TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/050189/05018900.043

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 18KB | 296 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."