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The New Times, July 15, 2004

Adios, Joyce Tarnow

Joyce Tarnow is history

Joyce Tarnow's a weird combo: a wiry, gray-haired mother of three who's a feminist, an environmentalist, and slightly wacko about population growth. "Fertility is an environmental issue," she says. "That's why I try to get as many people sterilized as are in my way!" Tarnow also has an interesting stance on immigration: America "can't take all the people in the world," she says. "We need to help nations that can subsist and let others wither on the vine." And how about this sensitive approach to countries like Haiti, which, she says, "has denuded the whole land"? "Stew in your own juices," is her advice.


But now, Tarnow, who for 28 years has been a stalwart in the abortion battle, is closing her business, the Women's Clinic in Fort Lauderdale. "I'm ready to hang it up," the feisty 65-year-old says. Over the years, BBs, red paint, motor oil, and piña colada mix are just a few of the items that have been flung at her windows. She has, at times, worn a flak jacket to work, and her name made the Nuremberg files, an infamous aggregation (some consider it a hit list for anti-abortion activists) of "every person working in the baby slaughter business."

"She's one of the unsung heroes," says Boca Raton-based attorney and rabbi Barry Silver, who worked with Tarnow to win a permanent injunction against the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue, which blockaded Tarnow's clinic in the '80s. "We bankrupted them," Silver says of the anti-abortion loonies, who were forced to pay $235,000 in legal fees. "Joyce was instrumental in that victory."

Tarnow's clinic, which is housed in a pink eyesore on State Road 7 in Fort Lauderdale, provides about 800 to 900 abortions per year. The building has been sold and will soon be replaced by condominiums. Since October 1976, when Tarnow opened the Women's Clinic near Cypress Creek Boulevard and Powerline Road, she's relocated three times; she moved to the present location 11 years ago. Faced with the prospect of packing up again, she says, "The question was, do I want to spend all the money and effort to relocate? No, I do not."

Ladies, don't despair. After the last abortion is performed at the Women's Clinic on August 14, there will still be at least five places in Broward County where you can get a surgical abortion -- including County Commissioner Ben Graber's medical office. By the way, over the past few years, as abortions have decreased throughout the country, the numbers have swelled in South Florida.

Neal Horsley, the keeper of the Nuremberg files, is happily uncapping his marker to cross Tarnow's name off his list. "I pray that more will quit," he says. "It is the only chance they have to avoid the horrible punishment that awaits them for making a living butchering God's children." (Horsley, by the way, also appears in our feature story this week, "Bombs for Babies.")


FSG NOTE: Tarnow is a major funder of Hometown Democracy