The existence of only one such clinic in the entire state places a special burden on working-class and farm women, who must travel long distances and pay hotel costs to receive care.

Responding to the call by the Jackson Area National Organization for Women, some 200 defenders of women’s rights gathered for a rally July 15, and around 40 turned out for daily protests across the city throughout the week.

Operation Save America, a right-wing group opposed to abortion rights, had announced plans earlier this year for an eight-day campaign in Jackson July 15-22 to shut down the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In fact, however, the group only mobilized 100 supporters at its height in Jackson—never more than a couple of dozen outside the clinic during work hours.

Throughout the week the rightists' actions served to further isolate themselves from Jackson residents.

On July 17 Operation Save America gathered on the steps of the state capitol to sign the “Emancipation Proclamation” of the unborn fetus. Several Jackson residents in a city that is 70 percent African-American came out to protest. “They are using our history and turning it upside down,” said Nicole Moses, 18.

Others throughout the week linked the effort to support the Jackson clinic to the struggle for Black rights in Mississippi in the 1960s.

“We should remember all those who have shed blood for our freedom, Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and many others, and the many women who have died because of unsafe abortions,” said Nsombi Lambright, director of the Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union, at a July 22 rally.Evers, a leader of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, was killed by the Klan in 1963, and Till, 14, was abducted and killed by racists in August 1955 in Money, Mississippi.

On July 18, the rightist group held what they called “Mississippi burning,” in which they tore up and burned the Koran and the gay pride flag. A church in Pearl, Mississippi, used by the rightists as a base for their operations, shut its doors to them after learning that they had burned the Koran on their property.

“I'm opposed to abortion,” Mary Woodward, of the Catholic Diocese of Jackson, told the Clarion-Ledger, “but I didn't see what happened with the burning of the Koran…as having anything to do with the issue.”

At a July 20 press conference organized by Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Summer Coalition, several defenders of women's rights, and local religious and community organizations in Jackson, spoke out against the rightists’ actions and bigotry.

“The narrow views and actions of Operation Save America this week do not reflect the views of the majority of Mississippians,” said Deborah Watkins of UNITY Mississippi, a gay rights organization in Jackson.

Ali ShamisdDeen, a Muslim and local civil rights attorney, called their acts “horrendous, and an attempt to garner support by appealing to those who hold these bigotries.”

“Bosses make profits and workers are weakened by keeping women in a second-sex status,” Ellie García, a garment worker from Atlanta and member of the Socialist Worker Party, told the press. “The freedom to decide whether and when to bear children is a fundamental right for women to win full equality.”  
 
 
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