In Your Town, in Your Face

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

In Melbourne, Florida, the first sign of coming events was modest. On a lot across from the Aware Woman Center for Choice, which performs abortions, two portable toilets sprouted. They were put there by Operation Rescue, the militant pro-life organization that had bought the property in part to demonstrate near the clinic without violating a court-ordered buffer zone. Soon, locals knew, video cameras would appear -- toted by nearly every actor in the coming passion play: pro-lifers and pro-choicers taping each other, police taping both and TV-news teams taping everybody. "There's probably more money spent on camera equipment than anything else," joked Melbourne police captain Gary Allgeyer. Then he turned serious: "We seem to be in the middle of it. And it's a very uncomfortable position to be in."

Starting last Friday, much of America was in the middle of it as Operation Rescue kicked off a 10-day marathon titled "Cities of Refuge." The campaign featured speeches, rallies and pickets in seven urban areas: Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota; Cleveland, Ohio; Philadelphia; Dallas-Fort Worth; San Jose, California; Jackson, Mississippi; and the area around Melbourne. Among its goals, explained spokeswoman Wendy Wright, is to ensure that "anyone in the continental United States ((is)) within a day's drive of a rescue." To pro- choicers, the implication is chilling: the transformation of abortion- clinic picketing from an activity for incensed locals and traveling zealots into a sort of vacation experience -- one that could turn every major city into a potential Melbourne.

Founded by Randall Terry in 1987, Operation Rescue sprang to prominence with a 46-day clinic blockade in 1991 that nearly paralyzed Wichita, Kansas. This year the organization has intensified its harder-edged tactics aimed at clinic employees: wanted posters of doctors, picket lines around their homes, and harassment of their children and neighbors. After one such target, physician David Gunn, was shot to death in March by a man connected with an unrelated but similar organization, "the pro-life movement was on the ropes a little bit," admits Operation Rescue's national spokesman, Patrick Mahoney. Nonetheless, Rescue continued a Melbourne "boot camp" that tutored recruits in everything from sidewalk "counseling" to surveillance. Graduates are now aiding the Refuge campaign in their hometowns, as Terry and other leaders jet from city to city, exhorting the troops. "We must strive to build a Christian democratic republic that is founded on the Ten Commandments," he says in a preview. "The only alternative is a pagan nation with rampant murder, rape, drug abuse, gang warfare, etcetera."

Meanwhile, the opposition has been honing its defenses. The Fund for the Feminist Majority has assembled 4,000 volunteers for counterdemonstrations. In Philadelphia a local coalition says it can field 500 at once to defend local clinics. Sympathetic restaurants have offered to fuel them with free snacks. The St. Paul police force, which one lawman describes as "massively" prepared, surrounded a clinic with an 8-ft.-high chain-link fence, while the cops in a Cleveland suburb made do with barrels, sandbags and 40 officers.

The defenders also found legal weapons. Although a federal clinic-access bill is still in committee in the House and awaits floor action in the Senate, most of the sites have recourse to local laws, like those in Minnesota against blocking a clinic entrance and "stalking" doctors and nurses, or San Jose's 8-ft. legal privacy "bubble" around clinic clients. Local officials have been heard from. Declared Philadelphia Mayor Edward Rendell: "I want to say clearly and unequivocally to Operation Rescue that lawlessness will not be permitted in this city."

Rescue will be under tight scrutiny because pro-life radicals stand accused of neglecting their quest's spiritual side and turning to bravado and brutality. In Milwaukee, not a Refuge city, one of the newer forms of protest is "speed-bumping" -- throwing oneself under the cars of patients headed for clinics. Local doctors have received death threats in person, and bullets were fired through a clinic window last week. Declares pro-choicer Joan Clark: "The blockaders are not from here. They're all from somewhere else, and they're paid by the missionaries. They're thugs, and they travel."

Increasingly, those who once made common cause with Terry and his group have been alienated. Bill Price, head of Texans United for Life, is boycotting the current Dallas campaign, citing incidents including a case in which a Rescue member allegedly made a bomb threat to a Dallas clinic from a phone in New Jersey. "These are the tactics of the Mafia," says Price. Earlier this year, Twin Cities Catholic Archbishop John Roach urged militant antiabortion groups to avoid his area. "I do not find Operation Rescue to be a positive element in the pro-life movement," he said, "and I just wish they'd stay wherever they are." Operation Rescue ignored his plea. This week the group's challenge will be to regain the confidence of its less radical fellow believers.

With reporting by Marc Hequet/St. Paul, Julie Johnson/Washington, Janice C. Simpson/New York and Sarah Tippit/Orlando