Start of Campaign : Fundamentalist Group to Picket Abortion Clinic

Members of a fundamentalist Baptist church in downtown Los Angeles will begin picketing a North Hollywood abortion clinic this morning as part of a new drive by anti-abortion activists to shut down clinics throughout Los Angeles, the church’s pastor announced Monday.

The pastor and three other anti-abortion activists, including a conservative congressman, discussed the offensive at a press conference called in Universal City to focus attention on methods abortion foes can use to close clinics.

The protesters said their target, the Family Planning Associates Medical Group clinic on Victory Boulevard, is one of the busiest clinics in Los Angeles.

The Rev. Robert L. Hymers Jr., pastor of the Fundamentalist Baptist Tabernacle, a year-old church that Hymers once described as “sociologically right-wing,” said that a half-dozen members of the congregation will be involved in today’s protest.

Closing ‘One Clinic at a Time’

“We are trying to get them moved out of the Valley,” said Hymers, also founder of the Fundamentalist Army, an organization that performs street missionary work in the inner city. “If we can get that one closed down, we will move into Los Angeles. I think we can close one clinic at a time.”

Representatives of the clinic, one of a chain of Family Planning Associates clinics in the Los Angeles area, declined to comment on the announcement or to discuss the number of abortions performed at the clinic. One employee said tat the clinic would remain open regardless of protests.

Monday’s picketing announcement came during an hourlong press conference featuring Hymers; Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove); Joseph Scheidler, executive director of the Pro-Life Action League in Chicago, and Donald E. Wildmon, executive director of the National Federation for Decency.

The protesters said they hope to draw more attention to fragmented anti-abortion efforts throughout Los Angeles and focus on effective strategies for putting what they called “the abortion industry” out of business.

Hymers said that members of the 300-member Baptist congregation will picket the clinic on Tuesday and Friday mornings, times when the protesters believe abortions are most often performed there.

He said the site was chosen after “prayer” and that members of other Baptist congregations had already picketed the clinic on weekends.

“If I don’t get arrested and fingerprinted at least once during the American holocaust, my conscience will bother me the rest of my life,” Hymers said, evoking a frequently used anti-abortionist comparison between Hitler’s extermination of the Jews and the aborting of fetuses, legalized by a 1973 Supreme Court ruling.

Operation Room ‘Sit-In’

The Baptist pastor said that he would hold a “sit-in” in the operation room of a clinic at some unannounced time.

Scheidler distributed excerpts from “Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion,” a new book he has written as a “workbook” for anti-abortion activists. The book describes sit-ins as a “powerful tool for saving lives” and discusses everything from what to wear during a protest to how best to attract media coverage.

Although the book includes a chapter entitled “Violence: Why it Won’t Work,” Scheidler said that he understands why activists resort to bombings and other forms of violence. He said he refuses to condemn bombings of clinics because his statements would be used as “ammunition” by pro-abortion activists.

“I hate to say it, but I think some of the violence has caused some thoughtful people to look at the abortion issue,” he said. “I have not in any way condoned the violence. I do understand it.”

Abortion Videocassette

Reporters were also given free copies of “The Silent Scream,” a controversial videocassette narrated by abortion adversary Bernard Nathanson. The tape shows the destruction of a fetus being pulled out of a womb by suction.

In Los Angeles Monday, about 20 women peacefully demonstrated outside the headquarters for the National Organization for Women to protest remarks made by NOW’s president about the film.

NOW President Judy Goldsmith claimed the narrator of the film tried to manipulate viewers’ emotions to “exploit a cultural concern.”

Dornan predicted the video, which has sparked heated debate nationwide because of its explicitness, would have the same historic impact on the abortion issue as the book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had on the slavery debate in the last century. That book, which dramatized the injustices of slavery, is credited with turning American public opinion against the institution.

“The abortion issue is the slavery issue of our time,” Dornan said. “We are engaged in the No. 1 social battle in the 200-year history of this nation.”

‘Sexist Crime’

Dornan, who has authored a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion, called abortion a “sexist crime” against women and an important human rights issue that has finally caught the attention of the news media.

Hymers, however, lashed out at the news media and churches for “refusing” to report to the public about the abortion issue. “If there is one dead body on the streets of Nicaragua, you put it on the front page,” he said. “If 150,000 people a year are being tortured,” he added later in reference to abortions, “you have a holocaust on your hands.”

Hymers said that his church would help lead the struggle against clinics in Los Angeles, but called on other congregations to assist him.

“Other churches ought to take a stand and not just say somebody ought to do do something,” he contended. “We are the somebody.”