 One Nation, Divided Under God Valentina Pasquali – Washington Prism Birmingham, AL – From inside this box-shaped maroon-painted building on the Southside 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. “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. 
40 days fro Life 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. |
