Abortion foes plan up-close bid to ostracize clinic staff

By Stephanie Simon
Los Angeles Times

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She lives in the worn brick building behind the picket line; a protester points to her window with a plastic arrow, the kind that might direct traffic to a garage sale. Only, this one says in red letters: ABORTION NURSE.

The men and women, and several bundled-up children, stand vigil for an hour in a cold gray wind, then head home for supper. They will return. For this is just the start of a campaign that tests the far limits of free speech: a crusade to expose abortion providers, to isolate them, to shame, even harass them into quitting.

They have chosen Wichita because it's home to one of the few clinics in the country that offer abortions to women in advanced pregnancy. Local activists maintain a steady vigil outside the clinic, clutching baby blankets as they kneel on the sidewalk in prayer.

Bent on more aggressive confrontation, Troy Newman, president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue West, moved his family here from Southern California two years ago. He then persuaded six like-minded friends to join him.

Forces marshaled, he drew up the most far-reaching battle plan that abortion-rights advocates have ever seen — legal, but deliberately invasive. He calls it the Year of Rebuke.

Over the next 12 months, Newman and his followers will point their arrows at everyone who works for Women's Health Care Services, from the chief physician to the armed security guards.

Photos of mangled fetal heads will greet the receptionist at her favorite restaurant. Protesters will point out the nurse as she walks into the mall, the office manager as she heads into church. Every clinic employee can expect pickets at home, yellow arrows pointed at the front door.

Newman will pick through clinic workers' trash to figure out where they do business; he will trail them at a distance to learn their routines. His goal is not just to make their lives uncomfortable. He wants to unsettle and disgust their friends and associates, so their hair stylists and their pharmacists, even their neighbors, make it clear they're not welcome in Wichita.

Invasion of privacy is not a crime in Kansas, so publicizing the names and addresses of clinic workers is protected under the First Amendment.

Said Newman: "This is a personal campaign. It's letting people know, abortion is not abstract. There's a real person who holds the scalpel, and he lives next door to you."
 
Hardball tactics are nothing new in the abortion wars, even among activists sworn to hold only peaceful protests. Abortion opponents photograph women entering clinics and post the pictures online. They send gruesome postcards to neighbors of clinic workers. They boycott construction companies building clinics. Activists have even trailed doctors through groceries, hissing, "How can you live with yourself?"

Newman's campaign aims more broadly; he vows to make abortion "an unavoidable issue" throughout Wichita. If he offends people, fine. If he repulses them, even better, so long as he gets them to think about what happens at the clinic.

"The whole idea is to create an atmosphere in which people are forced to deal with it," he said.

Abortion providers insist they will not be intimidated.

"Unfortunately, we're used to dealing with protesters," said Carrie Klaege, the clinic manager, whose suburban home has been picketed frequently. "If their point is to get us to quit, this is probably the worst way to go about it."

In a windowless clinic wedged between a Mazda dealership and a sports bar, Dr. George Tiller performs thousands of abortions a year, including several hundred on viable fetuses.

In Kansas, as in most states, it is legal to abort a fetus that could survive outside the womb — but only to save the life or protect the physical or mental health of the mother. Tiller is one of just four or five physicians in the United States to offer the procedure; women fly in from all over to see him.

Some of his patients are victims of rape or incest. Many have just learned, in their second or third trimesters, that their fetus has severe deformities and would likely die within hours of birth.

Tiller did not respond to requests for an interview; he rarely talks to the media. But in 31 years of performing abortions in Wichita, he has shown he won't be pressured into quitting.

In 1986, a pipe bomb exploded in his clinic. In 1991, abortion opponents put the facility under siege, blocking access to the gate for six tense weeks. In 1993, Tiller was shot through both arms by a protester. He was back at work the next day.

Newman, 37, directs his effort to force abortion providers out of Wichita from a trailer parked next to the studio of a Christian radio station. He claims to raise $250,000 a year for Operation Rescue West from 35,000 activists spread out from California to Missouri.

Some of that money supports the "Truth Truck," a white Isuzu with 211,000 miles on the odometer and color photos of fetal body parts plastered to every surface. Operation Rescue West's seven paid staff members and dozens of volunteers drive the truck, and three others just like it, coast to coast. They circle outside schools, sports arenas and clinic workers' homes, anywhere they might draw a crowd.

Parents often complain that the photos horrify their children. Even some anti-abortion leaders consider Newman's trucks unnecessarily provocative.

"He alienates a lot of people because he slaps them in the face with it," said Timothy Wiesner, who runs a crisis pregnancy center next to Tiller's clinic.

"We show the truth," Newman responds. "I don't care if people get mad. If abortion is so horrible that we can't bear looking at it, maybe we shouldn't be tolerating it."

Newman says his staff is committed to peaceful protest. His critics fear his protests could prove explosive.

"You don't know who these demonstrations will attract," said Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation. "These people have crossed the line many times."

Asked if the pickets could provoke extremist wrath, Michele Herzog, an Operation Rescue West staff member, fell silent for a moment. "It is very inflammatory," she said.

Herzog's four children were helping her hold up an enormous photo of crushed fetal parts at the picket outside the nurse's apartment in Wichita. She positioned the banner — measuring at least 15 feet long by 5 feet high — so passing drivers could not miss it.

Herzog said she hoped no one would target the nurse for violence: "That would not be a good thing."

But she added: "That's the risk you take when you're in this battle."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company