I realized then how hard it is to preserve some balance between the dictates of faith and the dictates of social reason, to disapprove of abortion and call your-self a Christian and at the same time separate yourself from the anti-abortion extremists.

—Verlyn Klinkenborg "Violent Certainties,"Harper's January 1995, p. 43

If you watch the crowds, you might think peace had been declared in America's

abortion wars. The middle and late 1980s were a time of massive, overt anti-abortion protests. News photos of the day show hundreds of activists blockading clinic doors and driveways—tens or scores storming clinic waiting rooms and lashing themselves together with bicycle locks. Mass anti-abortion activism of that sort went out of style in April 1992. In that month, concerted, mostly local, opposition prevented more than two thousand out-of-town "pro-life" activists from closing clin-ics in Buffalo and Amherst, New York, where FREE INQUIRY is published. Covering the confrontations, Time dubbed Randall Terry's Operation Rescue "Operation Fizzle." I was on the clinic defense lines each morning during the two-week "Spring of Life." Looking back, what I remember most clearly is how little actually happened. The mass forays by crawling demonstrators that had so frus-trated Wichita, Kansas, police the year before—and which we had been so thor-oughly trained to repel nonviolently—sel-dom materialized. When tried they failed.

Thomas W Flynn is senior editor of FREE INQUIRY.

Since then, the relatively large numbers of chiefly working-class, fundamentalist, church-going "right to lifers" who were once abortion providers' greatest worry have become bit players. They have not gone away: small Christian-right posses still appear like clockwork outside clinics. They still brandish ghastly altered images of bloody fetuses. They scream falsehoods about the risks of breast cancer, sterility, and death from abortion. And ruthlessly, they heckle women as they struggle to enter clinics to obtain legal reproductive health care. But they are no longer the greatest danger to abortion rights.

The tempo and style of the conflict have changed. Large, open, marginally violent activism is out. Scattered, covert activism, often shockingly violent, is in. Years ago, Randall Terry told abortion opponents, "If you believe abortion is murder, act like it." Today dangerous new Christian commandos have taken the van-guard in anti-abortion activism, answering Terry's war cry in a way even he might never admit to having anticipated.

The New Violence

Nof only doctors who perform abor-tions, but people who work in clinics

where abortions are performed, have new reason to fear for their safety. Since 1990, there have been 190 bombings or fire-bombings of abortion clinics and 600 acts of vandalism—including attacks with butyric acid, a penetrating, vile-smelling compound that can render a facility unus-able for weeks. Seven people have been shot and wounded. Tragically, five have been killed. In New York State alone, clin-ics reported four clinic incursions, three

death threats, two chemical attacks, two stalkings, and one gunfire attack during just seven months in 1994.

Understandably, the killing and wounding of abortion doctors attracts the most media attention. What receives too little scrutiny is the disturbing pattern of support for the new anti-abortion war-riors. When Michael Griffin shot and killed Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida, in 1993 donations poured in from across the country to defray the costs of Griffin's defense and to support his wife and children. Michael Hirsh, then a law student at Pat Robertson's Regent University, sent the Regent's law review a sixty-page article defending Griffin's action as justifiable homicide. He wrote: "Though Michael Griffin could have fled for his own safety, the children he protect-ed could not flee and had their backs to the wall—the uterine wall."

In the Summer 1993 Secular Humanist Bulletin, I wrote:

Dr. Gunn's murder was a horrible act, but one that followed with perfect clari-ty from conservative Christian theology. The only wonder is that it took this many years for one of the soldiers of Christ to work through the logic that made it inevitable. Now that the cat is out of the bag—now that everyone knows that a fundamentalist prepared to sacrifice his or her own future can gun down a physician with the confidence that spouse and family will be provided for—I'm afraid we're going to see many more attempts on the lives of abortion-ists and clinic personnel.

There are times when one would rather not have been right. Gunn's death was the first in a string of savage attacks. In August 1993, Oregon "pro-life" activist Rochelle "Shelley" Shannon shot and wounded Dr. George R. Tiller of Wichita, Kansas. Before she was sentenced to ten years in prison, Shannon promised the judge that she would not touch a gun again. Nor, she pledged, would she bomb any more clin-ics—a surprising assertion, since Shannon was not then a suspect in any clinic bomb-ings. Investigators searched Shannon's Grants Pass, Oregon, home. Letters and diaries found there led to charges that she had firebombed eight clinics in four states. Searchers also found a book called The Army of God, an anti-abortion how-to manual that advocated cutting off abor-

Viewpoints

Abortion Violence: The Crisis Deepens

Thomas W. Flynn

58 FREE INQUIRY

tionists' thumbs and urged Christians diag-nosed with fatal diseases to devote their last days to campaigns of clinic terrorism.

At a pro-Shannon rally held near the time of her sentencing, one "pro-life" spokesman declared: "What Shelley did was not only justified but honorable." The speaker was the Reverend Paul Hill, who on July 29 would fatally shoot abortion doctor John Bayard Britton and escort James Barrett outside another Pensacola clinic and wound Barrett's wife.

As Paul Hill had supported Michael Griffin, Hill in turn received enthusiastic support from anti-abortion extremists. Father David Trosch, a Mobile, Alabama, Catholic priest who had earlier tried to place newspaper ads describing the killing of abortion doctors as justifiable homi-cide, said of the violence, "I hope there's going to be more." He added that Hill "deserves a medal of honor." Jackson, Mississippi, activist Roy McMillan said Hill's actions were "biblically consistent." Bowie, Maryland, activist Michael Bray, who had served four years for clinic bombings, said: "Anyone who truly believes that the slaughter of children is what we have with abortion should go out and shoot an abortionist."

Meanwhile, the carnage continued. In November 1994, abortion doctor Garson Romalis was shot and wounded in his Vancouver, British Columbia, home while eating breakfast.

On December 30, Catholic hairstylist John C. Salvi allegedly killed two recep-tionists and wounded five others in rifle attacks at two Brookline, Massachusetts, abortion clinics. He was apprehended on December 31, after allegedly pumping twenty-three bullets into the windows of a Norfolk, Virginia clinic. (No one was injured.) Demonstrators appeared outside Norfolk's jail to laud Salvi and his alleged crimes. A clergyman called through a megaphone: "Thank you for what you did in the name of Jesus." Another protester called the killings "a righteous deed" and cried "John Salvi, we care about you. We love you. We support you."

Responding with Caution and Technology

Abortion doctors and clinic workers are responding to the new violence

with expanded caution and sophisticated countermeasures. Clinics are adding bul-letproof glass, metal detectors, and high-tech security systems. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America, whose 163 nonprofit affiliates operate more than 900 medical centers with 22,000 staff and volunteers, has commit-ted $100 million of its $500 million annu-al budget to security.

Violence begets violence, it is said. Unwilling to wait for high technology, one Buffalo clinic frisks all its visitors. Workers were amazed how many patients' significant others, friends, and family were carrying concealed weapons. Though New York is the nation's most handgun-hostile state, most of those whom clinic guards disarmed had valid carry permits. Apparently if a Brookline-style shooting had unfolded while they were in the waiting room, they planned to shoot back.

Will We Lose the Abortion Wars?

o their credit, most anti-abortion lead- ers have publicly deplored the new

violence. But they can afford to take the high road. Commando activism may suc-ceed in doing what their own more peace-ful protests never could—drastically cur-tail access to safe, legal abortion services.

Though abortion remains legal, the right .to choose it rings increasingly hol-low. In much of the American South and Midwest, women must travel hundreds of miles to get an abortion. Even on the coasts there are fewer clinics, and the per-ceived risk involved in visiting one has never been higher.

Over the last decade, more than 500 U.S. hospitals and clinics have stopped offering abortion services. "The availabil-ity of abortions is diminishing," reported the Washington Post, "because fewer doc-tors are willing to perform the procedure." According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the number of facilities has dropped faster than the U.S. abortion rate itself. At 25.9 abortions per 1,000 women of child-bearing age, that rate lies at its lowest level since 1976. Most observers say declining access, not some positive trend like broader use of contraceptives, underlies the trend. In Norfolk, where John Salvi was arrested. Dr. Abraham

Anderson has not performed an abortion since 1993. He was one of the only providers in the area who would give poor women abortions at a reduced fee. Now, he says, "Those who need an abortion have my sympathy. I just don't want to be killed." While lobbying in Albany, New York's state capital, I heard Repre-sentative Martin A. Luster (D-Ithaca) lament in a State Assembly debate that in the county that is home to Cornell University a Planned Parenthood clinic has been unable to fill a medical position because of the fear of violence.

The threat of violence doesn't just dis-courage today's physicians from perform-ing abortions. It is also discouraging tomorrow's from learning how. Just 47 per-cent of obstetrics and gynecology chief res-idents now graduating perform a first-trimester abortion as part of their training. In the Winter 1995 Secular Humanist Bulletin, I urged pro-choice organizations to fund scholarships that would pay part or all of a new physician's educational costs in return for an ironclad commitment to perform abortions for a period of years after beginning to practice. Some say this idea is too radical. Others say it's too little, too late.

One thing is clear. With the movement from massive, medium-intensity anti-abor-tion activism to the furtive, individual, often homicidal pattern of today, America's abortion wars have entered a deadly new phase. Keeping abortion legal is no longer the issue. Keeping abortion available at all in the face of maverick Christian violence is now the primary concern.

As secular humanists, we should defend the availability of safe, legal abor-tion not only out of a commitment to choice, but because abortion so powerful-ly expresses the Promethean impulse: the desire to take action to improve quality of life, even when—perhaps especially when—that means empowering individu-als to pursue options that outmoded reli-gious moralities might otherwise place off-limits. In simple terms, abortion is a good per se because, in a way that nothing else can, it allows women to make their own decisions whether or when to embrace the joys and obligations of moth-erhood. That avenue for self-determina-tion is one we cannot allow to be closed by violence—or through apathy. •

Spring 1995 59