Credit Jennie McKeon/WUWF Public Media
The months-long protests and counter-protests outside American Family Planning Clinic have come to an end, with businesses up and down Village Oaks Drive signing trespass orders.
“We’re happy about this,” said Allison, who declined to give a last name. She is one of the counter-protesters who have been out nearly every weekend in front of the clinic to help shield clients from abortion protesters.
Protesters have always been a common sight outside the American Family Planning Pensacola’s only abortion clinic. But in December, a clinic staff member reached out on a local Facebook group asking for volunteers to help escort patients as protesters were harder to ignore.
Pensacola fights anti-abortion terror
Occupied Muscogee Creek land Pensacola, Fla.
A group of activists, organizers and those in support of reproductive justice held Dec. 27 and Jan. 2 demonstrations at American Family Planning, a reproductive health clinic that provides abortion. The community gathered to oppose anti-abortion reactionaries, who have been terrorizing clinic workers, nurses and patients every day.
These reactionaries, calling themselves “Abortion Abolitionists,” stand outside of the clinic, barely off the property, holding up photoshopped signs of supposedly aborted fetuses, advertisements for phony “abortion reversal pills” and grotesque anti-Black images of enslaved people comparing them and the entire history of African slavery to aborted fetuses. This ignores the fact that it was forced pregnancy and reproduction by rape that white-enslaver plantation owners used to make obscene profits from the very bodies of Black women.