5 Abortion Foes Arrested at Ga. Clinic : Protest: The Operation Rescue activists had chained themselves together in the facility in violation of a court order.

Five Operation Rescue anti-abortion protesters were arrested today after they entered an Atlanta abortion clinic and chained themselves together, defying a court order upheld this week by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Police were called to the Atlanta Surgi-Center and arrested the five after cutting their chains. Maj. W. W. Holley said that they would be charged with criminal trespass and that information about the violation of the order would be turned over to the court.

An Operation Rescue spokeswoman, Jane Shepherd, said the protest was not a response to Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision to uphold the court-ordered ban on demonstrations by the group within 50 feet of any Atlanta abortion clinic. But she acknowledged that it violated that ban, imposed by a Superior Court judge in Atlanta.

“When we do a rescue in the city, it does not matter whether there’s an injunction or not,” she said.

The clinic’s director, Beth Petzelt, said the protesters pushed their way into the clinic about 8:30 a.m., as patients were being admitted, and scuffled with four or five staff members who tried to keep them out.

Meanwhile today, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., was told that Operation Rescue spent more than $50,000 for November demonstrations that kept women out of Washington-area clinics in violation of a court order.

Attorney Larry Eisenstein, who represents the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood, said Operation Rescue and its leaders should be found in contempt of a Nov. 8 order that prohibited blockades of abortion clinics.

He asked that they be fined “a large enough figure to deter them from returning in the future.”

Police arrested more than 700 protesters during a Nov. 17 demonstration on charges that they violated a new District of Columbia law.

At today’s hearing before U.S. District Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer, Eisenstein showed videotapes of three November demonstrations in an effort to prove that Operation Rescue, Project Rescue and their leaders violated Oberdorfer’s injunction.

Eisenstein said he would show that Organization Rescue, which says it is in debt, spent “well in excess of $50,000 and maybe well more than $100,000” on the November operations

He said that 1989 donations to the two organizations exceeded $700,000 and that they deposited more than $1.1 million in bank accounts.