All Sides Brace for Abortion Confrontation Saturday

Religious groups are gearing up for two major anti-abortion demonstrations at undisclosed Southland clinics, which could make up the largest effort in the West to shut down family-planning centers.

Organizers are predicting that 1,000 local demonstrators will participate Saturday in the first protest, which they call the Southern California Pastors’ Rescue, at one or more of the clinics that perform abortions in Orange and Los Angeles counties. Headquarters for both operations have been opened in Garden Grove.

Participants plan to block the facilities’ entrances, risking arrest and confrontation with pro-choice activists, to turn women away from scheduled appointments.

“Abortion is legal, but it’s not lawful--there’s a higher law,” said the Rev. Randy Adler, a protest spokesman and pastor of a 100-member reform-charismatic congregation, the Stone Mountain Church in Laguna Hills.

“We are planning on stopping abortion in this country. It’s murder. It’s a stench in the nostrils of Almighty God,” Adler said.

The protesters, ultra-conservative evangelicals and Catholics from the far left and far right, call themselves “rescuers” in the belief that, in preventing abortions, they are obeying the imperative of Proverbs 24:11 in “The Living Bible” to “rescue those who are unjustly sentenced to death; don’t stand back and let them die.”

The second protest, being called the “Los Angeles Rescue,” is to be a 4-day demonstration March 22-25. It is being sponsored by New York-based Operation Rescue, which claims to have held or inspired 150 protests resulting in 15,000 arrests of protesters nationally since November, 1987. Many of those arrested have ignored injunctions and fines levied against them. The Los Angeles Rescue is expected to draw 1,000 to 3,000 demonstrators--many of them veteran protesters from around the country, according to Mary Ann Baney, administrative assistant for Operation Rescue.

“If they pull it off the way they want to, it will be the largest campaign we’ve seen yet on the West Coast,” Dady Blake, president of the National Organization for Women’s Los Angeles chapter, said about the anti-abortion protesters.

From the Garden Grove headquarters of the two actions, local pastors, churches and anti-abortion leaders and organizations are being formed into a network to be tapped by Operation Rescue, said Kenneth Tanner, a student and coordinator for the Pastors’ Rescue.

The specific site or sites of the protest will be chosen the night before the demonstration, organizers said. The targets will be picked “only after intelligence-gathering has made it clear there are babies scheduled to die,” said Bob Jasso, a rescue veteran and leader in Pacifica, San Mateo County, who plans to participate in both protests.

Demonstrators will gather at multiple meeting places Saturday morning and be bused to the clinics, where they will sit down and “try and keep anyone from getting in there,” Tanner said.

Protesters will carry no signs and will be instructed to sing and chant and avoid shouting epithets, he said.

Women demonstrators will be assigned to approach each client of the clinic to “tell her how we would like her not to kill the baby and how we have services and counseling for her and a lot of alternatives,” Tanner said. In response, a coalition of pro-choice groups plans Saturday to send at least 500 trained activists to escort women into what they believe will be the targeted clinics, according to Robin Schneider, executive director of the Southern California branch of the California Abortion Rights Action League. The coalition includes CARAL, the American Civil Liberties Union, NOW and others.

“No one knows what they’re going to do,” Schneider said about the anti-abortion protesters. “Hopefully, the police will be there and enforce the law before they obstruct any entrances.”

Barbara Martinez, coordinator for the north county chapter of NOW, said volunteers are being sought to counter the demonstrators.

“We plan to have a presence at as many places as we possibly can,” she said.

If it is learned that protesters plan to be at a clinic at 6 a.m., Martinez said, “we’ll be there at 5. If they’re there at 5, we’ll be there at 4. We’re as committed as they are.

“We are not there to start any kind of violent interaction at all. Quite the contrary. We simply want them to think they are not going to be successful (at a certain target) and maybe turn back. We want to be a deterrent.”

The number of anti-abortion protesters has been rising in recent weeks at the Family Planning Associates clinic in Orange. “Two weeks ago, there were over 200,” said Patti Headland-Wauson, an escort with the United Feminist Network.

A court order at another popular target, the Family Planning Associates clinic in Cypress, has limited protesters to two at a time in the clinic parking lot. Likewise, escorts with clients are limited to two at a time.

Sgt. Timm Browne of the Orange Police Department said there is a good chance that protesters will target the Orange clinic Saturday, but “we hope they go somewhere else.”

Mass arrests of protesters, sometimes chaining themselves together, have become the hallmark of Operation Rescue and dozens of spinoff protests that swept the East and Northern California last year, often clogging jails and courts.

Requests for speedy jury trials by 248 protesters arrested in October in Sunnyvale resulted in a declaration of judicial emergency in Santa Clara County. Last month, on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, another 207 people were arrested.

“It’s a real big mess,” Presiding Judge Rene Navarro of the Santa Clara County Municipal Court said about the arrested anti-abortion protesters. “We can’t handle them all.”

Activists on both sides of the issue agree that the law on abortion may change when the U.S. Supreme Court rules--possibly by July--in a case that poses some of the same questions as Roe vs. Wade.

President Bush has lent his support to the anti-abortion movement.

National polls show public attitudes toward abortion vary depending on how questions are phrased, according to a recent analysis by the New York Times.

A Times Orange County Poll conducted in January showed that 60% of the survey’s respondents were against the Supreme Court barring abortions except in the case of a threat to a mother’s life. A large minority (41%) of those identifying themselves as fundamentalists held the same view.

Los Angeles City Council members passed a resolution, 4-3, in November denouncing Operation Rescue as a public nuisance.

No public officials in Orange County have taken a position on Operation Rescue.

Operation Rescue and its affiliates have received little support from mainline religious organizations or the National Right to Life Committee, a 12-million-member educational group based in Washington that advocates a constitutional amendment to restrict abortions.

Some leaders of Orange County’s largest evangelical congregations have also had a muted reaction to the group. Dr. Robert H. Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral said through a spokesman that he has no comment on Operation Rescue.

Charles Swindoll, pastor of the First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, said: “I certainly am pro life. But some express that in ways I may not choose to. . . . I’ve held back from statements that require other people to hold my convictions.”

Archbishop Roger Mahony of the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has offered “prayerful support” for the Pastors’ Rescue but said it is “not something that I or any of the other bishops (in Los Angeles) will be involved in.”

Bishop Norman F. McFarland of the Diocese of Orange said: “I don’t think there’s any higher cause we can fight for, but it has to be nonviolent. I think it’s a good cause to go to jail for.”

But he added, “I don’t see that I’m going to go down and get arrested.”

The religious zeal of the Operation Rescue movement was evident at a planning rally for Saturday’s protest that was held late last month at St. Pancratius Catholic Church in Lakewood.

Nearly the entire crowd of 600 stood when asked who was willing to go to jail.

Father Norman Weslin told the largely evangelical crowd: “God is saying to California, ‘Woe to California. You are becoming a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. . . . You are killing my babies.’

“We have let it go too long. When we go to God in a few years, he’ll look us in the eye and say, ‘What did you do when the killing goes on?’ ”

Civil laws that conflict with “God’s law” are “non-laws,” he said.

Adler, of the Stone Mountain Church in Laguna Hills, called for $10,000 in contributions to the Pastors’ Rescue, a figure he said was given to him by God through prayer.

“We’re going into war, and every war needs finances,” he said.

Father Al Howard, a rally spokesman and director of a Long Beach home for unwed mothers, later said that Adler’s call elicited $9,800 and two diamond rings.

Operation Rescue spokesman Jeff White said at the Jan. 21 rally that a great effort will be needed from anti-abortion protesters in California, whose Legislature each year rejects anti-abortion proposals.

“California is not going to roll over,” he said.