By Tim Connor

On the last day of May last year George Tiller was handing out bulletins at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, when an anti-abortion activist by the name of Scott Roeder shot him in the head. Dr. Tiller was the director at the Wichita Women’s Health Care clinic. He was 67. His death was a shocking reminder of just how combustible passions are in America when it comes to the matter of abortion.

Another reminder, albeit without bloodshed, came nineteen days later. It was in the form of a jam-packed hearing in Pasco, Washington. Pasco is the seat of Franklin County in south central Washington, a small city known for its rich railroad history, a vibrant Hispanic population, and triple digit summer heat.

“The temperature was nearly as high as the emotions inside Pasco City Hall on Thursday night,” wrote Michelle Dupler, a reporter for the Tri-City Herald, “as more than 200 people crammed into a meeting room–and spilled over outside–to voice their opinions about a proposed Planned Parenthood facility.”

The debates and protests over the clinic would go on for months, and each time the topic was on the agenda, the hearing room would overflow. When the Pasco council met to cast its final vote in mid-November, Spokane civil rights lawyer Jeffry Finer was seated near the rear of the hall, having picked out a seat from where he could get out swiftly, if need be. In this precaution he was simply drawing on his extensive American “culture war” experience.

“If something goes wrong,” he explained later, “I want to be near an exit door.”

Like everyone else in the packed in crowd, Finer was there to listen to how the Pasco City Council, having to vote on a charged issue in the midst of an election year, would decide. Planned Parenthood isn’t planning on performing abortions at its new clinic in west Pasco, but they haven’t ruled it out. But even if they had ruled it out, it’s doubtful the passions of opponents would have been quelled.

“People flooded out of the council chambers after the 5-2 decision,” the newspaper reported following the November 16th vote, “shouting, ‘Babies are a gift from the Lord, and you all voted to kill them’.”

Against the flames of such rhetoric, there were other sides to the story.

After the Pasco Council finally voted to issue the permit for the Planned Parenthood Clinic on West Court Street, there were shouts that “Babies are a gift from the Lord and you all voted to kill them.” But there were other sides to the story.

If Anna Franks is at all bent or disheartened by the siege in Pasco you can’t see it in her face or hear it in her voice. She’s been the executive director for what is now Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington & North Idaho for five years. A petite woman who grew up in Alaska, she looks younger than her forty years and there’s no hint of a grimace when she’s asked about the challenge that the Pasco clinic presented.

Anna Franks

“We take the attitude that we try to be unabashedly happy about what we do,” she says. “How can you not want healthy families and healthy communities? Because that’s what we’re creating.”

Here are some of the state-compiled statistics that Planned Parenthood and local health officials were looking at when the organization made the decision that women in Pasco needed their own clinic:

*Nearly half the pregnancies in Franklin County are unintended.

*The teen pregnancy rate of 94.4 per 1,000 is nearly double that of Spokane County.

*Among Washington counties, Franklin ranks third highest in the incidence of chlamydia, a sexually-transmitted disease that leads to a number of serious health problems for women, including increasing their susceptibility to HIV infection.

Because of the disproportionately low-income clientele that Planned Parenthood serves in south-central Washington, the organization’s clinics are often the only place where women will come in contact with professional medical care providers during the course of a year. To make a broader point about how valuable Planned Parenthood services can be in controlling governmental costs, Franks notes that In nearby Yakima County, where she has her office, a whopping 76% of births are funded by Medicaid. (The percentage in Franklin County is just below that, at 73%. By comparison, in Spokane County, it’s substantially lower, at 54.3%.)

Franks’s point is simple: in providing contraception, not only can Planned Parenthood prevent unwanted pregnancies to ease the burden on women and families, but preventing unwanted pregnancies saves tax dollars.

“One dollar for family planning,” she says, “translates into over four dollars in future savings when you consider the costs of maternal care, child care and other publicly funded costs.”

Most people packing the meetings in Pasco were opposed to Planned Parenthood. But among a sizable minority of supporters was a top official from the Benton-Franklin Health District who testified that the clinic would offer important reproductive health services that the health district wasn’t able to provide. Strong support also came from the editorial page of the local newspaper, the Tri-City Herald, which emphasized the public health needs for the clinic in Pasco, and chided opponents for making “far-fetched” and “absurd” arguments in their efforts to block a permit.

Franks was hardly new to controversy when she arrived in Yakima in 2005. By then, she’d been Planned Parenthood’s state-wide director in Alaska for nearly seven years. Before that, she’d worked out of Anchorage and Fairbanks doing education and disability coordination, serving children in remote parts of the state.

The political climate for family planning in conservative Alaska is tough, but Franks found it difficult even to garner political support for Head Start funding when she was working to provide early education, health and nutrition services to poor Alaskan children. It didn’t seem to matter that the state was wealthy with oil revenues, she recalls. “Some of the legislators wouldn’t even talk to us.”

As for the emotionally-charged rhetoric and conflicts and that come with the territory when providing reproductive health services, Franks recalls how she answered her mother’s concerns when she told her she was taking the Planned Parenthood job in Alaska.

“I said, ‘mom, I could be teaching in a school where a kid brings a gun. It could happen anywhere, any time. So, even if I were a teacher I would risk being shot by some crazy kid.’”

Franks says she’d never experienced anything quite like the passion-filled hearings in Pasco last year. But the conflict wasn’t a surprise.

“All the signs were that we would face some resistance,” she said.

When asked how she steeled herself during the heat of the conflict, she talked about her responsibilities to her 150 member staff and how important it was, in her mind, to not let it get the better of them.

“It’s not for every one, I guess,” she said.

Although she noticed that much of the stridency in the protests against Planned Parenthood in Pasco came from smaller, fundamentalist religious groups, it was also clear they were facing opposition from the Catholic church and the all-male Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus (the Knights take their name from Christopher Columbus.) The church itself turned out to own some of the best prospective properties, she says, and had attached restrictive clauses to them. She says the Knights did their share to promote opposition to the clinic by taking the city’s official land use hearing notice, republishing it, and sending it out as a mailer to encourage people to turn out in protest.

“You either like Planned Parenthood, or you don’t,” she says about the protesters. “We do more to prevent abortion than anyone else. It’s not the protesters out on the street that are preventing abortion. Ninety-five percent of our clients come in off the street to prevent a pregnancy, to get birth control. Most don’t get pregnant because of us. And, thus, they don’t need an abortion.”

But, she added, “that doesn’t matter to people,” she says. “The same people that protest, they don’t believe in birth control.”

One of the frustrations Franks said she and her staff had to deal with is that none of the real estate agents they tried to partner with in Pasco seemed particularly eager to help them find a suitable location. In our interview she joked that a realtor had proposed showing her a property on the runway at the Pasco airport.

Finally, and without the help of any of the local real estate professionals, they found the site they wanted. It’s a spacious building  on Court Street, one of Pasco’s main thoroughfares, a few blocks from where U.S. Highway 395 approaches the north bank of the Columbia River.

Anna Franks at the door of the building where the Pasco clinic will open this summer.

The building was purchased in May and because the City of Pasco requires special use permits for non-profit entities, a permit application was filed shortly thereafter. The battle in Pasco would be over the permit–the culture war funneled into what would normally be a dry and boring land use permit process.

National Planned Parenthood has first-rate attorneys in New York and Washington D.C. who are used to all sorts of legal conflicts that arise around the organizations’ clinics. But Franks says she and her staff were looking for local counsel to represent them in the hearings in Pasco. They were having trouble finding a local lawyer when Franks learned about Jeffry Finer from Dr. Stacie Bering, a board member and former medical director for Planned Parenthood’s regional organization.

Bering is married to Finer and the two of them have been down roads like this before. A quarter century ago, the physician and her new lawyer-husband found themselves in a fierce, high-profile battle as anti-abortion picketers verbally and sometimes physically accosted women trying to enter Bering’s obstetrics and gynecology practice at the Sixth Avenue Medical Building on Spokane’s lower South Hill. The moral and political arguments were the familiar ones, and, at the height of the siege, Finer took the threats against the couple so seriously that, among other precautions, he used a mirror on a stick to help search his car for bombs.

There was also an important legal question to resolve, which is where the protester’s rights to free speech unjustly infringed upon patients’ rights to privacy in seeking medical care. It was one of Finer’s first cases as a new lawyer, Bering v. SHARE, and it went to the Washington Supreme Court. In 1986, the court ruled that “time, place and manner” restrictions on picketing at the clinic were necessary and warranted to protect children entering the medical building (often for health services unrelated to Bering’s clinic) from the harmful effects of highly disturbing speech, and to protect women’s right to an abortion.

“I’m not a land use attorney. But Rick is. Rick and I don’t get to do much work together but here was an opportunity where I could go across the hall and say, ‘Rick, what the hell is LUPA and why should I care?’  And he gave me the confidence that I wouldn’t get strung out or sucker punched by something I didn’t understand.” —Jeffry Finer.

When Finer argued the case before the Supreme Court, even the inside of the courtroom was ringed with Washington State Patrolmen, spaced every five feet. The case, and the circumstances around it, received national attention and, for a while, Finer and Bering made appearances around the country sharing their experience and offering advice on how to safeguard access to clinics.

After Franks made the connection Finer through Bering, the news got an enthusiastic response from Planned Parenthood’s legal team.

“Our attorneys really wanted Jeffry,” she said. “I think they knew of him going way back.”

If there was a complication, it was only that Finer doesn’t specialize in land use, and the legal challenge to the clinic in Pasco was shaping up as a land use battle.

“I’m not a land use attorney,” Finer said. “But Rick [CFJ attorney Rick Eichstaedt] is. Rick and I don’t get to do much work together but here was an opportunity where I could go across the hall and say, ‘Rick, what the hell is LUPA and why should I care?’ [LUPA is Washington's Land Use Petition Act]. And he gave me the confidence that I wouldn’t get strung out or sucker punched by something I didn’t understand. That’s always a fear. If you’re going into a new area of law you better know it well, or you better stay away. So Rick gave me a lot of confidence.”

On paper, at least, the issuance of a permit to Planned Parenthood to operate its clinic on West Court was pretty straightforward. At least that’s what the city’s planning staff saw when it recommended to the Pasco Planning Commission last June that the permit be granted. But by then, thanks in part to the Knights of Columbus campaign to pressure the elected commissioners, political opposition to the permit had solidified. The commission ultimately voted in mid-September to reject the permit.

The stated basis for opposing the permit was essentially that the clinic would lead to upset and inconvenience and perhaps even public safety problems on West Court because it would attract opposition.

That’s the issue the Tri-City Herald zeroed in on in its November 2nd editorial: “Protests Shouldn’t stop Planned Parenthood clinic.”

“The foes of a proposed Planned Parenthood facility in Pasco continue to make illogical arguments to prevent the clinic from opening there–even participating in the very protests they fret about,” the editorial began. “The city planning commission bought into some of the silliness in September when it recommended that the city deny a permit needed to open the clinic on Court Street, citing the potential for protests outside the facility as a primary concern.”

When asked how she steeled herself during the heat of the conflict, Anna Franks talked about her responsibilities to her 150 member staff and how important it was, in her mind, to not let it get the better of them. “It’s not for every one, I guess.”

One effect of the obstructionist reasoning from the protesters and the planning commission is that it sparked donations to Planned Parenthood, statewide.

“It made people angry on the west side. It made them angry in Spokane,” Franks said. “The very idea [that the actions of picketers would be used to deny a permit for the business being picketed] really sparked something in people. So that’s a good thing. It definitely raised awareness.”

From a legal standpoint, Finer welcomed the argument.

“The irony that made Anna cross-eyed,” Finer says, “was the picketers saying they’re going to cause a problem, so we can’t have the clinic. Well, yeah, but I liked that they were saying it because it was a dead-end legally. In front of a federal judge I had little doubt we would win, although I wasn’t sure how we’d do in front of an elected county judge.”

He would get to find out, but by the time a challenge to the clinic reached a Franklin County Superior Court judge in February of this year, the issue was a bit different. At the packed hearing in November, when the Pasco council was preparing to vote, Finer listened as one of the more conservative members of the council opened his remarks by saying he’d been reading up on the law.

“‘I gotta tell you,’” Finer recalls the councilman saying. “‘It doesn’t matter what I think about Planned Parenthood and abortion. This is a land use case. If we vote against this, we’re going to get sued and we’re going to lose, and we’re going to pay their attorneys.’”

It was precisely the argument Anna Franks had put before the council in a letter a week before the vote. Though Franks had been told by her researchers that the Pasco council almost always votes to adopt planning commission recommendations, this time was an exception. They over-rode the commission recommendation and voted to approve the permit.

The expected legal challenge to the permit came on behalf of four Pasco residents, who decided they would contest the permit under the states Land Use Petition Act (LUPA). They had 21 days to file and serve the appeal. It came on the 22nd day.

“My secretary’s really good,” Franks said. “We saved the postmark on the envelope.”

“We couldn’t believe it,” Finer said. “We were stunned. It was, ‘oh, my, God, he [the opposing lawyer] missed the deadline!’ Now, we would have won anyway, but we might not have won for a long time. It could have gone to the state court of appeals and Anna would have had an empty building sitting there where Planned Parenthood is making payments but receiving no income, and that’s a financial hemorrhage.”

“The irony that made Anna cross-eyed was the picketers saying they’re going to cause a problem, so we can’t have the clinic. Well, yeah, but I liked that they were saying it because it was a dead-end legally. In front of a federal judge I had little doubt we would win, although I wasn’t sure how we’d do in front of an elected county judge.”—Jeffry Finer

One irony in the postscript of the story is that when Finer attended the hearing on the appeal, he listened as the Franklin County judge disclosed, from the bench, that he had just attended his church’s “sanctity of life” celebration the previous weekend and that he had strong personal feelings about the subject. He then asked if either side wanted him to recuse himself.

“I don’t,” Finer remembers thinking to himself. He didn’t object, and later listened as the judge essentially repeated Finer’s argument back to him; that he was elected to sit on the bench by virtue of the people of Washington, and because he was “a judge and not a king,” he could not bend the procedural rules to hear a case that was not properly before the court.

“He had no choice,” Finer says.

The abrupt end to the challenge was a relief to Planned Parenthood and, right now there are no legal obstacles to the clinic’s planned opening on West Court Street in July.

“If feels good,” Franks says, “but in the back of your head you’re wondering, ‘what’s next?’”

For Franks and Planned Parenthood, there have been silver linings to the struggle in Pasco in addition to the added donations the organization received after the planning commission rejected the permit. They have consistently heard from many others in the Pasco community, including supportive church leaders who turned out to testify at the contentious hearings, that the clinic is welcome and needed by the people it will serve.

Then there’s this counterpoint: Planned Parenthood has recently opened up another clinic, in Sunnyside, a town of 15,000 about midway between the Tri-Cities and Yakima in the Yakima Valley.

“After we bought and built on the site,” Franks says, “we were featured in the Sunnyside newspaper for being the largest contributor to the local economy for the quarter. And when we opened the clinic, the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce co-sponsored our open house. To this day, we’ve had no protesters in Sunnyside.”

–CFJ