Rebuilding a Planned Parenthood After a Domestic Terrorist Attack
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Rebuilding a Planned Parenthood After a Domestic Terrorist Attack

In September, the Planned Parenthood in Pullman, Washington was firebombed—even though it doesn't offer abortion services. In the following five months, the community rallied together to help reopen its doors.

It was 3:30 in the morning when someone smashed the window and tossed a firebomb into the lobby of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Pullman, WA. The lab was the first to go up in flames, and soon all four exam rooms were burning too.

The fire raged for three hours, incinerating the front desk and erasing any semblance of a health care center. The building was still standing as the sun rose on September 4 of last year, but everything inside had been torched.

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There were no injuries and no arrests. Law enforcement still has a $10,000 reward for any identifying information about the arsonist.

Read More: An Interview with a Convicted Abortion Clinic Arsonist

Authorities quickly classified the fire as an arson, which came as no surprise to the regional Planned Parenthood affiliate. Reproductive health clinics have endured over 180 arsons since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973; another Washington clinic had even been bombed in 1996. But the Pullman Planned Parenthood facility never provided abortions: Patients came to obtain contraception, to get tested, to have Pap tests and pelvic exams. That would seem to make it an unusual target for pro-lifers—either violent or peaceful.

A note on the fence near the Pullman clinic. All photos by Quinn Russell Brown.

Overnight, 3,000 patients lost their reproductive health care and family planning services. The closest Planned Parenthood was in the city of Spokane, 80 miles north, and that clinic didn't have weekend hours.

Though the Pullman clinic was built in 2011, Planned Parenthood has been serving the city for three decades in shared spaces with other healthcare providers. Contraceptive-seeking students often came to the Pullman facility from Washington State University (up the street five minutes) and the University of Idaho (a 15-minute drive across the border). Older patients relied on the clinic for general health care. Jennifer Murray, 38, had called to schedule a breast screening the day before the arson. She took a half-day off work and went to Spokane instead. "It's shocking and frightening," Murray says. "None of us knew there was that much anti-Planned Parenthood sentiment here."

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As jarring as the violence was, it hadn't occurred in a vacuum. A rowdy chorus of anti-choice activism had been ringing throughout the region—inspired by the deceptive videos released by Dave Daleiden in an attempt to discredit Planned Parenthood's fetal organ donation program—and protests sprung up in Pullman and Spokane shortly before the attack.

The anti-abortion movement and the extremist groups associated with it have been re-energized in the aftermath of the fraudulent Daleiden video. After the initial release of the "sting" videos, in July of last year, clinics in Illinois, Louisiana and California were attacked with firebombs. Then in October, a man named Robert Dear opened fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic Colorado, killing three people and wounding nine others. After his arrest Dear reportedly said, "No more baby parts," a reference to the Daleiden videos.

Two weeks before the arson at the Pullman site, there was a large anti-abortion rally attended by over a hundred people, but no red flags were raised, according to law enforcement. "People have the constitutional right to protest," Pullman police commander Chris Tennant. says. "Most of the protests that were done prior to the arson were faith-based and family-oriented. There weren't any bad apples that came out of that."

"We had never had any kind of protest in Pullman before," Tanya Riordan, vice president of community outreach for the regional Planned Parenthood affiliate, says. "A couple people here and there might come out and hold signs—maybe five times. We hadn't received threats, animosity, nothing."

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In the five months since the arson, supporters in the community and donors across the country have rallied to reopen the clinic's doors.

The fire gutted the clinic on a Friday. By Monday morning, clinic manager Frances Jones had set up a tent in the parking lot, later relocating the pop-up provider to a small space in a strip mall. "It was really just to say, 'We're here, we're a presence, we're not going away,'" Jones says. "It had this great outpouring of support from the community that really powered us forward from that point on." Patients came by to get prescriptions and condoms. Others stopped to give hugs or hang notes on the fence, and some offered to bring tools to help rebuild. During an open house, local faith leaders offered a blessing.

However, Planned Parenthood did struggle to rebuild the firebombed clinic in the months that followed. One by one, contractors contacted by the reproductive health organization cited safety concerns or philosophical differences.

And, while the clinic received support from many in the community, some voices stayed conspicuously silent. Nathan Weller, a Pullman city council member and the vice chair of the county Democrats, says he's disappointed in the response of the city. Weller says he emailed the mayor and the city supervisor on the day of the arson to ask if there would be a temporary location for the clinic.

"I was essentially told that I should not come to such decisions so quickly," Weller says. "For me, that amounts to pretty much saying, 'Yes, the services are disrupted, but we really can't do anything about it.'"

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Weller also expected a stronger condemnation of the attack. He said the city's only statement was to announce that an investigation had begun. When Planned Parenthood tried to temporarily rent space in a county building, the county denied the request.

Despite the setbacks, Planned Parenthood and its supporters raised $250,000 and repaired the facility. On the first Friday of February, five months after the attack, the clinic reopened. New safety measures include outdoor lighting, upgraded cameras, and heavy-duty windows. There's also a new employee, an on-site security guard, which is an increasingly common sight at clinics across the country.

Patients appear undeterred by the violence. They've booked all of the appointments for weeks in advance, and walk-ins still wander in, whether or not they have insurance.

On a recent afternoon, a pair of college students named Nick and Brady pulled up to the clinic and laughed as they walked inside. They left with a bag of condoms a few minutes later.

Asked why they came to the clinic, Nick said something you hear from Planned Parenthood patients across the country—something that reveals the futility of four decades of violence: "When you think of Planned Parenthood," he said as he looked at a building that had once been engulfed in flames, "you think of a safe place."