A Battle Echoes from The Street to the Court

BY A STRANGE AND LURID COINCIDENCE LAST WEEK, Americans were invited to reconsider when respect for life should begin and when it should end. The drama opened with demonstrators outside San Quentin prison praying and singing and talking of mercy for convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris, who faced the gas chamber the next day. Across the continent on the streets of Buffalo, crowds of antiabortion activists sang and prayed and talked of mercy for the unborn as they gathered outside abortion clinics with the hope of shutting them down. The unseen audience in both cases, weighing life and death, was the Supreme Court, but everyone else who watched was invited to judge whether some lives are more sacred than others.

The demonstrators in California waited through the night Monday as judges of the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco went to battle against the Supreme Court in Washington. The question was whether sending Harris to California's gas chamber, unused in 25 years, constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Four times the appeals court stayed the execution, and four times the Justices overturned the stay, ultimately blocking the lower court from making any more end runs. In the meantime Harris ate his last meal, a supper of pizza and jelly beans, then was taken to the eerie apple-green chamber and strapped into the chair. A few minutes later came not death but a momentary reprieve as the judges fought on. Finally, just before sunrise, the high court's patience and his luck ran out, and he arrived back in the gas chamber a final time, as a roomful of journalists, politicians and relatives of his young victims watched through a glass window. By the time the cyanide pellets were released into the chamber, the networks and the nation had had a chance to muse once more over the morality of a government's punishing a killer by killing him.

It was a question worth putting to activists who call themselves pro-life and then threaten doctors with death if they continue to perform abortions. Outside a health clinic in downtown Buffalo, the crowd was largely peaceful but the rhetoric was not, as opponents called each other "Nazis" and "murderers." The Rev. Robert Schenck waved his ghastly prop before the cameras and the demonstrators: a 20-week-old fetus that he carries in formaldehyde to antiabortion rallies to illustrate his respect for human life. The carefully stage-managed battle was designed as a reprise of the Siege of Wichita, which occurred when Operation Rescue tried to shut down abortion clinics in Kansas last summer.

But last week there were equal numbers of abortion-rights activists prepared to defend the doors of the clinics, and the vaunted showdown seemed more a sideshow to the main event playing out before the high court. On Wednesday, the Justices heard arguments in the case that allows them to overturn or undermine Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion. They must decide whether or not to uphold a Pennsylvania law that requires a woman to wait 24 hours before having an abortion, notify her husband or, if she is a minor, her parents, and receive counseling about the alternatives to abortion.

The men and women of Operation Rescue, who are passionately opposed to abortion, share an ultimate value with those in California battling the death penalty: both base their case on the sanctity of life. But consensus collapses over definitions: Is abortion murder or a medical procedure; is an execution murder or an exercise of justice? Is it logically possible to be against abortion and in favor of capital punishment? If pollsters are right, many Americans would say yes; last week's dramas invited them to explain why. (See cover story on page 26.)