A liberal pro-life group blockaded a Memphis Planned Parenthood clinic Friday, prompting several arrests including the group's founder and her mentor, a veteran pro-life activist known for clinic blockades decades earlier.

Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, which exposed allegedly illegal late-term abortions blocks from the White House and prompted House Republican committee chairs to pledge a probe, kicked off a new wave of what it calls "nonviolent direct action" through "the largest peaceful civil disobedience for the unborn in 30 years" Friday.

PAAU founder Terrisa Bukovinac, who challenged President Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination before he dropped out, and Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue and Constitution Party nominee in 2024, were both arrested among 14 activists ranging from their 20s to age 70, PAAU said.

So were activists convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and pardoned by President Trump, Joan Andrews Bell and John Hinshaw, and the leaders of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society and Let Them Live, Monica Migliorino Miller and Nathan Berning, respectively.

News2Share editor-in-chief Ford Fischer posted video of the arrests, including Terry getting dragged away by police. Tennessee now bans abortion, but PAAU said "Planned Parenthood continues to traffic people, including minors, across state lines (even providing gas cards), in order to kill their babies."
 

Before the blockade PAAU hosted a two-day launch event for Rescue Resurrection, "an effort to bring back the abortion rescue movement of the 1980s and 90s," in which Terry played a central role. PAAU also acquired a training facility in Memphis for activists to conduct civil disobedience against abortion clinics.

It chose Memphis for the facility because the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in the Tennesee city and it's the home of the National Civil Rights Museum, "which highlights the connection between civil disobedience and changing the law."

Ms. Magazine covered the opening of the facility by what it calls "antiabortion militants," which recounted Terry's activism. 

"During the blockades, accessing a targeted abortion clinic meant getting through a gauntlet of bodies blocking clinic doors and driveways," the feminist publication said. "Activists would travel state to state for blockades and would go limp when arrested—to represent the 'unborn'—requiring three to four police officers to remove each protester arrested and carry them to waiting police buses."