TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050189/05018900.043

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 17.2 KB | 317 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 26

"Save the Babies"


Operation Rescue: a case study in galvanizing the antiabortion
movement

By Garry Wills


    Anaheim, Calif.: Gray after little sleep, the uterine
warriors gather in a parking lot across from Disneyland. The
cars still have their lights on in the ambiguous dawn -- large
cars and vans. The crusaders of Operation Rescue do not know
where they are going, but they are prepared for long drives.
Organizers line up the carloads to be given maps as thexy peel
off out of the lot. Taut nerves make the leaders snappish as
they scurry about, pausing in little clots of prayer, then
bustling to their tasks. Their language is semimilitary,
befitting such constant readers of the Book of Exodus. These
a|re churchgoing, middle-class couples, uneasy in the shabby
clothes they have put on for prison service later in the day.
Not the demonstrators of civil rights or antiwar protests, these
are a new breed: "Bible Christians" increasingly determined t}o
restore their country to God.

    Targets are kept secret until the last minute, since
Operation Rescue's tactic is to jam all entrances to an abortion
clinic before the police can muster sufficient officers to begin
arrests or before pro-choice activists can pre-empt the doorways
and leave funnels for staff and patients to enter. Some clinics
will close if they know they are going to be hit, so Operation
Rescue has made appointments at a number of the clinics, relying
on cancellations to tell them which targets are unavailable that
day. The scouting of the sites has been thorough: there are
diagrams of all points of entry and even Polaroid shots of the
doorways, so the numbers needed to seal off each door can be
apportioned.

    The pro-choice opposition has marshaled its resources in a
military counter-image of the raiders. They have posted troops
at the most likely target clinics and kept others mobile in
cars, with walkie-talkies to summon them as soon as the protest
site becomes apparent from the route of the Operation Rescue
caravan. An elaborate game of feints and reciprocal infiltration
is going forward. Before this morning's caravan can even get
started, the pro-choice side seems to have checkmated the game
with a single move: both ends of the street off the parking lot
have been blocked at the last minute with a line of pro-choice
cars.

    Randall Terry, the pro-lifers' flamboyant orator, 29 and
impulsive, wants to start moving the caravan before further
layers of obstruction can be brought into place. He says enough
men can just lift the few blockading cars out of the way. But
Jeff White, two years Terry's senior and in charge of today's
operation, brushes past him to form a little circle of his
friends and pray. Praying out loud is the first response to any
setback for this group. (Terry often interjects, in the middle
of conversation in a normal tone, a groaned "Jesus help us.")
The prayer does not deliver a plan, but at least it slows down
response. By then police cars are clearing away the roadblocks.
After all, the cops' assignment today is to keep people from
obstructing access. The pro-choice maneuver, though it fails,
has bought time for its side; the pro-lifers move out late,
attended by the pro-choicers, who have turned their blockading
cars into moving observation posts along the flank of the
caravan, signaling by radio the course that is being set.

    The clinic is only a short ride away, in Cypress. Before
the cars reach the site, 30 pro-choicers are already protecting
one of the eight doors to the building and reinforcements are
arriving. Some pro-lifers leap out of their cars and streak
toward the seven unguarded doors. The leaders call them back and
regroup across the street. The troops have been instructed not
to move on their own; there is safety (and nonviolence) in
solidarity. The first task is to seal in the 30 pro-choicers
with superior numbers, to wedge them in at the door ("making
them help us save the babies"). The other doorways will be
filled up, in an orderly way, as the caravan parks in nearby
spaces.

    Conveniently, the small Cypress police station is just
across the street. Negotiations can immediately be opened with
the authorities. Joseph Foreman, 34, is the Operation Rescue
man delegated to police relations this day. He informs the
police of the group's intention to block the doors and asks what
charges will be brought against them, what procedures followed.
The "rescuers" go limp, so that it takes four police officers
to carry off one demonstrator, but the means of entry into
arrest vans is always negotiable. Foreman agrees to have his
people walk onto the buses: "I hate to have them carried on;
someone always gets hurt." But when Foreman tells Terry of the
arrangements, Terry sends him back to get assurances that the
police will not arrest at too great a speed in exchange for the
walk-on. It is the kind of change in terms that makes the police
distrustful of Operation Rescue, and Foreman is clearly unhappy
at this infringement of his on-site authority.

    Some 700 pro-lifers at the clinic are divided into three
main groups: the rescuers jammed in the doorways; authorized
"sidewalk counselors," who tell any arriving patient that she
can discuss a way to keep her baby at a nearby "crisis pregnancy
center"; and "prayer supporters," who are asked to sing hymns
and observe the police. Each group has its own marshal
instructing it, without bullhorns if possible, and no one in the
three groups is supposed to talk to anyone -- police, press or
hecklers. Most observe the discipline, but the prayer supporters
are the least predictable. They are sympathizers who do not mean
to go to jail, but they often get carried away because of the
hecklers or the sight of their friends being arrested. At every
rally they are told not to get into arguments. Mike McMonagle,
the only Roman Catholic in the leadership of Operation Rescue,
tells them the night before: "If you shout even something as
unthreatening as `We will help you' to an arriving mother, the
sound of 30 voices shouting that does not say what you mean it
to say. Leave that to the sidewalk counselors, who are trained
at persuasion." Prayer supporters would be more of a nuisance
than a help if so many of them did not decide, on seeing their
comrades arrested, to fill in the emptied places in front of the
doors. In almost every case, mo~re people go to jail than had
intended to.

    The tactic of the rescuers, consciously drawn from the
nonviolent techniques of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., is
to knead themselves so densely in around the doors that no one
can thread a way through the inert resisting bodies. Rescuers
are not supposed to push or shove, and they are told not to
bring poster sticks or umbrellas that they might be tempted to
use as barriers. If the mass is penetrated, it is supposed to
ooze back out and around the rift, enclosing it in a new
carapace of seated bodies. They move in a human sludge, on their
knees, not standing, to make confrontation possible.

    Pro-choice protesters ring the pro-lifers, trying to cover
them up with placards, so that the TV cameras register support
for the clinics. The pro-choicers chant and demand the arrest
of the pro-lifers: "Read 'em their rights, and take 'em away."
Each group has its grisly signs -- aborted fetuses on one side,
women's corpses bloody from illegal abortions on the other. It
is a noisy scene, hymns vs. chanted slogans, with both sides
resorting to bullhorns to get above the din (and the police
finally adding their loudspeakers). The task of the police is
first to detach the two groups, ordering those who do not wish
to be arrested to move away. That brings all but the most
embedded pro-choicers out of the milling near the doors. Then
the arrests begin -- 373 of them in Cypress on the Thursday
before Easter.

    On the Friday before Easter, the rescuers showed up in Long
Beach, where the police are under a shadow of alleged
brutality. Officers were especially polite, clearing some paths
but making no arrests. The clinic closed down. On the day before
Easter, in Los Angeles, 725 arrests were made in a pelting rain
that turned the rescuers into sodden clumps. Most of those
arrested remained in jail over Easter, refusing to give their
names or be released until felony charges were dropped against
four of their leaders (including Terry). There have been
hundreds of such local actions, with thousands of arrests, in
the year since this new wave of activism began gathering
momentum.

    Where did these respectable law-breakers come from all of
a sudden? Randall Terry is this year's most obvious symbol of
the right-to-life movement. An ordained preacher who physically
resembles former boy evangelist Marjoe Gortner, Terry dropped
out of high school, had a "conversion experience," then went to
Elim Bible Institute in Lima, N.Y. He started picketing
abortion clinics, along with his wife, in 1984 while working for
a car salesman. Before Terry came along there had been large
lobbying and education groups in the field for decades -- the
National Right to Life Committee, the Human Rights Review, the
annual antiabortion marches organized by Nellie Gray, which have
been praised by recent Presidents. These were largely decorous
undertakings with their roots in Roman Catholicism. Civil
disobedience was not their style; it remains so little to their
liking that the National Right to Life Committee newsletter
never refers to the activities of Operation Rescue.

    But after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, two things
happened: some individual crazies began to bomb abortion
clinics, and younger Catholics who believed in direct action
(many from their experience in civil rights and antiwar
protests) began around 1975 to sit in at clinics. This latter
was the "peaceful presence" branch of Catholic direct action,
much of its activity coordinated by John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, a
Harvard graduate inspired to pacifism by Thomas Merton. This
form of activism produced the one authentic hero of the pro-life
movement, Joan Andrews, a pacifist and longtime protester for
human rights, who served 2 1/2 years in a Florida jail for
attempting to disengage a suction machine used in abortions. She
practiced "loving noncooperation" with her jailers and was put
in solitary confinement. Many law officers as well as a growing
number of protesters worked for her release. This pro-life
faction began running crisis pregnancy centers to help mothers
bear their children and find parents to adopt them.

    There was a smaller, "frankly harassing" group of Catholics
engaged in direct action, symbolized by Joseph Scheidler of
Chicago. He did things like hire a detective to track down a
woman who was planning to have an abortion, and justified his
outrageous actions by the publicity they brought to his cause:
"Hiring that detective got me 60 interviews." Scheidler boasts
that he asked then President Reagan to meet with the families
of clinic bombers. "That was the last time I was invited to the
White House."

    Though some evangelical seminarians participated with the
Catholic peace activists who sat in at clinics, the massive
involvement of evangelicals did not begin until Terry met
Andrews and Cavanaugh-O'Keefe at an umbrella meeting for direct
actionists in 1986. At a similar meeting in 1987, Terry met Juli
Loesch (now Loesch Wiley), a self-described "Catholic lefty" who
had left college to support the United Farm Workers. That year
she was organizing the "We Will Stand Up" clinic protests that
stopped abortions in most of the cities the Pope visited on his
U.S. tour. But she remembers Terry as "streaking over our sky
like a comet" with plans for nationally organized sit-ins (which
were about to be renamed rescues). A member of Feminists foro
Life, Loesch Wiley later joined Terry's Operation Rescue,
despite misgivings about its predominantly male leadership, as
its first communications coordinator.

    Scheidler says Terry "was brilliant. He taped a song
against abortion and sent it to all the pro-life groups. Later,
when people met him, they said, `Oh, yeah, I know him, he's the
kid with the frizzy hair who sang When the Battle Raged.'"
Cavanaugh-O'Keefe gives a more dispassionate account of Terry's
rise: "He organized without distraction for two years to
undertake a national action, lasting several days, first in New
York and then in Atlanta (at the Democratic National
Convention). He organized it brilliantly and brought in all the
pro-life groups." Terry also formed a team of nine organizers,
all in their 30s, who have proved indefatigable. Though it has
one Catholic, two ordained ministers and two women, the team's
style is decidedly male, lay, young and clamorously pious in
evangelical style.

    Terry appeals primarily to fellow evangelicals, the people
who send their children to Christian schools or keep them in
"home schools" with an even stricter Christian curriculum. Many
supported Pat Robertson for President. Others revere the
teachings of Francis Schaeffer, the evangelicals' cult
intellectual who died in 1984, three years after issuing his A
Christian Manifesto, which called for civil disobedience to stop
the killing of babies by abortion.

    Catholics argue that a fetus is clearly human, relying on
concepts of "natural law" that forbid tampering with
reproduction even by contraception or sterilization.
Evangelicals, in contrast, argue directly from the Bible,
primarily from passages in which God says he knew his people
when they were unaware of his call, even knew individuals in the
womb (Psalms 139:13-16, a favorite text). They take their
command to "rescue those who are being taken away" from Proverbs
24:11. The moment of conception is celebrated in Jewish and
Christian scripture. Even so, many evangelicals were late to
focus on this issue, after resenting court actions for so long
on matters like banning prayer in schools and Christian symbols
in public places. Terry has turned this late arrival on the
scene to homiletic advantage, repeating over and over that it is
time for the churches to repent their acquiescence in the
"holocaust" of children killed since 1973. The saying his
admirers most often quote is "There are no heroes in this
movement; we were all 15 years too late."

    By most estimates, the anti-abortion activists are roughly
two-thirds evangelical and one-third Catholic -- and the
Catholics soon pick up the evangelicals' hymn-singing style at
rallies that stir up and instruct people on the eve of any
direct action. The movement is ecumenical, in that it has played
down doctrinal differences between Fundamentalists and other
evangelicals. Elements of the political right and left mingle
more guardedly. Andrews, whose "other issues" include nuclear
war and capital punishment, says of Terry, whose other issues
are pornography and prayer in schools, "I hope we will be able
to influence each other." Some evangelicals see the pro-life
movement as the vehicle by which they will resume the active
public influence they lost in the 1920s after the Scopes trial.
Abortion has become for them what anti-Communism was for
preachers like Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis. Says the
Duke University Divinity School's respected evangelical
historian George Marsden: "This is the sort of thing that won't
go away. It's a way of getting at a whole package of issues."

    But less parochial people are also responding to the moral
fervor of the activists. Christopher Hitchens, writing in the
Nation, has criticized pro-choice arguments from the left,
saying that the fetus is obviously a human life: "What other
kind could it be?" Readers of the socialist In These Times and
the pacifist Friends Journal recently came across an article by
Nanlouise Wolfe and Stephen Zunes that began: "Our reaction to
scenes of antiabortion activists engaging in civil disobedience
outside abortion clinics is probably similar to that of many on
the left: `What are they doing using our tactics?' One major
factor may be uncomfortable for many of us to admit: many of
them are us." Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice now speaks and
writes against abortion.

    Some Catholics, left behind in this outpouring of new
energies on what was considered "their" issue, seem to be
running to catch up. Auxiliary Bishop Austin Vaughan of
Newburgh, N.Y., has gone to jail with Operation Rescue, and
Cavanaugh-O'Keefe claims other bishops are considering that
step. The threat of increasingly harsh penalties for sit-ins,
especially under the suspect RICO anti-racketeering statute,
brings out more defiant rhetoric from the pro-lifers. Some
leaders have sold their homes and disposed of other property to
live in imitation of Andrews, who gave up her worldly goods to
pursue the cause. Says Cavanaugh-O'Keefe, who is identified by
some in the movement as "the father of rescue": "I think there
will be tremendous numbers who will risk jail in the coming
year." He even argues, "This civil rights movement is larger,
in terms of sheer numbers of supporters and of those who have
gone to jail all over the nation, than the civil rights movement
of the '60s. We're now ready to fill the jails."