Life

A Former PP Employee Tweeted Her Experience

by Jaime Lutz

In response to the shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood on Friday, Nov. 27, Bryn Greenwood (@bryngreenwood), a former employee of a Kansas Planned Parenthood, took to Twitter to talk about the acts of what she calls "terrorism" she survived while working at Planned Parenthood. The kicker? This specific Planned Parenthood clinic didn't even perform abortion services, according to Greenwood — but that didn't save it from the ire of anti-abortion extremists.

In the three years Greenwood worked at the clinic, she says, she endured bomb threats (and actual bombs), attempted arson (while people were inside the building), butyric acid stink bombs (which are actually more dangerous than they sound — according to Mic, butyric acid can cause burns and respiration problems), and much more. She also worked in the clinic of George Tiller, an abortionist who was the frequent target of extremist violence — including a murder attempt, even before he was assassinated by an anti-abortion terrorist while attending church in 2009.

As Bustle's Abby Johnston noted on Saturday, it's important we recognize that the Colorado Springs shooting could be domestic terrorism. After all, someone who opens fire on a clinic is not merely an "activist." But Greenwood says it better than I do. Here's everything she went through:

What Greenwood endured is, unfortunately, all too common at Planned Parenthood centers and other women's health clinics across the country. For that perspective, enter Michelle Kinsey Bruns (@ClinicEscort), who laid out a timeline yesterday of 100 instances of anti-abortion violence over the past four decades. "A stunning number of Twitter cretins accused me — & maybe you? — this weekend of 'making up' the US anti-abortion violence problem," Bruns tweeted. "My next 100 tweets will be the citations they needed—from 4 decades of antichoice violence, near-misses, threats & incitements." She used the hashtag #is100enough — as in, "if 100 examples won't convince you that antichoice violence is real, how many do you need?" she said.

You can check out the Storify for that right here. The magnitude of the attacks against clinics is stunning, but I'm particularly taken with how Bruns ends up summing up all that violence. "Operation Rescue had a saying: 'If you believe abortion is murder, act like it's murder.' Now, what could that possibly mean?" she tweeted. "It's WELL PAST TIME to stop acting like any incident of clinic violence occurs in a void & inflammatory rhetoric plays no part."

And she's absolutely right.