Businesses Caught in Abortion Cross-Fire : Protests: Both sides are using pressure tactics. In South Bay last week, Planned Parenthood had to move a meeting twice.

Word of the meeting was barely out when Michael Franks’ phone began to ring. Did he realize, the callers demanded to know, that “child killing” would be promoted in his French restaurant Tuesday night?

Gradually, the Redondo Beach restaurateur deduced the reason for what was looking more and more like a boycott threat: A Planned Parenthood group had scheduled its regular meeting in the hotel housing his establishment.

The incident--part of a chain reaction last week that forced the Planned Parenthood group to change its meeting place not once, but twice--underscores an escalation in the abortion wars, groups on both sides say.

Amid charges of harassment and concerns over civil rights, participants in the abortion debate are taking their battle beyond the clinics in an attempt to deny each other a place to organize.

In the last six months, a South Bay group opposed to abortion has used the threat of boycotts and embarrassing pickets in an attempt to pressure at least three local businesses, including Franks’, into turning away advocates of abortion rights. On the other side, when the anti-abortion Operation Rescue last year tried to stay at an Anaheim hotel, the hotel manager received a warning that, if he gave lodging to the group, the hotel would be risking the possibility of a confrontation between the two sides--or worse.

In each case, the business either canceled the reservation or persuaded the group involved to voluntarily go elsewhere. The strategy, however, has stirred both local debate and nationwide attention.

To its supporters, the tactic is an effective way of rooting out the opposition while raising public consciousness and forcing fence-sitters to take a moral stand. To critics, it is an infringement of the constitutional rights of free assembly and speech.

To the businesses caught in the middle, however, it has raised the specter of expensive boycotts, bad publicity and the frustration of being dragged into an emotionally and politically charged debate. Even while buckling to the boycott threats, they say they are just trying to stay out of the battle.

“It was a no-win situation,” Franks recalled. “It was dreadful for the restaurant. I have a local business, and my name was being thrown around. . . . We were stuck in the middle of something we had no involvement in and no power to do anything about.”

Locally, the tactic first gained attention in March, 1989, when about 500 out-of-town members of Operation Rescue arrived in Orange County for a three-day demonstration. When word got out that that organization had planned to use the Ramada Main Gate hotel in Anaheim as a base of operations, callers phoned the hotel and persuaded the manager to cancel the accommodations.

The callers, according to hotel officials and abortion-rights advocates, warned that Operation Rescue’s demonstrations had turned angry and violent in the past. They noted, too, that the hotel was risking pickets by the abortion-rights side.

The hotel canceled the reservation, citing the “controversial” nature of the group and the “potentially dangerous situation” that might be posed for other guests if Operation Rescue were allowed to stay.

No organization took credit for forcing the hotel’s hand.

That was not the case when the tactic surfaced in September in the South Bay.

“We want this area to be an abortion-free zone,” announced Redondo Beach businessman J.T. Finn after he and about 50 abortion opponents took aim at the Torrance office of Mercury Savings & Loan.

At issue was the savings and loan’s decision to rent a conference room to the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. When Finn saw an ad noting that the group would be discussing ways to counter Operation Rescue, he launched a phone and letter-writing campaign aimed at getting Mercury to deny NOW the meeting room it had used for more than three years.

“When they declined, they were informed that pro-lifers would be picketing the bank,” Finn said. The protest drew about 50 people armed with placards and giant photographs of aborted fetuses. At one point, a local physician left the picket line to withdraw his $100,000 pension fund account from the savings and loan, the doctor said.

Five months later, NOW received a letter reminding the organization that its contract to use the meeting room would expire in May, and that Mercury was unwilling to renew it.

“To be perfectly honest,” wrote Mercury Vice President Mickey Greenberg, “the unfortunate picketing incident last year did influence our decision. It brought to light the fact that NOW is political, and the criteria for the use of the Mercury Room specifically excludes political groups.”

NOW protested, charging that Mercury knew it was political from the start. But for Mercury, the decision seemed the only way to remain neutral in a loaded debate, Greenberg said.

As NOW was gearing up for its last meeting Wednesday in the Mercury Room, Finn and his supporters were planning to put two more businesses on the spot. Once again, the impetus was a news item advertising a speech on Roman Catholicism and abortion rights, to be sponsored by the South Bay Friends of Planned Parenthood. The ad said the meeting would be Tuesday evening at Franks’ restaurant, Chez Melange--a technical error, since the meeting would be not at the restaurant itself, but in the hotel housing it.

“Suddenly I started getting phone calls,” Franks said. No one seemed satisfied with his explanation that the ad was incorrect.

“I was tied up for four hours one evening trying to explain my position (on abortion), which was that as a restaurant, we had no position to explain,” he recalled.

At wits’ end, he called the Planned Parenthood group, which sympathetically volunteered to meet somewhere else.

“Michael said they were harassing him terribly, threatening to boycott him,” said Pat Collins, spokeswoman for the Planned Parenthood group. “As soon as I heard about it, I said, ‘This is ridiculous. Why should an innocent man get his business ruined?’ ”

So, with four days left before the meeting, Collins’ group lined up the conference room at the HomeFed Bank down the street. Finn said word leaked to him almost immediately, and a new round of lobbying was launched.

“They said they were going to picket and all these wonderful things outside the bank, and we just said, gosh, let’s stay neutral on this,” recalled HomeFed branch manager Lucia Nisenson.

Collins said the bank withdrew its offer of the conference room within two hours of making it. Bank spokeswoman Kaye Rowan stressed, however, that the decision “had nothing to do with the nature of the group.”

“We needed to make a good decision for the business,” Rowan said. “We were concerned about threats to customers getting in and out of the branch.”

Eventually, the Planned Parenthood group found a meeting room at a recreation center in a Torrance municipal park, where Finn’s group picketed them.

Collins and others said the episode violated their First Amendment rights.

“It’s incredible that in a democratic society, our civil rights can be so openly abused,” Collins said.

And Carol Sobel, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, noted that the state Unruh Civil Rights Act specifically prohibits discrimination in public accommodations on arbitrary grounds.

Others, however, defended the tactic as an effective means of forcing businesses to take a stand.

“If these people don’t do something, they’re accessories to the crime,” said Operation Rescue spokeswoman Wendy Wright in Washington, who compared people who are neutral on abortion to those who lived near Nazi death camps during World War II but “did nothing to stop the killing.”

The South Bay incidents come against a national backdrop in which economic leverage has increasingly been employed as a weapon in the abortion fight. In recent months, groups favoring legalized abortion have threatened Idaho potato growers in an effort to head off a ban on abortion in that state; launched a letter-writing campaign to clients of the nation’s largest public relations firm to protest its anti-abortion ad campaign for the Roman Catholic church, and targeted Orange County fast-food magnate Carl Karcher, owner of Carl’s Jr., for his open opposition to legalized abortion.

On the other side, opponents of legalized abortion are claiming victory over recent decisions by American Telephone & Telegraph and Winn-Dixie supermarkets to withdraw corporate support for Planned Parenthood.

“If politics is going to be a dead end, then we’ll turn to the religion of this country--the almighty dollar,” said Robert Marshall, director of research for the Virginia-based American Life League.

Added Stephen Wood, director of Operation Rescue’s Florida Legislative Center, near Tampa: “It’s effective. Let’s face it. I believe a second American Civil War will rise over abortion, and it will be fought economically, not just at the voting booth.”

Wood and others around the country said, however, that so far California seems to be the first place to see the threat of secondary boycotts involving accommodations.

“So far the general public has been one or two or more steps divorced from the fray,” noted Barbara Radford, executive director of the National Abortion Federation in Washington. “But I’m not surprised to hear about this type of local activity . . . and people better get used to it.”

Added Wood: “It sounds like California, as usual, is taking things a step further, and . . . it sounds like a great idea.”