ARTICLES
May 2001 ARTICLES
Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Prayers in Chamber of Horrors
Pro-lifers Take Credit for Closing Two Southern California Abortion Clinics
By Emma Trujillo
After more than 25 years in the child-killing business, an abortion clinic in Cypress has closed. The Family Planning Associates Clinic on the corner of Grindly and Orange streets in Cypress, owned by infamous abortionist Dr. Edward Allred, has ceased operations following the sale of the building.
On Friday morning, March 9, more than 50 people gathered, with permission from the building's new owner, to thank God that no more helpless and innocent babies would be killed there. They said the rosary and other prayers in the hallway of the vacant abortuary, and afterwards everyone walked through the rooms, where as many as 100,000 babies had met their deaths at the hands of abortionists.
Participants expressed a mixture of joy and sadness -- joy in the knowledge that there would be no more killing in the building, but also sadness in the knowledge that so many innocents had died there. "It was an overwhelming feeling to walk into this place where the death of children had occurred on a daily basis for the past 25 years," said Gloria Butler Jacobsen. "Once inside, I stood shoulder to shoulder with the valiant men and women who had stood outside, some for years, praying and counseling the desperate women who had come for an abortion. Many pregnant women chose life because of their prayers, love and support. In my imagination, I could see Chief Allen and Ralph Buglione rejoicing with us in heaven at the closing of this chamber of horrors."
Jacobsen was with retired Santa Ana Police Chief Edward J. Allen, a member of St. Joseph's Catholic Church, and Ralph Buglione, an Italian Catholic and retired Internal Revenue Service agent, when they were arrested at the Cypress clinic in 1984. Until their deaths, both Chief Allen and Ralph Buglione devoted their lives to closing down the clinic.
"Allred's Cypress clinic was a modern Dachau," said Don Smith, producer of the film Conceived in Liberty, which showed the arrest of Chief Allen and Buglione. "Let's make its closing into a national process that reaches all the other abortion clinics. May they go down like a row of dominoes."
Among the many faithful sidewalk counselors present on March 9 was retired teacher Hector Rubio, 70. He had been at the clinic every Saturday for the last 18 years. After his retirement, he increased his sidewalk counseling to five or six days a week. Hector's son, Joe, 39, also counseled outside the clinic on Saturdays. Hector Rubio and his wife of 40 years, Marilyn, have nine well-educated children and 11 grandchildren. Rubio's parents moved from Mexico to California, legally, in 1923. His father came from Chihuahua and his mother from Guaymas, Sonora. "They had five children -- and no one ever went on welfare," stated Rubio, referring to the fact that Hispanic women are constantly told to abort their children, because, if they do not, they will not be able to get a good education and have good careers. "Not true," says Rubio.
Jane Turtzer and Liz Simon faithfully went to the clinic at least once a week for fifteen years. Tom Nagle, Ann Egan, John Marco, Fred Navarro, Lyn Sarner and Linda Gaitly were also devoted counselors over the years. George Kubeck was not only active himself for several years, he was also able to get the Knights of Columbus involved.
Mechi Grothues, who counseled outside the Cypress clinic since it opened, started, with Ralph Buglione, the Shield of Roses prayer group, which has led the prayer vigils outside the clinic. She said seeing the clinic close-up was an emotional experience for her. "I could hardly believe it," she said. "I felt numb." She said she usually tried to go on Fridays because that's when the laminaria were inserted to cause late term abortions the following day. She said she found the women were more receptive that day. Friday was also the day when sterilizations were done. Mechi, originally from Germany, said she doesn't want her children and grandchildren to ask her what she did about this American holocaust the way people asked her parents' generation about the Nazi holocaust.
Grothues says that, based on medical wristbands they would regularly find in the gutter outside the clinic, they estimated that the number of abortions kept dropping from a high of 5,000 per year to approximately 4,000. The wristbands, which were put on the women who went in for "the surgery," contained the woman's name, her birth date and the year the abortion took place, plus a number indicating the number of abortions done that year. Example: the number 99-3456 would indicate the 3,456th abortion performed in the year 1999.
The abortion clinic took up the entire first floor of the two-story office complex located across the street from a middle school and a Mormon Church, with St. Irenaeus Catholic Church just two blocks away. Dental offices, accounting, marketing, lawyers and insurance businesses, at one time or another, rented the upstairs. "We indirectly closed down the place because of a high vacancy factor," said Hector Rubio. "The old owner told us, 'You guys are costing me money because of the difficulty of renting the place.'"
Once renters found out that an abortion clinic was located in the same building, and that people were outside protesting the killing every day and trying to persuade women not to have abortions, they usually would not renew their leases. Now that the building has been sold, one wing is expected to be torn down and replaced by condominiums, while the section that held the abortion clinic will be remodeled.
During the first two or three years the clinic operated, Dr. Edward Allred, the owner and operator of the Family Planning Associates abortion clinic chain, would show up on Saturday mornings to do abortions. Allred became infamous not just by becoming a millionaire through performing abortions, but also for remarks he made to a newspaper regarding the desirability of preventing Hispanics births.
After the first couple of years, it appears that Allred did mostly administrative work, while Dr. Thomas Grubbs, along with a Dr. Davis and a Dr. Fox, performed the abortions. In 1995, Dr. Grubbs was charged with the death of 18-year-old Christina Mora, who was 16 to 18 weeks pregnant when she went in for an abortion on November 3, 1994. A report from Dr. William D. Frumovitz, a medical expert hired by Mora's lawyers, said Grubbs' medical care "fell below applicable standards" and the 'breach of standard care was the direct cause of Miss Mora's death' because "the anesthesia record says that Dr. Grubbs did the entire extraction procedure in three minutes.... The extraction of a 17-week old fetus cannot be done in three minutes without sacrificing the safety of the patient and markedly increasing the risk of exactly the sort of complications suffered by Miss Mora. The unreasonable haste with which the procedure was performed resulted in the cervical laceration."
Ultimately, Mora's family agreed to settle their claim against Grubbs for an undisclosed amount of money.
Another Family Planning Associates abortion mill, this one located in the San Diego suburb of La Mesa, will also be closing, but it is not clear whether it will close for good or just relocate. Family Planning Associates, located at 8881 Fletcher Parkway in La Mesa, has also lost its lease. The building has reportedly been sold to new owners, who have expressed concerns about the pro-life protesters and the crowds and police they draw. The La Mesa Police Department sent in a SWAT unit, paddy wagons and canine units during a peaceful pro-life rally and candlelight vigil outside Family Planning Associates in January. Other tenants in the building reportedly became upset when a television news crew identified the building as the site of an abortion mill. The Family Planning Associates lease reportedly expires in June.
Allred's chain has been encountering financial difficulties after losing a lawsuit -- and much of their business -- to Planned Parenthood. Family Planning Associates unsuccessfully sought to prevent Planned Parenthood from taking away abortion contracts held by FPA on the basis they were a non-profit unfairly competing with a for-profit business.