Planned Parenthood no stranger to violence, controversy

The motive for America's latest deadly shooting is not yet known, but Planned Parenthood, where three were killed, has been attacked before by people fiercely opposed to abortion.

Friday's violence at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs also left nine people wounded. The alleged shooter, identified as Robert Lewis Dear, 57, was arrested after a six-hour standoff with police.

What inspired the shooter is not clear. But Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers said that because the clinic performs abortions -- a highly divisive issue in America -- this may have had something to do with it.

"You can certainly infer what it may have been in terms of where it took place and the manner in which it took place," Suthers told CNN.

Planned Parenthood is a major provider of women's health services, offering preventive checkups, contraceptives and abortions at its 700 clinics around the United States.

The prominent organization has often been the target of demonstrations and even violence by anti-abortion activists.

The most infamous of these involved bombs placed by a man named Eric Rudolph against abortion clinics in Atlanta in 1997 and Birmingham, Alabama, in 1998. The first wounded six people and the second left one dead and one wounded.

It was Rudolph who also set off the bomb that rocked the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996, killing one person and wounding more than 100.

In 2009, George Tiller, a doctor who performed late-term abortions, was killed while attending church in Kansas. He did not work with Planned Parenthood.
And since July, Planned Parenthood has been at the center of a political controversy and under verbal attack in particular by Republicans.

This come after an anti-abortion activist named David Daleiden spent more than two years secretly filming meetings with Planned Parenthood officials in which he passed himself off as an intermediary that works with abortion clinics and research facilities.

He says the videos show Planned Parenthood officials discussing the sale of fetal tissue and changing rules to leave certain organs of an aborted fetus intact. Selling such parts for a profit is illegal, and the suggestion is that's what Planned Parenthood was doing.

The organization says the videos were doctored and the only mention of money centered on covering Planned Parenthood's costs.

Nevertheless, in October, Planned Parenthood changed its policy and said it would no longer accept even compensation for its costs when it donates an aborted fetus to researchers.

Republicans in Congress tried in vain to cut off the federal funding that Planned Parenthood receives.

Abortion is even on the Supreme Court docket. The court said this month that by June next year it will consider the restrictions that certain states place on women's right to undergo the procedure.

That highly emotive debate will play out right in the middle of the campaign for the presidential election of 2016.
Source: AFP