"Save The Babies"

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 they 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 are 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 to 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, more 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 for 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."