The judicial system is making antiabortion demonstrators think twice, as many are paying a heavy price.
In Pittsburgh, Bob Irwin must wear an electronic device around his ankle 24 hours a day for the next several months. He is under house arrest for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic last year. The authorities have installed surveillance equipment in his bedroom phone to monitor his whereabouts. He is allowed to go back and forth to work. He is permitted to go to church on Sundays, but not on Wednesday nights.
“I was told that higher authorities felt the Wednesday services were political,” he explains, adding that the services actually consist merely of praise, worship, and prayer. Irwin is considering going to a midweek service anyway, something he says could cost him two to seven years in jail. It is a difficult choice for Irwin and his wife, who are parents of four preteen children.
In Milwaukee, some of those who have participated in similar illegal demonstrations are having their driver’s licenses taken away for five years for refusing to pay fines. In Portland, after being found guilty following a jury trial, Randy Alcorn left the pastorate so authorities could not garnish his wages.
And in California, hundreds have been arrested for trespassing at abortion clinics. Among them are about a dozen employees of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. One of them, Steve Kipp, the father of four children aged five and under, has been sentenced to over seven months in prison, with no chance of reduction, per the judge’s order.
From coast to coast, those who have lent their bodies to the rescue movement are paying a price for it. And even some who oppose the concept of illegally blocking the entrances to abortion clinics believe that price is too high. “The punishment Operation Rescue people have received has been barbarous,” said columnist Nat Hentoff of the liberal Village Voice.
Hentoff, who opposes both legal abortion and illegal prolife activities, said he is particularly concerned about pain-compliance techniques routinely used on protesters who go “limp” instead of cooperating. Said Hentoff, “The head of a [Los Angeles] police unit who trained cops in the use of pain techniques actually said in a court deposition that it was okay to [use the techniques on] Operation Rescue people because they’re religious” and “consider it necessary to absorb pain.”
Trying Times
But the rough treatment does not stop when rescuers leave the paddy wagon. Prolife advocates in southern California note that actor Martin Sheen, after his eighteenth conviction for antinuclear protest, got 3 hours of community service; some first-time antiabortion activists got 300 hours. Others have received jail terms of 30 days or more for trespassing, which, in another context, would typically draw a minor fine.
“There is no protest group in this nation that is being treated with anywhere near the degree of harshness that we are receiving,” said Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue (OR), (see interview below).
Said Sam Casey, an attorney with the California-based Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom, “There have been more Christians put in jail on behalf of the unborn than for any other civil-rights movement in this country’s history.”
Perhaps most important, attorneys representing prolife demonstrators say they have consistently been denied the opportunity to present an intelligent defense. Such a defense rests on the premise that a fetus is a human life with civil rights, including the right to survive. Judges have routinely barred this premise from juries’ consideration by dismissing as irrelevant any testimony regarding defendants’ motives.
OR Founder Terry Unabashed
A coalition of prolife organizations at a major rally this summer turned down the opportunity to hear from Randall Terry, the controversial founder of Operation Rescue (OR). Many in the prolife movement have distanced themselves not only from OR’s tactics, but especially from what they regard as Terry’s inflammatory rhetoric. As evidenced by the following interview, Terry will never be accused of pulling punches.
In your view, why has the judicial system been so tough on Operation Rescue?
Politically, our view on child killing is not the popular one right now. Most other activists find sympathizers in the media and in the judiciary. We find virtually none. From a spiritual perspective, there’s no question in my mind there are forces of darkness behind the judicial oppression of Christians. I believe rescuers are the first fruits of God handing his people over to be oppressed. He has promised that when innocent blood is shed, especially the blood of children, he will hand his own people over to their enemies.
Have the court actions against the rescue movement slowed its momentum?
It has slowed rescue down some, but 1990 is a year for us to catch our breath. I believe in 1991 there’ll be fresh growth. We’re having another [Washington] D.C. project in November. We expect hundreds to participate.
Several big-name leaders have lent their names to the cause, but so far none has actually participated in a rescue. Does that frustrate you?
I wish the whole Christian church would rescue. We have the sheer numbers to grind the killing to a halt. But people have to make that decision on their own before God. They’re not going to face me on the day of judgment.
If you had known when you started OR what you know today, what would you have done differently?
I would have made more of an effort to mobilize Christians to defend rescuers. That’s why we’re starting the Christian Defense Coalition, which will mobilize Christians to write, phone, picket, visit, have prayer vigils in front of judges’ offices or homes to hold them accountable for our treatment. When the Christian community rises up with a voice of outrage over either police brutality or judicial tyranny, the tyrants have a tendency to back down. We have to send a message that we will not tolerate oppression, that if you mess with a few of us, you’re going to deal with a lot of us.
Yet a large segment of the Christian community doesn’t care to defend OR. They feel that the rescue approach is wrongheaded.
Historically, silence and accommodation has done nothing to help the oppressed. It only strengthens the hands of the oppressors. That is the lesson of Nazi Germany and of the Eastern Bloc countries. Hitler went after the insane, the feeble, the elderly. The Christian community, by not taking action, contributed to Hitler’s strengthening and its own weakening, and ultimately to the death of 30 to 40 million people. When the Christian community tolerates the oppression of a few, it paves the way for the oppression of the many. It doesn’t stop with rescuers. Today, people are being arrested for praying or picketing on sidewalks, something they have a constitutional right to do.
But the nonrescue wing of the prolife movement has not exactly tolerated abortion. It merely maintains that the rescue approach hurts the chances of political success.
The church has played Mr. Nice Guy. We’ve said, “Let’s play within the system. Let’s be nice. Let’s not be confrontational.” And America has slid into the jaws of hell. The Christian community does not control the levers of power in any major institution in this country. We are in the back of the humanist bus. There are people who hate our God and his Word, who are determined to push the church into irrelevance. The way they are doing it is by terror, and it has started with rescuers. You strike out at one group of people and then you look at the others and say, “Do you want this to happen to you?”
Do you really think it helps your cause, though, to call Supreme Court justices “Nazi judges”?
We’ve got to stop being like Neville Chamberlain and start being like Winston Churchill. Chamberlain wanted to appease Hitler, wanted to win him, to reason with him. He never understood you cannot appease someone who is dedicated to your destruction. When we have godless enemies of Christ who are sitting in judgment on the Supreme Court bench, why are we concerned about winning their favor instead of calling them what they are: tyrants?
That goes for the whole Supreme Court?
No. But there are some—Blackmun and Stephens are enemies of Christ. When history’s final editorial light is cast upon them 50 or 100 years from now, they’re going to be remembered with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Harry Blackmun opened the floodgate of bloodshed that will cost 30 million children their lives. He is a vile human being. Why should we wait for the next generation to say what’s true?
Cyrus Zal, who defended prolife demonstrators in El Cajon, California, is serving a 290-day sentence—200 of those days for refusing to pay a $10,000 fine—for contempt of court. Zal said he was cited for contempt because, in violation of the judge’s instructions, he “asked a police officer if he’d ever been an unborn child,” and asked an abortion clinic worker “if she was familiar with those places where two people go in and only one comes out alive.”
But it is not just strident prolife attorneys such as Zal who say they have smelled a rat in the judicial system. Los Angeles County public defender Jeffrey Crowther, who defended the Focus on the Family employees, was chosen not for his prolife credentials but by the luck of the draw.
Said Crowther, “I just wanted to represent my clients as best I could, but the cards were stacked against us from the beginning.” Crowther observed that in the rescue cases he has followed, judges’ rulings—from pretrial motions to instructions to the jury—seemed uncannily uniform. Though he said he had no “direct evidence,” he suggested the possibility that judges had gotten together to discuss how to handle these cases. “I’ve heard Operation Rescue is investigating this,” he said. “If they’re not, they should be.”
Crowther said his experience has changed his perspective on the judicial system: “To feel [as if] the judicial system was set up differently for Operation Rescue [is] very upsetting.”
The Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom’s Casey offers various explanations for the harsh treatment of antiabortion trespassers. For one thing, he alleges that judges must pass political tests to move up in the system, and those tests, as of the present, require a prochoice position.
And, according to Casey, rescuers are being punished for slowing down an already clogged system by refusing to plea bargain. He said he also suspects the tough sentences are based not on what protesters have done, but on judges’ suspicions of what they will do. “This is unjust,” said Casey. “You can’t be punished for a crime you haven’t committed.”
Chilling Effect?
Undoubtedly, the consequences of illegal abortion protests have caused many to think harder about whether to participate, or at least about making better preparations. Businessman Rex Moses, well known in Austin and Corpus Christi, Texas, for his leadership in the rescue movement, made over $200,000 in 1988. He left his business and sold most of what he owned to help finance rescue activities. He owes over $1 million after losing two civil lawsuits, but he has claimed, “I would die before I would pay them a cent.”
According to Operation Rescue spokesperson Mary Ann Baney, the pace of rescue has slowed to about eight to ten occurrences a month, down from about three times that many a year ago. But, she said, over 100 rescue organizations, none of which have any official ties to any other, remain active around the country.
Operation Rescue’s paid staff, once as high as 23, is down to 3. OR can accept donations, but has stopped soliciting funds, the result of a $50,000 judgment against OR in a lawsuit filed by the National Organization for Women (NOW). (According to OR’s CarolAnn Krzykowski, the money is due the New York attorney general, since NOW suffered no damages.)
New Directions
Another result of the crackdown in the courts has been diversification of prolife activities. The organization Life Chains has succeeded in getting tens of thousands to stand in line on city streets wielding antiabortion placards.
The New Jersey-based Operation Goliath has been established with the strategy of nonviolently closing “the [abortion] mills one at a time and for good,” said organizer Skip Robokoff, pastor of the Fort Lee Gospel (Christian & Missionary Alliance) Church. Robokoff called the approach “multipronged and omnidirectional.” It emphasizes raising awareness in the community through contacting clergy and through aggressive distribution of Christian literature, as well as street preaching.
Operation Goliath demonstrates at the homes of doctors who perform abortions, an increasingly common tactic among prolife groups.
According to Robokoff, the group has cut by 90 percent the business at one local clinic. Robokoff said other tenants at the office complex where the clinic is housed are leaving and that insurance rates have skyrocketed, due to insurance agents’ fears of violence.
OR founder Terry recently has helped launch the Washington, D.C.-based Christian Defense Coalition, whose purposes include raising awareness of “judicial oppression” of Christians and motivating believers to put pressure on authorities on behalf of those being punished for their prolife activities.
Meanwhile, Joseph Foreman, one of the organizers of Operation Rescue, is one of eight “Prisoners of Christ” being jailed in Atlanta. This organization, he said, emphasizes noncooperation with the legal system “at the points at which it defends child-killing.” As of last month, the organization was aware of 79 people serving time for antiabortion activities.
Foreman said that if Christians would take seriously the biblical teachings on material things, they would be “less vulnerable to lawsuits and the consequences of losing a job.” His organization is trying to recruit as many as possible—particularly the single and retired—to be willing to spend time in jail for the sake of unborn children.
He said this emphasis is a result of his philosophical struggle with the rescue rationale, which, he said, in theory would justify violence to prevent abortions. Though he does not view antiabortion violence as morally wrong, he maintains that “God has provided a better way.”
That way, he said, is patterned after Christ’s approach to “socially entrenched and legalized immorality”: the Cross. “In the same way Jesus erased the distinctions between God and man,” Foreman said, “we’re trying to erase the distinctions between adult human beings and unborn children by standing in their place.”
By Randy Frame.
