Chattanooga: Prolifers Buy Abortion Center

Group outbids abortionist, closes last city clinic.

If you can’t beat them, buy them.

For years, prolife activists had stood outside Chattanooga Women’s Clinic on abortion days, pleading with women who entered the facility and praying to God to end the killing of unborn life.

Such requests are no longer necessary. Prolifers recently purchased the property, making Chattanooga, Tennessee, population 433,000, the largest city in the United States without an abortion clinic. An existing crisis pregnancy center across the street will move into the building, with long-range plans of incorporating a national memorial to aborted babies.

Prolifers say circumstances leading to the purchase are nothing short of miraculous.

Chattanooga Women’s Clinic opened in 1975, and, for its first decade, the community begrudgingly tolerated it, even though the facility and its operators had been sued five times in that span. But in 1984, a group of about 50 prolifers began picketing and sidewalk counseling at the facility.

The clinic filed a harassment lawsuit against the prolifers, resulting in a permanent injunction prohibiting the prolifers from approaching women in the parking lot who had abortion appointments. The strategy of yelling so the women could hear them did not prove persuasive.

A different strategy

Podiatrist Dennis Bizzoco had been one of those who picketed and counseled at the clinic for nine years. He says a turning point came four years ago when an interdenominational group of 15 men began to meet every Sunday morning for an hour of prayer on the clinic grounds.

“Every Sunday we would ask the Lord to give us the land,” says Bizzoco. But activists did more than pray about bringing an end to abortion at the facility.

Prolifers distributed fliers near the clinic exposing its problems, and they opened a crisis pregnancy center, AAA Women’s Services, across the street. Within four years, the crisis pregnancy center was seeing nearly 1,800 women annually. By 1989, Christian activists had become bolder, blocking access to the clinic in rescues. The number of weekly abortions at the facility subsequently dropped.

Meanwhile, the two sisters who ran the business died of cancer, one in 1991 and one this year.

Raising the funds

In April, Ed Perry, the itinerant abortionist who had been leasing the quarters, signed an agreement with landlord Porter Yarborough to buy the property for $254,000, subject to bankruptcy-court approval. The Pro Life Majority Coalition of Chattanooga (ProMaCC) caught wind of the deal and found a Christian creditor—who was owed $130—to object, saying there was a better offer.

The ProMaCC board met, faced with the prospect of raising more than a quarter of a million dollars within a week to stop the proposed sale. By word of mouth, pledges poured in from those wanting the abortion facility closed. Even a lawyer in court on another matter who heard about it pledged $10,000. Within a week, $300,000 had been raised, and the matter went to auction in bankruptcy court.

Bidding began in $5,000 increments above the original $254,000 offer. Perry stopped at $289,000 and ProMaCC purchased the property for $294,000—in cash. Only 80 donors, all of them local, contributed, says ProMaCC president Bob Borger, a Presbyterian Church in America pastor.

“No man or woman can take credit,” says Patricia Lindley, ProMaCC vice-president. “God alone orchestrated a divergent group of prolifers to work together.”

Subsequently, the Chattanooga Women’s Clinic dissolved as a corporation. Prolifers are confident another abortion facility will not open in the city, because new clinics must go through a lengthy public-hearing process in order to obtain a certificate of need.

Although 90 percent of Chattanooga abortions were done at that clinic, seven doctors in the city still do the procedure. Some prolifers have targeted the two biggest providers for picketing.

One of the earliest protesters was Charles Wysong, a father of 13 children. He started American Rights Coalition six years ago, seeking out women who had been injured by abortion. Initially, Wysong erected 15 billboards in the city, urging women to phone about their complications from abortion. The group has been instrumental in closing a dozen abortion clinics around the country. A key to success, Wysong says, is getting churches, especially pastors, to realize their responsibilities in fighting abortion. “We have 4,500 babies a day being slaughtered, and we’re praying for Aunt Suzie’s knee to get better.”

Building plans

Borger says half of the 8,600-square-foot building will house AAA Women’s Services. “We’re taking a place that delivered death spiritually and physically to babies and giving them life,” Bizzoco says.

The building’s other half will become a national abortion memorial. The first phase will feature construction of a giant garden “wailing wall” and chapel, a place for women to grieve and find healing. The wall will contain plaques commemorating the 35,000 unborn babies who died in the building over 18 years.

A third phase of the memorial will be an “Image of God Center,” dedicated not only to aborted babies but to Jews who died in the Holocaust and to black American slaves. The museum is scheduled to open in January 1995 after $1 million is raised.

By John W. Kennedy.

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