When Planned Parenthood Burns Down
S1: If you worked at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Knoxville, Tennessee, there are some things you just knew. First of all, come in the back door. That’s where Terry Mills office was. Tori’s the director of community engagement, but she was also a bit of the unofficial greeter for the clinic. She ran the sex ed classes for high schoolers generally tried to make the place feel cozier than you might expect.
S2: I remember we had like a kind of a clothesline up on one of the walls where we would hang cards from, from patients. Of course, they didn’t have folks names on them, but they would just have like messages of support for staff or for other patients coming
S1: in at Christmastime. Tory would help decorate the rainbow colored tree with ornaments made out of condoms. On Mondays, she’d get the crockpot out and feed the student group she hosted. Now, like a lot of folks, Tori mostly works from home. She misses the place. Do you ever go by the clinic now?
S2: I actually didn’t go by until a couple of weekends ago actually went by on the the Roe v. Wade anniversary Saturday, January 22nd, which is also the day that a year ago, our front doors were shot out with a shotgun.
S1: Tori went by that day to clean up after a different attack. This one an arson. The fire happened on New Year’s.
S2: Breaking news this morning out of East Knoxville Knoxville fire crews are on scene right now working to put out flames at the Planned Parenthood clinic on North Cherry Street. A hunt for suspects is now on after Knoxville fire ruled the fire an arson. The assistant chief says the fact that the fire already breached the roof lets them know it was burning well before crews arrived. So, you know the day. That the arson happened was a Friday, it was New Year’s Eve, and I remember as I was kind of fielding calls and text messages from folks that morning thinking, I don’t know that I’m ready to go by. You know, this building that I’ve spent honestly more time in in the last 10 years of my life than even my own house.
S1: Knoxville authorities believe
S2: someone set fire on purpose on New
S1: Year’s Eve.
S2: That building now a total loss. It always feels, I think any time you see a building after a fire, it just feels very surreal, you know, and kind of the first place my mind goes is like, Oh, that’s where this used to be, or that’s that’s where I used to teach. And there are parts where it is. Yeah, where it is. There’s not much left.
S1: You sound emotional when you talk about it.
S2: Yeah, I mean, I think I think it’s difficult not to be right because, you know, I’ve really had great times. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried. I’ve, you know, I’ve had so many experiences in that building and I think that I think that there are probably patients of ours who feel that same way. Like they remember the day that they got, you know, that their first dose of hormone care or they remember their abortion and whatever emotions accompany that. So I think I am trying to both hold the emotions I have and also hold the emotions that other people have with that space. And also, you know, thinking towards the future.
S1: But what is the future of Planned Parenthood in Tennessee? Today on the show, the threat to abortion, it may seem abstract if you’re looking at what’s happening in state legislatures or at the Supreme Court. But in Knoxville, where the Planned Parenthood clinic has been attacked twice in one year, the threats a little more visceral. I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to what next? Stick around. When I asked Terry Mills why she started working at Planned Parenthood in the first place, she told me a story from her own life. She became sexually active at 13 and in her small conservative town near Tennessee’s border with Georgia. She didn’t have a lot of guidance about what safe sex should look like.
S2: My school, I had one, you know, a few brief days of abstinence only sex education taught by an outside, I think, crisis pregnancy center. And all I remember from that course is that if you signed an abstinence pledge card that you would get a free sandwich at a fast food restaurant. So that was the extent of my sex education when I got to college at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. You know, I got really actively involved with Planned Parenthood because there was a Planned Parenthood, a Knoxville when I when I moved here. And yeah, I’ve just kind of stayed involved ever since, and I actually started my career here at Planned Parenthood as a sex educator.
S1: Now, Tori has been working for Planned Parenthood for 11 years, and in that time the laws around abortion interstate have tightened. You can’t get an abortion using Obamacare, for instance, there’s a mandatory waiting period. There’s also a trigger law, and that means that if Roe vs. Wade is overturned, abortion is going to be illegal here automatically. But despite all this, Tori says her work always felt safe.
S2: I have never felt fear going to work at Planned Parenthood, and I’ve never felt fear living, you know, in my community and wearing my Planned Parenthood t shirts out and telling people what I do for a living. I have always been really intentional in the spaces I move in to to, you know, if people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them, and I have had such positive responses from from the community, from telling people, I don’t know what I do for a living. And it’s often usually followed with a story that somebody has about going to Planned Parenthood or taking their child to Planned Parenthood. I’ve always felt that I love to be able to share that I work at Planned Parenthood with folks because it opens up these conversations that sometimes we don’t feel like we’re allowed to have. You know, we’re not allowed to talk about what what it was like to get birth control or what it was like to have an abortion or what it was like to be scared and worry about our reproductive and sexual health.
S1: So you get to see this like hidden side of people because of your job.
S2: I do. I really do. I feel so lucky. I when I when I work with new staff to bring them on and we talk about, you know, doing outreach and going to, you know, health fairs or go table at community events, I really prepare them to to hear people’s stories.
S1: This open mindedness Tori says it started to shift as protests in front of the clinic got more heated in recent years. In particular, a pastor named Ken Peters began holding services right outside the clinic doors. He called this congregation the church at Planned Parenthood.
S3: How’s everybody doing tonight? And then come on if you don’t can. She’ll have to, but we’d love to have you come over in this section over here because this is where the battlefield is going to
S1: gather over here. Peters leads what he calls a Patriot Church, and his sermons are overtly political. He attended the rallies on January 6th two,
S3: but we got to do something more than just political event because ultimately this is a spiritual battle. Can somebody say, Hey, man, this is a spiritual battle? And how many of you believe it’s spiritual warfare? That’s what we’re here to do.
S1: We’re here to the Church of Planned Parenthood describes itself as a worship service at the gates of hell, and Tori says this kind of preaching had an impact on Knoxville political climate.
S2: I do think there has been a shift in the tenor in our city since since he came here, and we know that rhetoric and its, you know, violence inciting speech and even speech that does things like, you know, for example, when you say that a person who provides abortion or even supports abortion is a murderer that conjures up certain feelings and images and people. And I I think it’s important to understand that rhetoric and speech like that has can have consequences. And so I don’t think regardless of what his intent was, I don’t I don’t think there’s any. It doesn’t surprise me that him moving to our city and the violent acts that have happened have happened close together, you know, and that prior to him being here are our health center has never seen any acts of violence prior to this.
S1: Yeah, I mean, we should be really clear that other journalists have interviewed Ken Peters and he said, I hope someone’s prosecuted for this. And he said he had nothing to do with anything that’s happened at the Planned Parenthood.
S3: This is not going to stop abortion. It’s the changing of hearts and minds. It’s the changing of laws. This temporary halt temporarily halt abortion. This doesn’t stop it. We just pray that nobody was hurt and that whoever did this is caught and prosecuted, and we pray that abortion would stop right here in the state of Tennessee.
S1: But he does also call himself a Christian patriot. Some people call what he’s doing Christian nationalism. I mean, in his first sermon in front of the Planned Parenthood, Ken Peters did say that we pray that every fire of heaven would come against this building, which a year later is pretty shocking to reflect on.
S2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
S1: How did you hear about each of these attacks, the shooting and then the fire? Was it frantic phone calls or text messages?
S2: Yeah. So I with the January shooting, I am actually I was the person on our, you know, our alarm company called first because I don’t live very far away. So I woke up to a call from the alarm company. So, yeah, it was one of the first people to be there.
S1: What did you do next?
S2: My personality is such that I’m a little bit of a fixer. I remember getting to the health center and we were there and my first thought was, we got to we got this glass cleaned up. We’ve got to be able to see patients. And yeah, I just grabbed a broom and a vacuum and started to clean up because we wanted to be able to still see patients. We didn’t want that to stop us.
S1: So I wonder when the arson happened, whether this there was this sense of like, Oh no, not again.
S2: Yeah, the arson hit me a little differently. And I think part of it was because I actually I was off that day, you know, it was New Year’s Day and I was I slept in and I woke up and turned over to grab my phone and saw that I had, you know, twenty five text messages, 15 missed calls. So I knew immediately that something was wrong and my my husband walked in right as I was looking at my phone and he had just seen the news. And it was already, you know, on local news at that point. It’s interesting. I remember the difference in the way that I felt. I remember when the shooting happened, I was so angry. I was just so angry and. When I woke up on on the 31st. That feeling of rage didn’t hit in the same way I was just I was sad. I was truly sad. And I think I think that’s what happens when you realize that something like that is just, you know, that you’ve. You’ve lost not only your ability that day to to see the patients who needed to come to you, you know, and when we were, thankfully we were already closed, you know, at that point. So it was less about, you know, not being able to see patients. We we were closed for renovations the day that the fire happened. But just knowing that that something had been destroyed, that was not going to be easily fixed.
S1: You can’t just go over and sweep up the glass.
S2: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And and that we had been so close to finishing these renovations that we had all been really excited about. And yeah, I was just really sad.
S1: Yeah. When I read that the clinic had been undergoing renovations and expanding, actually, it made me wonder that even though I’m hearing so much these days about abortion access being restricted more and more, especially in a state like Tennessee, it sounds like there’s a lot of demand for the work that gets done in your clinic.
S2: There absolutely is, and I I have struggled to try to explain both to myself and also to other folks what it’s like to do this work in Tennessee because I don’t want to negate the experiences of people who maybe live in smaller communities. You know, Knoxville is a fairly decent sized city, which means that it tends to be more progressive than some of the outlying rural areas like where I grew up. But I have felt for the last, you know, almost 11 years part of the community. I haven’t felt like a pariah. I, you know, even even when I see conservative family members or, you know, I’m out in the county, which tends to be a more conservative area, I have never felt afraid for my safety.
S1: Does that feel different now?
S2: You know, I don’t know. I think time will tell it’s hard because I’m still, you know, with COVID still not venturing out a whole lot, but in some ways after something like this happens. It it pushes people in your community who were already with you to be more vocal, and so in some ways, I feel like there has been a groundswell of maybe the folks who supported Planned Parenthood supported access to abortion, who just didn’t want to speak up. It has pushed them to to understand that we have to speak up together. There can’t just be a few of us at the front of this fight.
S1: We’ll be right back. You’re painting this picture of Tennessee. As a largely open place to talking about what women and families need, even when that might not be. What an individual’s values are, and as you talk, I’m hearing like there’s some moments of where you see that maybe that’s not 100 percent the case, like when you when you were getting abstinence only education and it didn’t kick in until high school and they were asking you to sign abstinence card. How do you square in your mind your point of view that Tennessee is like this place where? You can really talk to anyone about your work and the importance of sex education and the importance of abortion care for women who need it. How do you square that with the fact that over the last year your clinic was violently attacked twice?
S2: Yeah, some days it is hard to square those things. I think that the distinction that I would make. Is that I think there’s a big difference between having these conversations one on one with people versus, you know, in the Twitterverse or on social media or even in kind of large group settings, you know, the times when people have come to me and told me their stories. There’s no one else around, you know, this is these are one on one conversations and the times that I have really fruitful conversations about my work with people. Who I know don’t agree with me on the issue of abortion or on other parts of my work. The times that those conversations are fruitful are when they’re one on one, when we take the time to build a little bit of trust, when I think we take the time to create some humanity. You know, and I will also say that some of this is just it is played out, not just anecdotally with my own experience, but we’ve been doing a project here. This is kind of our second go of the project and we we call it a deep values conversations project. And the deep values approach to conversations is a little bit different than a typical, you know, persuasive approach where you, you know, pick up the phone you call a voter and you try to persuade them to vote for a candidate or an issue. The deep values approach really takes a storytelling approach to this, and it takes an active listening approach where you pick up the phone you call a voter who you’ve never spoken to before.
S1: And is this a swing voter or is it a Democratic voter? Is it a pro-abortion voter, or do you know how they land on the issue?
S2: Yeah. So for our project, we we were trying to kind of find people in the middle right doing the best that we can with data that we have. So we were definitely not calling people who were already on the Planned parents for less. We didn’t want to talk to those folks. We also didn’t want to talk to necessarily the people protesting in front of our building, right? We wanted to find people that, you know, may or may not support access to abortion, but who, yeah, hopefully fell somewhere somewhere else. And, you know, not one end of the spectrum or the other persuadable
S1: voters
S2: are potentially persuadable voters. And that’s what’s so interesting is that, you know, with a devalues call, the first thing that you do is you actually ask them to rate where they are on a zero to 10 scale in terms of their support for access to abortion. And there were a lot of people on that scale who were zeros, and there were a lot of people on that scale who were tense.
S1: How do you approach a call with someone who’s a zero?
S2: Yeah. I mean, honestly, the same way that you would with a 10, right? So they they they rate themselves on that scale. And usually one of the next questions that we would ask is how did you come to your value to hold this value on abortion? Like what? What got you here? What experiences in your own life? And I think I’m still even though we’ve done this twice now, I’m still surprised by the number of people who are willing to talk about that. What do they tell you? You know, it varies for some people. I think it was clear that that’s the first time they’ve reflected on that question. For other people, it is quick and obvious, you know, like, Oh boy, am I? You know, I grew up in a church or I grew up in a family where this was just, you know, this is just what it is. Abortion is murder, you know, plain and simple. And you know, from there, we would really start digging into kind of the personal aspects of it. You know, we would often ask folks, Do you know anybody who’s had an abortion? We know that statistically one in four cisgender women in America, not to mention, you know, tons of trans and non-binary folks, one in four have an abortion in their lifetime. And so statistically, it is likely that all of us know somebody who’s had an abortion, even if they haven’t told us that they have. And so we often ask folks to reflect about their experiences, either their own or for people that they know who have had abortions and really getting them to think about. Like, what? What would you want for that person? What if that is your daughter? What if that is your best friend? Like, what would you want that experience to be like for them, even if they don’t, even if you don’t agree with that decision?
S1: Listening to you talk, I understand how this technique would. Be really useful, but I guess I’m just surprised that once you explain, as I’m sure you do when you get on the phone with them, Hi, my name’s Tori, I’m from Planned Parenthood. I’m surprised you don’t get some proportion. Maybe a big proportion of people who say, I don’t talk to baby killers and hang up the phone.
S2: Yeah. I mean, that has absolutely happened. But it is. It is few and far between and, you know, the majority of people that are willing to talk to us. And of course, there’s plenty of people that, you know, hang up because I think you’re a telemarketer before you even get to the Planned Parenthood part. But you know, there’s there’s plenty of people who you know, like, I don’t feel like talking right now or things like that, but of the conversations that we have had and this last round of our project, we talked to about 400 and 450 to 475 folks. And most of them are willing to dig in with us. And that’s it always surprises me. And the thing that we look at from these calls is we always look at, you know, we do that’s not rating scale question up front. We have a conversation, ideally, you know, 20 to 30 minute conversation. Sometimes it’s shorter. Sometimes it’s longer. We asked them again at the end where they rate themselves and are we were. We’re still in the process of analyzing some of the data, but we saw that in this last iteration. Out of those four hundred and fifty people that we talked to right at, a third of them shifted more positively, at least one one point and support their support for abortion access.
S1: That work sounds so labor intensive, and the payoff sounds so potentially microscopic. And yet you sound really hopeful about it.
S2: You know, I think I’m hopeful because I see it as one tool in the toolbox. You know, I wouldn’t turn every part of my job over into deep values work because I do think that there are important things that need to happen on the electoral level are important things that need to happen on the access level. But I think that this is one piece of the puzzle because I do think again, you know, having those experiences where I recognized how little people are talking about abortion, creating more spaces where we’re even just saying the word is so important. And I think the the other side of this is the impact that it has on the people that we’re training to make these calls. So we trained 45 people and you know, a lot of people are using this technique now to talk to their parents or to talk to that one family member. And I think that that is what we’re looking for, right? Not just that we’re doing these one time calls with Tennesseans who don’t know us, but also that we’re starting to have these really difficult conversations with our own networks, the people who really love us and trust us. And I think that’s where, you know, like if, if, if I had every person in the state trained up to do that and felt more comfortable initiating some of these conversations with people they love and trust most, I think about the impact that could have.
S1: I feel like I’m talking to you at a strange time because the clinics burned down and also the Supreme Court is set to potentially rule on the viability of Roe versus Wade because Tennessee has this law. That means that abortion will be illegal if Roe vs. Wade is overturned. I wonder how Planned Parenthood thinks about rebuilding with a clinic destroyed.
S2: Yeah, I think you have to kind of go with what you do know, which is that there are people in Knoxville who need birth control, who need STD testing, who need a place to come for sex education services, who need gender affirming health care. And we know that it is important for us to rebuild or re-establish a health center here to get those services. Back up as quickly as possible, and I think some of it is symbolic, too, right, like helping folks understand that no matter the shifts and changes that happen at a policy level, Planned Parenthood will always be here and we will be here to provide care in whatever iteration we were able to and to provide resources and support. And I think we feel like it’s important to have a brick and mortar location, regardless of kind of where where the future takes us. No matter what happens with to Roe v. Wade, no matter what happens at the Supreme Court this summer, this fight is not over. We there, you know, I say this fairly often Tennesseans will need abortions no matter what happens with our state law, the Supreme Court. Tennesseans will still have abortions, and it will be our job to figure out how we help people access the services no matter what.
S1: Tori Mills, thank you for continuing to show up for work every day.
S2: Thank you. I really appreciate you lifting the voices of folks in the South are doing this work.
S1: Tori Mills is the director of community engagement for Planned Parenthood’s Knoxville Health Center. And that’s our show. What next is produced by Carmel Delshad Mary Wilson olina, Schwartz and Daniel Hewitt. We’re led by Alicia Montgomery and I’m Mary Harris. Go track me down on Twitter. Say Hello, I’m at Mary’s desk. Meantime, I will get you back in the speed bright and early tomorrow morning.
