of Kansas," said Elizabeth Nash, head of state affairs at the state. Guttmacher Institute, in a statement.
After a moment of celebration, this is what Burkhart said she intended to work on afterwards.
"It is," she said, "considering all the laws, appeals and decisions," a crazy race.
And it's definitely not over.
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