(C) Florida Phoenix This story was originally published by Florida Phoenix and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . From Roe to Dobbs and Beyond: The Birmingham bombing, and the aftermath • Florida Phoenix [1] ['Devon Heinen', 'Jackie Llanos', 'Kelcie Moseley-Morris', 'More From Author', '- July', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar'] Date: 2024-07-02 This is part two in a four-part series. Diane Derzis had worked in abortion care in Birmingham in the 1980s and 1990s. She had lobbied the Alabama Legislature for abortion rights protections, earning the nickname “The Abortion Queen.” She had faced threats to her life. And protesters who once trapped her and her patients in the clinic. By her early 40s, she was burned out. On her therapist’s advice, she left Alabama and returned to Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she first went to college. In Virginia, life was slower and less exciting compared with what she had just given up. But it was peaceful. She served as an instructor in a vocational higher education setting and worked in real estate. She lived about 15 minutes away from her family and often had Sunday dinner with them. Derzis hadn’t had that kind of time with family in years. But life away from abortion care would prove to be fleeting. Just six months. From Roe to Dobbs and Beyond Diane Derzis’ Lifetime in Abortion Care June 24 was the 2nd anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which ended federal abortion rights protections in the United States. This is the second of a four-part profile of Diane Derzis, the owner of the clinic at the center of the decision, and her lifetime in abortion care. Part 1: Diane Derzis went from working at an abortion clinic in Birmingham in the 1970s to running Summit Medical Center in the 1980s and ’90s. She quickly became acquainted with the need — and the threats. Part 2: Diane Derzis bought an abortion clinic in Birmingham and came face-to-face with violence. Part 3: She had an opportunity to buy an abortion clinic in Mississippi and took it. And that clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was at the center of a lawsuit that ended abortion rights protections in the United States. Part 4: How Derzis navigated the post-Dobbs landscape, and found a new home for the Jackson clinic In 1996, Derzis got a phone call about a clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. Did Derzis want to buy it? The clinic, New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic, would be the first Derzis owned. The clinic wasn’t brand new, and her co-owner was one of the physicians who worked there. Derzis didn’t have to worry about the minute-by-minute, day-by-day operations. She hoped she would be able to do the work she loved in a new way that might address the burnout that led her to leave the field. But that was not how it played out. At least every other day, Derzis was on the phone. Sometimes she’d visit the clinic in person, driving over in her recreational vehicle. Derzis would stay for four or five days, once again the Abortion Queen. On Jan. 29, 1998, Derzis was getting dressed and having some coffee in Harrisonburg. She got a call. On the other end of the line was New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic’s administrator. “The sirens you hear are coming for us,” Derzis remembered the administrator saying. “They’ve blown up the clinic.” The line disconnected. Derzis turned on the TV. Every channel she flipped to had coverage of the bombing. She repeatedly tried calling the administrator back. No answer. It was cloudy and frigid that morning in Birmingham. Robert Sanderson, an off-duty Birmingham police officer, was at the clinic, working a shift as a security guard. Outside the front door, before any patients had arrived for appointments, Sanderson noticed something odd in the shrubbery. Just then, New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic’s head nurse, Emily Lyons, was at the door about to enter. As Sanderson leaned over to investigate, a man named Eric Rudolph, watching from across the street, used a remote control to detonate the bomb. It was 7:33 a.m. The blast was felt for miles. Sanderson was killed by the bomb. Lyons was severely injured. The explosion damaged her eyes, tore off teeth and eyelashes, and put a hole in her chest. Her face was full of rocks. The right side of her skull was broken. The bomb shattered her left leg, ripped skin from her shins, and burned her right arm. Shrapnel lodged itself in her chest. The bomb was housed in a plastic toolbox. The toolbox had been purchased at Walmart. Nails and gravel made up at least some of the shrapnel that was inside the bomb. Shrapnel reached the chairs and the front desk inside the clinic’s lobby on the ground floor and even up into a second floor waiting area. Derzis doesn’t think the bomb was designed to damage the clinic. Instead, she said, it was made to kill patients and staff. At the time of the bombing, Rudolph was 31 years old and a resident of Murphy, North Carolina. Later that year, the U.S. Department of Justice would charge Rudolph with the 1996 bombing at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia, that killed one person and injured at least 111 others, and bombings that happened in 1997 at an area health clinic in Atlanta and an Atlanta nightclub. The latter injured five people. By the time the Justice Department announced those charges, Rudolph had already been charged for the bombing attack at New Woman All Women Clinic. • • • Instantly that morning in Virginia, Derzis thought the bombing was her fault. “Clinics in the country at that time, most of them were very quiet. People didn’t do press,” she said. “It was just quiet, but that’s not how I thought it should be. I thought it should be not tucked aside and shameful, but it should be talked about. There should be a face there, and there’s someone to answer questions and, you know, and all of that. But all of that also had a price, ’cause I called attention.” People at the clinic paid the price for Derzis being who she was, she felt. After all, there were three clinics in Birmingham at the time, and Rudolph chose hers. Derzis had to get to the clinic the morning of the bombing. She got a flight out of Charlottesville, Virginia, to Birmingham, with a connecting flight in Atlanta. While watching the news in Atlanta and waiting to board her flight, an agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives walked over and introduced himself. They’d sit with each other on the flight to Birmingham and talk for the whole flight. A crowd of journalists was waiting for Derzis at the airport in Birmingham. Hollering at her, they tried to get a comment. They stunned her. She wasn’t expecting them — and there were so many of them. Skipping them, Derzis headed straight to her clinic. But she couldn’t get to it. Streets were barricaded off for three or four blocks. • • • Derzis didn’t see any option but to stay in Birmingham and make sure the clinic was running again. She needed to do something positive. And there was an emotional-support element, too. She wanted to help. The would reopen a week after the bombing. On reopening day — Feb. 5, 1998 — the clinic’s windows were still damaged. Replacements had to be specially ordered. A handful of TV satellite trucks were there. Friends of hers — owners of other clinics — were there, too. Two were from North Carolina, one from Atlanta. They helped out. Despite everything, the clinic’s phones rang nonstop that day, just like normal. Women came in for care, even from as far as Huntsville, a 90-minute drive. Most of the women that showed up didn’t even know a bombing had occurred. “That normalcy, it was such — I don’t even know. You think about, you know, Emily’s fighting for her life, Sandy’s dead, and we’re open and back in business,” Derzis said. “It was just surreal.” Derzis would stay in Birmingham for about a week or so after her clinic reopened. “The clinic didn’t need me there,” Derzis explained. “That healing had to be from within.” Her first week home at her farm in Virginia, Derzis was antsy. Naturally a big reader, she started devouring books left and right. She slept little. This would go on for weeks. And she couldn’t shake the thought that the bombing was her fault. Randomly, she’d start crying. Crying made her think she was weak — Derzis doesn’t like weakness. Family dinners during those first few weeks back home were filled with silence from her loved ones about the bombing. That silence ate Derzis up. Derzis had hardly known Lyons before the bombing. But she visited Lyons during her monthlong stay in the hospital. For at least two of those weeks in the hospital, Lyons was on a ventilator and in a medically induced coma. Shortly after the explosion, her left eye had to be removed along with some of her intestine. The first time after the bombing that Lyons remembers seeing Derzis was after her stint in the hospital and then a monthlong stay in rehab for physical therapy. Derzis visited her at her house. She was in a hospital bed in the living room. The second time, they went out to dinner. Lyons’s husband, Jeff, went, too. Lyons was in a wheelchair. Jeff had to read the menu to her. And she had to have help with eating. The first year after the bombing was physically challenging for Lyons. There was physical therapy. She had to relearn how to walk up the stairs in their three-story home. Doctor visits took place every week. A nurse would come to the house and do dressing changes every day. Lyons remembers the nurse cleaning holes in Lyons’s legs with Q-tips and peroxide before applying gauze soaked in iodine. She would try to take a pain pill before the visits, “because it’s like pouring salt in a wound,” Lyons said. “The fire is unimaginable,” she said. “And then at nighttime, Jeffrey would have to do the same thing. And he hated to see that he had to cause pain.” Seeing Lyons in that first year was a reality check for Derzis. She said Lyons’ suffering put her own struggles in perspective. Over the years, Lyons would have more than 50 surgeries resulting from the bombing. At some point, a doctor told her he had never seen anything outside of war like what Lyons endured. In one operation, in April 2023, a piece of plastic — about a quarter of an inch in size — was removed from Lyons’s sinus. That piece of plastic was part of the tool box that the bomb was housed in. It had been in her sinus for 25 years. Though faded, there was still a hint of green to it. Dinners with Lyons and Jeff would continue over the years for Derzis. They’d become friends. • • • The morning of the bombing at New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic, Doug Jones was headed to Birmingham’s Southside neighborhood. Jones was the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama at the time. He’d later become a U.S. senator, representing Alabama as a Democrat. He had a breakfast meeting with a journalist from the Birmingham News to get to. They were going to talk about Jones’s first five months on the job. On the way to breakfast, he heard about the bombing. Jones made his way to the scene. Robert Sanderson’s dead body was still there when he arrived. A task force was created that morning to work on the investigation into the attack. Birmingham’s police department, the FBI, and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were all part of it. Jones helped coordinate things for the task force: “where investigations should go, who would be doing those investigations and how, as well as the legal ramifications that always come up,” he explained. “For instance, when you needed to get a search warrant, when you need to get an arrest warrant, when you need to get a material witness warrant, when to go public.” That morning, a student attending the University of Alabama at Birmingham noticed something. “This was an 18-year-old kid, OK? This was an 18-year-old kid at the time, who heard the bomb,” Jones said. “He was doing his laundry in the basement of a dorm, heard the explosion, looked out the window, saw people moving toward the plume of smoke from the bombing — except for one person, who appeared to be wearing a disguise and was walking very hurriedly away. And he thought that was very suspicious, and he went outside, walked around his car, [and] saw him.” That was Eric Rudolph. But then the student lost sight of him. After a little while, the student got another person to help search. Before long, the two spotted Rudolph getting into a gray Nissan pickup truck. And they’d go on to get the truck’s license plate information. “And that’s how we identified him. Of course, we didn’t know Eric Rudolph’s name at the time. We knew that Eric Rudolph owned the truck, but we weren’t able to identify him, per se,” Jones said. “But I’m tellin’ you, without the fortitude of that 18-year-old kid, I don’t know if that case would ever have been solved.” Rudolph would get charged with the bombing within weeks. By then, he was on the run. During his time on the case, Jones interacted with Derzis. He remembers she was thankful for the work that law enforcement was doing on the case. In 2003, the manhunt for Rudolph came to an end. Five years had come and gone since he bombed Derzis’s clinic and then disappeared. Finally, he was caught. A journalist called Derzis within an hour of Rudolph’s apprehension. She was at the clinic, and hadn’t heard yet. Thank God, she thought. In 2005, Rudolph pleaded guilty to the bombings. He was sentenced to two life terms behind bars. Next: Diane Derzis gets an opportunity to buy an abortion clinic in Jackson, Mississippi — one that will be at the center of the most important Supreme Court case of the 21st Century. This story first appeared in the Alabama Reflector, with the Phoenix a member of the nonprofit States Newsroom network. [END] --- [1] Url: https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/07/02/from-roe-to-dobbs-and-beyond-the-birmingham-bombing-and-the-aftermath/ Published and (C) by Florida Phoenix Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/floridaphoenix/