Pensacola was once center for abortion violence. Late nurse who ran clinic wasn't scared.
Linda Taggart, the nurse who ran one of Pensacola’s first abortion clinics during its most tumultuous times, has passed away.
The clinic was a target of violence for years, including bombings, arson fires and deadly shootings. Despite being attacked and threatened repeatedly, Taggart remained steadfast in her position for 30 years until her retirement.
The 85-year-old trailblazer passed peacefully from heart issues on Aug. 20, in her North Carolina home. She was laid to rest in Pensacola.
Taggart was a passionate, longtime advocate for women’s reproductive rights. In 1974, she signed on as administrator for what was then a new clinic, The Ladies Center, which provided healthcare services including pregnancy termination.
It opened a year after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus is essentially able to live outside the womb, based on the right to privacy in the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.
At the time she took the job, Taggart was a 32-year-old single mother with a young daughter. She had been widowed when her first husband and high school sweetheart, a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, died during training.
She later remarried. During the marriage Taggart miscarried and afterward was unable to have children. The couple soon adopted a baby girl, Keri, but split when she was 3.
Taggart’s daughter, Keri Rhodes, said it was “just the two of them” for years and they were very close.
“She was a fun mom,” said Rhodes. “We traveled quite a bit, a lot of traveling. We snow skied together. She hated the beach, so we always went snow skiing in California or Nevada. Went to museums, parks all the time. Disney World was her happy place, and we went there several times a year.”
Before moving to Pensacola, Taggart lived in Miami with her family where she had several creative outlets including runway modeling, playing clarinet in a band and singing at local radio stations.
She especially loved fashion and Rhodes said as a mother, Taggart made sure her daughter wore outfits that were stylish, but appropriate and often ahead of their time for the private schools Rhodes attended in Pensacola.
“She liked for me to wear particular clothes,” Taggart’s daughter remembered with a chuckle. “I didn’t have jeans. She traveled a lot in California, and she always brought clothes back for me to wear that were ahead of the fashion trend. I was the first to wear them around here."
Rhodes continued, “She also taught me how to eat at fine dining restaurants. Etiquette was a big thing for her. Write ‘thank you’ letters after you get a gift, use your manners at the table. She was always dressed up, all the time. She was just elegant. A friend of mine said, ‘You know, your mom is polished.’”
Ladies Center History
Keri Rhodes remembers her mom often brought her to work, from the time Taggart started with the Ladies Center. The clinic’s first location was Town & Country Plaza off Fairfield Drive and Rhodes said she would sometimes come in on non-procedure days and help file paperwork.
As she grew older, Keri said she took on more work and eventually worked for her mother for 12 years as assistant administrator. She was there for the day-to-day operations, as well as for much of the violence that followed the Ladies Center and other abortion clinics.
Before she ever worked at the clinic, Rhodes was targeted for being Linda Taggart's daughter. The problems ranged from false police reports against her resulting in legal bills, to threats of kidnapping.
She recalled one night at church with her mother, undercover Pensacola police officers approached them to let them know there was a plot to kidnap Keri.
"I ended up having to go to DeFuniak Springs for a long weekend," Rhodes said. "Just until they felt that it was safe enough for me to come back."
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Over the years, they remained vigilant and the clinic moved to several different locations around Pensacola. The city had become the center of the abortion debate and in 1984 erupted into violence.
Several Pensacola clinics that provided abortions were bombed that year and the Ladies Center was bombed twice.
They were in an office behind University Mall off Davis Highway when the first bomb went off one night in June, before sunrise. Rhodes was not quite 10 years old at the time.
“I remember the answering service calling my mom,” said Rhodes. “They were like, ‘Yeah, something's going on with the clinic. It was bombed.’ My mom was like, 'What?!' So we got in the car and we went over there and it's still dark, so you can't see anything and I remember telling my mom, ‘It doesn't seem like it's that bad, you know?' But when the daylight came, the damage was very bad. They put the bomb in my mom's office and what happened when it blew up, it shifted, it blew the roof off, shifted it and then came back down, so everything inside collapsed. I guess the blessing is that they did it at that point when no one was there.”
The Ladies Center then moved to the Ninth Avenue location, but protestors and violent extremists followed them there, too. Rhodes remembered when they once broke into the clinic while her mom was working with other staff.
“(Anti-abortion extremist) John Burt and some people came and broke into the clinic while they were there,” Rhodes said. “They went through the door, and she was standing there trying to protect the office. They pushed her back and she fell back on the stairs and actually had back problems from that moment on. They went in there and destroyed some property and stuff like that.”
Taggart’s longtime friend Bill Caplinger volunteered as an escort during those years to help protect the staff.
"What happened is that every crazy in the country made it their thing to come to Pensacola and close this clinic because of Linda Taggart being there so much,” Caplinger recalled. “She just understood, and she knew from being a nurse for a long time before she specialized in this and took this on, but she just understood that that you are not free if you're not free to manage who you're going to give birth to.”
In 1993, Dr. David Gunn was murdered in front of Pensacola Women’s Medical Services by anti-abortion extremist Michael Griffin. The crime was the first murder of an abortion doctor in the United States.
Griffin ambushed Gunn and shot him three times in the back with a shotgun, shouting, “Don’t kill any more babies."
A year later, Dr. John Britton and escort, retired Air Force Lt. Col. James Barrett Jr., were shot to death outside the Ladies Clinic on Ninth Avenue. Anti-abortion extremist Paul Hill shot and killed them with a shotgun, and wounded Barrett’s wife, June, a retired nurse.
Taggart wasn’t in the office that day, but Rhodes was.
“I was pregnant with my oldest daughter, and it was me, a counselor and a nurse,” Rhodes recalled, “and we were all there, and we were just hanging out talking and all of a sudden, I see Paul Hill out there. He was always out there. I pull in and he was like, ‘Hey Keri, don't kill any babies today or whatever,’ and so we go in to do our job and I can see the escorts pulling up.
“It was June and Jim Barrett, and they just picked (Dr. Britton) up from the airport. They were coming in and next thing I know just pow, pow, pow. We were like, ‘What is that sound?’ Then we realized it was gunshots and we saw Paul Hill there in the driveway and so we went and locked the door real quick and he shot them. He actually started walking down Ninth Avenue, left the gun there in the driveway and then just started walking down the street.”
Hill was convicted of the murders and executed by lethal injection in 2003.
Michael Griffin was convicted of killing Dr. Gunn and sentenced to 25 years to life for the crime. So far, his requests for parole have been denied and his next hearing is set for 2043.
Remembering a trailblazer
Despite the violence, Rhodes said her mother never thought about quitting and refused to back down from her work, even when her name was placed on a “hit list” on an anti-abortion website.
“She's a very headstrong person, very headstrong,” said Rhodes of her mother. “Her husband died when she was just a young lady. She had breast cancer when I was around 12 and she had a double mastectomy. My grandmother and my aunt died from breast cancer. She's just a strong, determined lady, and that's probably why she lasted so long with all her heart issues, you know. She just wasn't going to let anybody run her out of town.”
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Rhodes believes her mother’s passion came from seeing so many women and girls with different struggles walk through the doors of the clinic.
“We had 12 and 13 year olds coming in that were pregnant,” said Rhodes. “Either their parents didn't watch them or they were just hanging out with people they shouldn't have been and they ended up getting pregnant or they were raped. Then I saw women as old as in their 60s. In between, you've got the women who had one child and they can't afford another one. I mean there are just so many different stories and scenarios, just so many, you know? She saw that. It just became apparent that women need rights and choices and safe abortions.
“Whether anybody likes it or not, it's all about choice,” Rhodes continued. “These women agonize over this decision. I mean, we've sent plenty of patients home because we're like, ‘You need to rethink this,’ because we don't want them to do something they're going to regret. That was just her. What she wanted to do was just make sure that women had a choice.”
Rhodes said her mother lived a full life and advocated for women’s rights behind the scenes as well, regularly going to Washington D.C. to support the cause.
She never remarried but was with her partner until she passed. They met many years earlier when he was the owner of the building the Ladies Center rented on Ninth Avenue.
Rhodes said they moved to North Carolina to be near her best friend and in recent years Taggert’s health began to decline. She was a firm believer to the end that women should have the right to choose and was appalled at Florida’s recent rulings attempting to shorten the window women can terminate a pregnancy.
The Florida Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments over whether to overrule long standing abortion rights protections under the state constitution and instead uphold a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that bans the procedure in most cases after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
If the 15-week ban stays on the books, the stricter six-week ban would take effect about a month after the court’s decision.
“I think it's just a cycle,” Rhodes said of the legislation, “but at this point, there's nothing we can do right now. We need more women just like Mom. I want her to be recognized as a strong woman, a woman who believed 120% in women's rights and did everything in her power to make sure that women we're provided a safe environment to make such a private choice and have it done without anybody hurting them.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola nurse Linda Taggart, abortion-rights trailblazer, dies at 85
