Valentina Pasquali

Birmingham, AL –  From inside this box-shaped maroon-painted building on the South side of Birmingham, Diane Derzis has been providing abortion and contraception services to the women of the American south since 1975. Her clinic, New Woman All Women Health Care, sits right across the street from Al’s, an exquisitely greasy Greek deli. The facility was the very first in the state, and Derzis, renowned for her vociferous activism, has been dubbed “the abortion queen” of Alabama.

Today there are five such clinics in the state, and only one in neighboring Mississippi. As a result, women who choose to have an abortion must travel for hours, sometimes for days. “Overall, we see around 2,000 patients a year,” says Derzis, who oversees a staff of 12 employees, including five physicians.

Diane Derzis

“We have women from their early teens to their sixties, rich and poor, black and white, democrats and republicans,” Derzis explains as she enjoys a smoke on a bright Saturday fall afternoon sitting outside of Al’s Deli. However, since an abortion costs about $425, one group of people rarely seen at Derzis’ clinic comprises the very poor and uninsured.

Diane Derzis is an assertive woman with eye-catching short hair and an unabashed taste for cigarettes. She has an undergraduate degree in Psychology and a Law degree from the University of Alabama. She is a native of Virginia, where her husband resides and where the couple owns a farm and a second abortion clinic.

Derzis became involved in the abortion rights movement in her early twenties, after undergoing the procedure herself in 1974, a year after Roe v. Wade was decided. Roe v. Wade is the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case that established a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy as an integral part to her right to privacy. The Court established that this right should be upheld until the moment “the fetus becomes ‘viable.’” Viable was determined to mean the point at which the fetus is “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid.” The Supreme Court set this viability requirement at somewhere between 24 and 28 weeks. That requirement for abortions now varies on a state-by-state basis.

Since she opened her practice, Derzis has had to deal with a plethora of families and individuals; from married couples who cannot afford the sixth child, to single women who work full-time and go to college, to thirteen-year-old girls who have been the victims of violence or are, more simply, sexually active at a very premature age. The only thing all these people have in common is that they have decided not to carry a pregnancy to term. “One time, a car with a license plate saying ‘choose life’ pulled in our parking lot,” Derzis recalls, “I thought it was a pro-life activist who wanted to protest.

” Instead, a middle-age woman got off the vehicle, walked inside the clinic and filled out the form to have an abortion. Derzis asked the woman about the license plate. To Derzis’ surprise, the patient simply answered: “That was before, before I got pregnant!”

In spite of the wide variety of women who choose to terminate a pregnancy at some point in their lives — independent of race, religion and class — abortion still carries a social stigma, especially in the heavily conservative – Christian south. In fact, the so-called “pro-life movement” has been growing in recent years and has become increasingly outspoken. During the campaign for the 2008 presidential election, anti-abortion activists were to be seen at all the most important events including the Democratic National Convention in Denver and the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. They carried vivid life-size photos depicting late-term aborted fetuses and bluntly accused then Presidential nominee Barack Obama of being a “baby killer.”

Judy and Lisa sit on picnic chairs outside ‘Planned Parenthood,’ the only other abortion clinic in Birmingham. They move their fingers along the beads of their rosaries and seem absorbed in deep meditation.

Judy and Lisa of Forty Days for Life

They are members of 40 Days for Life, an anti-abortion initiative that takes place at regular intervals in cities across the U.S. and all the way to the American Samoa. Placed next to Judy and Lisa’s chairs is a large poster portraying an all-American family. At its center, is the silhouette of a child with no face, suggesting that a rightful member is missing, having been the subject of an undue abortion. “We are not here to cause any problem, we are peaceful,” Judy explains. Not at ease with the media, they decline to give their full names and speak to an anonymous campaign coordinator on the phone for a long time before answering any questions.

40 Days for Life began as a local campaign in College Station, Texas, in 2004. “After that first campaign we realized that the number of abortions dropped 28% locally,” says Director for Outreach Shawn Carney. The organization went national in 2007 and, since then, it has conducted three full-fledged campaigns, the latest instance of which occurred at the height of the presidential race in September and October.

Overall, the volunteers of this Christian, yet non-denominational, initiative have appeared in 204 cities in 49 states. The tenets of the movement are: prayer and fasting, constant vigil and community outreach. The 40 Days volunteers rotate every few hours in front of abortion clinics and insure a ‘round-the-clock presence, seven days a week, rain or shine, for forty straight days. “We want women to know they have alternatives and we also try to comfort those who come out having had an abortion,” Carney explains. Simply with its presence, Carney says, 40 Days for Life has changed the mind of over a thousand women thus far and secured “1,100 saves,” babies born after the mother decided to forgo the abortion. According to Carney, women who find themselves in those circumstances are looking for someone to stop them. “We are there to tell them that they are not alone,” he maintains.

Both Judy and Lisa are stay-home moms and sit outside Planned Parenthood wearing jeans and sweaters. To cover today’s watch they will drive 50 miles each way as their homes are in the distant suburbs. “I believe abortion is murder,” argues Judy, “and that Roe v. Wade should be overturned.” This gray-haired grandmother doesn’t admit any exception to her conviction, not in the case of rape nor in the case that a pregnancy might present a risk to the life of the mother. “Pro-life issues are my top priority,” echoes Lisa, the younger and the less talkative of the two.

Planned Parenthood of Birmingham, Alabama

Inside this branch of Planned Parenthood, in a hilly residential neighborhood of Birmingham and overlooking a quiet tree-lined street, the clinic’s CEO doesn’t mind the pair of eyes watching them 24 hours a day. “They are fairly harmless,” Barbara Buchanan says of the visitors who sit at her front door night and day. “The only problem is when they start engaging our clients while they are entering the facility, which they shouldn’t.” Planned Parenthood, the best known provider of women health services and with a presence in all 50 states, is a federation of affiliates operated by a local board of directors. In 2007 Buchanan saw a total of 4,000 women come through the door, for services that ranges from providing contraception and STD testing, to abortion.

Unlike Diane Derzis, who came to her profession very young, driven by personal experiences and a sense of activism, Buchanan arrived at Planned Parenthood only two years ago from the private industry. She holds an MBA and a Master in Public Administration from the University of Alabama, and has extensive management experience in the health care sector. “I’m a life-long card-carrying member of Planned Parenthood,” claims Buchanan. However she then clarifies that she took the job primarily because it represented a wonderful professional opportunity.

Although Buchanan’s protesters Judy and Lisa do not appear to harbor any plans to hurt or harm anybody, not all anti-abortion activists follow the same peaceful path. In fact abortion clinic bombings and slaying of doctors providing this procedure have often adorned the headline news.

Doctor David Gunn was the first one to lose his life, in Pensacola, Fla. On March 10 1993, Michael Griffin saw the doctor stepping out of his car in the parking lot of one of the clinics where Gunn used to work. Griffin shouted, “Don’t kill any more babies!” and shot the doctor three times in the back. New Woman All Women Health Care, Diane Derzis’ facility, was also bombed in 1978. Although nobody was killed, Emily Lyons, the nurse at the time of the attack, lost one eye. For his part, Shawn Carney defends the peaceful approach of 40 Days of Life as a new wave in the anti-abortion movement, claiming that his organization is making history. Everybody who offers to volunteer or work for the initiative must sign an agreement pledging that they will not resort to any form of violence.

The general dedication — which has often turned to rage and hostility – and renewed enthusiasm of the anti-abortion movement, is a little surprising if one considers the fact that the number of abortions performed in the U.S. has been steadily declining since a peak reached in 1990.

According to a 2005 study by the government agency Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1990 there were 1,429,247 registered cases of legally induced abortions, while in 2005 this figure was down to 820,151, just above the levels found in 1973 (615,831 cases), right when abortion was first made legal. Furthermore, the pro-abortion rights movement argues that general family planning, going well beyond abortion to include various forms of contraception and counseling, helps raise happier children and more stable and secure families. “Planned families are healthier, planned children are healthier,” argues Planned Parenthood’s Barbara Buchanan repeating the mantra that gives her organization its name.

Local governments however have been imposing more stringent restrictions. In Alabama, the state legislature recently passed a law requiring women to wait at least 24 hours between the moment they first check in at a clinic and the time when they can have the abortion.

This new regulation bears a particular burden for rural women, who must travel away from their homes to go to a health center, and need to either stay overnight or drive back to their towns and back to the clinic again. Or for those women who cannot take time off from work. For someone who can only check in for a first visit on a Saturday morning, the new law now means that she will have to wait until at least the following Saturday for the procedure to be done. The state-enforced delay can cause troubles for those women who might be close to the 17th week of pregnancy, the legal abortion term in the state.

Moreover, although clinics always provided counseling to their patients to ensure that they were aware of the significance of the decision, Alabama has now produced an extra set of videos and publications which abortion providers are required to show their clients prior to proceeding with an abortion. Such info material, extremely graphic, normally depicts images of fetuses at the late stages of a pregnancy, and is meant to prepare — some would say dissuade and discourage — women for an abortion. “It is so offensive; they think women are stupid and don’t know what a fetus looks like,” complains Diane Derzis.

In Derzis’ experience, very few patients are at all shaken by the explicit imagery that appears on the state-mandated info material. And only a small number of women will feel remorse and regrets after the procedure. “All studies show that women that have not been pressured into getting the abortion, but rather have chosen to do so independently, do not suffer from emotional distress afterwards,” she affirms.

New Woman All Women Health in Birmingham, Alabama

According to Derzis, the belief that a woman who has already made up her mind on getting abortion can be convinced out of it is fundamentally wrong. The truth, Derzis maintains, is that a woman who has decided to terminate an unwanted pregnancy will do so regardless of what it takes. An extremely low number of women who arrive at an abortion clinic are willing to even consider alternatives, such as giving the born child up for adoption, despite being informed about such possibility. In a sense, the legalization of abortion in 1973 simply acknowledged a practice widely used even before and made it safer, guaranteeing the legal and sanitary conditions that would afford a woman to terminate a pregnancy in a facility properly equipped.

Shawn Carney disagrees. “First of all, making something legal doesn’t make it safer,” he says, claiming that the abortion procedure has changed relatively little since before 1973. “And, most importantly, something that might be safe doesn’t necessarily have to be good,” Carney argues, citing slavery as a practice that would not be dangerous but yet unquestionably intolerable. “Abortion is the most merciless act this country has, against the most innocent creature,” states Shawn Carney explaining that the mission of 40 Days for Life is not directly to overturn Roe v. Wade but rather to have a presence on the “frontline,’’ in the local communities where abortion actually takes place.

The intensity of the debate over one of the most controversial legal decisions in the history of the United States, and one that has found a prominent spot in the political discourse is unlikely to abate anytime in the near future, and this is probably the only thing that both sides agree on wholeheartedly.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – Ever since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the United States Government has been hard-pressed to solve the riddle posed by Iran and, more recently, to curb Teheran’s nuclear ambitions and support for international terrorism. The latest American attempt centers on the implementation of economic sanctions tailored to hurt Iran’s private sector. This new refined sanctions policy is an idea of Stuart Levey’s, the Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Department of the Treasury. More sophisticated than the traditional reliance on comprehensive sanctions imposed on countries as a whole, Levey’s creation is yet to yield definite results.

“Entities that engage in nuclear proliferation, as well as terrorist organizations, need access to the global financial system in order to fund their activities,” Levey explained at a recent conference organized in Washington D.C. by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. As a consequence, the thinking is that if the U.S. Government manages to constrain these organizations’ transactions with recognized financial institutions, it can successfully curtail their unlawful activities.

The premise to Levey’s philosophy is that banks and financial institutions are risk-averse and are dependent on their credibility among clients to conduct business in a profitable way. If they were to recognize that a partner engaged in bad behavior, they would sever ties in order to preserve their standing. “In the case of Iran the evidence of bad behavior is very extensive,” Levey commented, claiming that Iran regularly abuses the financial system to pursue uranium enrichment and to fund organizations such as Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Once the Iranian entities involved in this back-door transactions are identified and sanctioned by the U.S. Government, and once their names become known to all financial institutions wishing to comply with international regulations, the latter will necessarily withdraw their support, protecting their business with the Americans and leaving the sinful to scramble for money.

Since the launch of the program, Stuart Levey has visited over 70 financial institutions worldwide, trying to convince them to cut off relations with selected Iranian entities. Since 2006, the U.S. Treasury Department designated, among others, banks Saderat, Sepah and Melli. “There is now a wide consensus that Iran poses a threat to the international financial system,” Levey said, noting that Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) in Iran have dried up because nobody is willing to finance them anymore.

According to former Washington Post correspondent Robin Wright, who was also part of the discussion at the Wilson Center, an example of how the lack of foreign investments is already hurting Iran’s economy can be found in the South Pars gas field. The South Pars field, which Iran shares with Kuwait, is one of the biggest gas reserves in the world. “Yet, many multinational oil companies have been recently cutting their pledged funding and, as a result, Iran’s portion of the field is underdeveloped,” Wright pointed out.

Despite expressing harsh criticism of the Bush Administration’s policies toward Iran, Wright defended Stuart Levey’s endeavor: “Levey’s story is good,” she declared, noting that what started as a U.S.-only strategy is now being slowly embraced by many international partners. These include the European Union and Australia, but also multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and the Financial Action Task Force – the world’s financial watchdog based in Paris and representing the 34 largest economies. Citing her own independent research, Wright said that over 90 major financial institutions worldwide have limited, if not entirely cut off, business with Iran – other than for those goods that are exempt from the sanctions regime, such as agricultural goods and medicines. “Iran has become a dangerous business,” Wright added.

If the slow siege brought onto the regime in Teheran by its financial isolation is progressively hampering Iran’s development, noted the speakers at the Wilson Center, the mismanagement of the country’s own resources perpetrated by the current leadership is rapidly accelerating the crisis. “President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has squandered Iran’s reserves,” Robin Wright said. By some measures, she maintained, Iran currently holds only eight to nine billion dollars in its Oil Stabilization Fund, the country’s rainy-day account. Official government figures put this number around 25 billion, still much less than what it should have been considering the massive spike in gas prices this past summer.

In the meantime, falling oil prices in recent months have threatened Iran’s oil revenues, upon which the country’s economy is heavily dependent. The budget of the Islamic Republic relies on minimum price of about $60 a barrel. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has predicted that Iran will face an unsustainable deficit if oil remained under even $75 per barrel. In any case, Iran cannot afford current prices of around $46 a barrel. President Ahmadinejad’s first response to the crisis has been to lower interest rates below inflation levels, which, for economists worldwide, is the recipe for disaster. “Timing is on the side of the U.S. for the first time,” Wright commented.

As a result of a faltering Iranian economy, an increasing number of prominent figures, from senior clerics, to economists, to former government officials, have spoken out against the performance of President Ahmadinejad. According to both Stuart Levey and Robin Wright, this should be taken as an indication that an internal debate has been unleashed creating strong incentives for the leadership to change its behavior. This, ultimately, is Levey’s and the Department of Treasury’s goal.

However, according to former IMF Executive Jahangir Amuzegar, this interpretation overlooks other important facts. According to Amuzegar, in recent years Teheran has scored a series of successes, especially in the political and economic arena. First of all, Iran emerged from the two U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a much stronger player and is seen increasingly as the predominant power in the region. Teheran also managed to defy resolutions of the UN Security Council without serious repercussions, was invited to join the Gulf Cooperation Council – which ironically was first established to counter Teheran during the Iran-Iraq war – and to take on observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Iran has also been courted by India, China and a few countries in South America, primarily Venezuela, for its unparalleled oil reserves.

At the military level, Amuzegar explained, Iran is equipped today with more developed technology and has increased its number of active nuclear centrifuges. Even from the economic standpoint not all the news from Teheran has been gloomy. Some of its dollar-denominated transactions have simply been moved to Euros and Yen. Iran’s reserves in the European Union have gone up while Teheran’s liability against them has gone down. Big banks that have curtailed service to Iran have been substituted by smaller boutique institutions, especially banks based in the Far East that have few contacts with the U.S. And finally, U.S. exports to Iran have increased more than tenfold under George W Bush’s watch, particularly those traveling via Dubai.

“Iranians are very good at adapting,” commented Robin Wright, who agreed that many businesses already found their way around even the latest round of U.S. sanctions. To avoid the restrictions imposed on them by the international financial system, Iranians have been increasingly relying on an informal structure for transactions, an unofficial version of Western Union that is known as the Hawala system. Anybody can send money into Iran by using a network of private individuals that will pass it along a chain of personal connection until it reaches the final recipient. The money never goes through regular financial institutions and, as a result, is particularly hard to trace. In addition, many Iranian businesses hurt by the sanctions have simply been moved to Dubai, which now has a population of Persians as large as that of locals. Recently, Wright pointed out, Dubai has been collaborating more with the U.S., taking small steps in limiting the number of visas granted to Iranian citizens or enforcing stricter security controls on them. Nevertheless Dubai has become Iran’s number one trading partner and, as a result, is deeply invested in its relation with Teheran.

Sanction regimes also present another, fundamental challenge: their ability, or inability some would say, to hit the right target. According to Stuart Levey’s of the Treasury Department, this new strategy, comprising measures aimed at the private sector, should contribute to drying up financing for Iran’s businesses that operate at the international level. “Although it might not be the perfect target,” Levey conceded, “It is still a pretty good target, since these are people that have means and leverage.” In his opinion, these influential Iranians, unhappy at the consequences of the behavior of their own government, would pressure Teheran into adjusting its policies. As a consequence, they would help the U.S. achieve its goals.

Nevertheless, it appears that even Levey’s carefully crafted sanctions plan is failing to protect ordinary citizens in Iran. “Ali the plumber and Amid the carpenter, who eat rice and bread; that’s who has been hurt by the sanctions,” said Amuzegar, referring to Iran’s staggering inflation and rising cost of staple food. “The people who are suffering are precisely those that the U.S. Government keeps saying will not be touched,” Amuzegar continued, “everybody else is thriving.” The risk, Robin Wright noted, is that the U.S. could be alienating the people who least like the regime already, while government-controlled businesses are much better equipped to weather the storm. “So far we are targeting the 20% of businesses in private hands in Iran. But the 80% of the economy is in the hands of the government,” Wright commented.

Undoubtedly, President Ahmadinejad is facing rising criticism even within Iran, and his position has been severely weakened by the ongoing financial crisis. “If we continue on this trajectory, the regime might start considering Ahmadinejad as a liability,” argued Robin Wright. However, even if Ahmadinejad loses the upcoming presidential elections, scheduled for June of 2009, politics in Iran is not bound to change very much, maintained Amuzegar, especially with regard to nuclear proliferation and support for terrorism. “I agree that Ahmadinejad might lose, but I doubt that anybody different would take his place,” Amuzegar insisted.

Despite the appreciation for Levey’s effort, there is widespread agreement that the ongoing attempts of the U.S. Government aimed at undermining the Iranian leadership might not pay off. While the development of a nuclear weapons program by Iran might still be negotiated and maybe prevented, “the U.S. will have to learn to live with uranium enrichment,” Robin Wright avowed. A recent report by the Peterson Institute of International Economics titled “Economic Sanctions Reconsidered,” says it best: “It’s hard to bully a bully with economic measures,” the authors suggest.

“Of course it hasn’t worked yet,” Stuart Levey said trying to respond to the criticisms of his sanctions plan. “But, as a government official, what I can do is keep going. We are getting the right signals,” he concluded.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition