Just in time for hurricane season, another kind of storm will be descending on the state of Mississippi this July. Emboldened by recent draconian trends in limiting women's access to safe and legal abortion in a country where 87 percent of counties already lack an abortion provider, the folks at Operation Save America (formerly known as Operation Rescue) are currently organizing a one-week assault on the Jackson Women's Health Organization — otherwise known as the last abortion clinic in the entire state of Mississippi — from July 15-22. Yup, that's right, the last one.

As if it isn't hard enough to get an abortion in Mississippi already. According to the Guttmacher Institute, women must currently jump over the following hurdles in order to obtain a safe, legal procedure:

• Minors must obtain consent from both parents or must go before a judge to prove that they're mature enough to have an abortion (just to clarify, 12-year-old girls are not required to go before a judge to prove that they're mature enough to become parents).
• Women must receive state-mandated counselling that includes information designed to discourage them from having abortions, then they must wait 24 hours before the procedure is provided (which translates to: taking two days off of work instead of one, finding childcare for two days instead of one, getting two separate rides or paying two separate bus fares instead of one or paying for a hotel room, and generally being treated like a child who needs to think LONG and HARD about what she's doing before she's allowed to do it).
• Medicaid will only pay for an abortion in cases of life-endangering pregnancy, fetal abnormality, rape, or incest (according to Mapping our Rights, 18 percent of Mississippians have no health insurance, and 19 percent rely on Medicaid). Insurance policies for all public employees in Mississippi follow the same restrictions.
• Taking a page from South Dakota's book, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour recently indicated his support for a bill (currently making its way through the Mississippi house) that would ban all abortions in the state, except in cases where the pregnancy endangers a woman's life.

Still too easy to get an abortion in Missisippi, according to Operation Save America. Per their website, the July privacy-invading festivities will include daily street witnessing and evangelizing at the Jackson Women's Health Organization and other "strategic locations," nightly rallies, an "Old-Testament style" solemn assembly, and — my personal favorite — hands-on training in "sidewalk counselling." For those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with this compassionate strategy, "sidewalk counselling" means shoving a doctored picture of a bloody fetus in a complete stranger's face while screaming at her not to kill her baby.

When it comes to sidewalk counselling, I speak from experience: when I was growing up, my mother worked at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, and occasionally after school I would come by the clinic to catch a ride home. Each time I went through the door, I had to pass through a knot of protesters (mostly, but not exclusively, elderly men) who begged me, week after week, not to kill my baby (do these guys understand how pregnancy works?). This was in the late 80s and early 90s, Operation Rescue's heyday. On Saturdays they would stage massive protests — chanting, singing, praying through bullhorns, chaining themselves to the clinic steps, and even disguising themselves as official clinic escorts so that they could perform guerrilla "counselling" sessions on unsuspecting women who thought they were being guided through the fray by clinic staff. Coming soon to a clinic near you, my sisters in Mississippi.

Of course, shutting down the Jackson Women's Health Organization is just one item in Operation Save America's comprehensive agenda for social change (and critics say the left has an unfocused agenda!). The organization's recruitment literature for the Mississippi event contains the following rallying cry: "We will slay the Goliath of Roe v. Wade, the juggernaut of homosexuality, and the iron fist of Islam." Okay, grammar aside (how exactly does one slay a juggernaut?), does anyone still think it's okay to call these people "pro-life"?

As of now, in the interest of keeping the war-like environment to a minimum for their patients' sake, the Jackson Women's Health Organization has withdrawn their request for pro-choice volunteers to mount a counter-offensive, but there are still plenty of ways to get involved. For more information or to find out how to donate, contact the Southern Abortion Fund at [email protected] or the Jackson area NOW chapter at [email protected]. For leads on how to support the homosexual juggernaut and the iron fist of Islam, you'll have to do some Googling.