Protesters Plotted ‘Rescue’--and Then It Was Too Late

The Missouri Rehabilitation Center, where Nancy Cruzan died Dec. 26, was built in 1907 as a TB sanitarium. A lot of folks in the area still call it the Chest Hospital. For the week or so they were there, anti-abortion protesters called it the “Missouri Euthanasia Center.” They had come to try to stop Joe and Joyce Cruzan from allowing their daughter to die. The protesters’ goal was to “rescue” Nancy Cruzan. But how?

Their first idea was to remove her from the hospital and take her to “a safe place.”

“We could take her gurney, pop her on a stretcher, whip her into a station wagon and just get her out of there,” said protest leader Joseph Foreman in an interview after Cruzan died. “But where would we take her? We had nowhere . . . . “

So, they settled instead on a plan to feed Nancy Cruzan.

Cruzan’s feeding tube was disconnected on a Friday evening. By Sunday, Foreman, a Presbyterian minister from Atlanta, his wife and five children were on their way to Mt. Vernon.

They arrived after midnight and slept in a Sunday school classroom not far from Cruzan’s hospital. Before dawn, 15 or 20 other people arrived and, by afternoon, they had turned their sleeping quarters into a war room.

Foreman, 36, is a founder of Operation Rescue, the controversial right wing of the anti-abortion movement. The group believes in using civil-disobedience tactics to stop abortions. Now, some members are turning their attention to a new arena: the right to die.

In the church room, Foreman stood at the blackboard with a fat piece of yellow chalk. Operation Rescue had been talking about intervening in such cases as Cruzan’s since 1985, Foreman said. This would be the first attempt.

“We talked all afternoon about what we were doing and why,” he said. “We needed to find out just where Nancy was in the hospital. There were five or six scenarios. Somebody could go in and apply for a job. Or we could go in as gawking tourists and say something like ‘Is this the place they’re gonna kill that girl?’ Or we could we could go in as Christmas carolers. What we finally settled on was to have a couple go buy a poinsettia and take it in for the Cruzans.”

As Foreman stood at the blackboard drawing diagrams of hospital exits and entrances, Wanda and Eugene Frye walked in. As was the case with the others in the room, the Fryes, who had arrived by bus from Kansas City, had a long history of abortion-clinic protests and have the arrest records to show for it. Only weeks before, Foreman himself had done five months in an Atlanta jail on trespassing and other charges related to a clinic demonstration.

Wanda Frye, 46, a licensed practical nurse, was considered a key to the plan, Foreman told the group, because she would be the one who would push a feeding tube through Cruzan’s nose and into her stomach.

“I’ve dropped quite a few tubes and I’ve never run into one I couldn’t do,” said Frye.

“The plan was for us to get into Nancy’s room. The men, see, would block off the doors. I said, OK then, if, God willing, I got to her room, I would drop a tube down her.”

Foreman acknowledged serious medical problems could occur if the tube were placed incorrectly, “so we didn’t want to do it under duress. We decided if the room was empty, we would barricade the doors and feed Nancy as much as we could without having her choke. . . .

“We decided that if the family was there and created a fuss, we were simply going to step out in the hall and pray silently and abandon the force-feeding.”

The next morning, Foreman led the Fryes and about 20 others up to a second-floor wing of the hospital. Outside, dozens of demonstrators continued their round-the-clock prayer vigil and protest.

At the end of a hallway, near Cruzan’s room, police stopped the protesters. A hospital chaplain arrived and asked them to go to the center’s chapel. Eugene Frye accepted the invitation. But Foreman and the others--including Wanda Frye, stethoscope draped around her neck, feeding tube tucked into her nurse’s uniform--dropped to the floor and began to pray.

“We weren’t going to get up and walk away. We were there to help,” Foreman said. One by one, the protesters were lifted into wheelchairs and rolled out of the hospital into police vans.

In all, 19 were arrested. “When they asked our names, we all said, ‘Nancy Cruzan,’ said Anne Foreman, Joseph’s wife. “Nineteen Nancy Cruzans, because if it’s OK to starve Nancy, it’s OK to starve any of us.”

On the day Foreman’s group was arrested, Gary Tebbets drove his 1977 Pontiac into the hospital parking lot, pulled on his stocking cap and looked around.

“I saw what was happening,” said Tebbets, 42, a music teacher from a nearby town. “I wanted to do something, you know? I wanted to do something directly. “

He walked into the hospital and headed for the cafeteria. There he filled a white foam cup with cold water and walked to the hallway where police stood guard.

“I am here to bring a drink to a dying friend,” he said.

“Who is your friend?” the guards asked.

“Nancy Cruzan,” Tebbets said.

For the next hour, Tebbets, who had never met Cruzan, paced the halls of the hospital with his cup of water. He insists now, as he did then, it was not a symbolic gesture. “If I’d got to her bedside, I would’ve given her a drink.” He said he was not troubled by the fact that Cruzan had been unable to swallow anything for at least three years.

As Tebbets arrived to plead his case with the medical director, a dozen or more state and county police surrounded him and urged him out of the building. “I was walking to my car, down the sidewalk to the parking lot, and it became clear I’d never get to Nancy,” Tebbets said. “It was obvious the cup of water wouldn’t do her any good. So I drank it.”

Gary Rickman and Yvette Williams didn’t know each other and they didn’t know Nancy Cruzan, but they went to court in the last days of her life in attempts to stop the removal of her feeding tube.

Rickman, a 50-year-old contractor from Kansas City, petitioned two Missouri courts to resume the feeding of Cruzan. His suit, filed with his friend Gary Tebbets, contended Cruzan was being denied due process.

“I looked up this term ‘vegetative state’ in a law dictionary,” said Rickman, “and I found out all she needed to exist was food and water. Well, everybody needs food and water, so I filed those suits. We didn’t use any lawyers really.

“As for myself, I can’t think of any case where euthanasia is OK. I want to live. When people are on machines, I don’t necessarily agree with having those help you live. I know this is a pretty emotional thing for a lot of people. I’ll tell you, even my own mother thinks I’m wrong.”

Williams, a 27-year-old graphic designer and part-time caretaker for disabled children, was one of a handful of other anti-abortion activists who filed unsuccessful lawsuits to restore Cruzan’s feeding tube. If she were in Cruzan’s situation, “My dad said he would starve me to death,” Williams said. “But my mother said she would take care of me until God saw fit to take me home to heaven.”

How would she feel trapped in a contorted, unresponsive body such as Cruzan’s? “They said Nancy wouldn’t want to live like this. Well, nobody would like to live like that. But everybody goes through hard times in their lives. I’m not happy all the time either.

“The reason I filed this suit is Nancy was a very healthy disabled person. She didn’t even have bedsores. Like, what is a good quality of life?”

Since 1985, the Missouri Rehabilitation Center has focused on caring for Missourians with severe head injuries. It also has one of the largest numbers of patients on respirators. Until Nancy Cruzan was declared dead at 2:55 a.m. Dec. 26, three patients there were in “persistent vegetative state(s).”

Donald Lamkins, the director of the center, has been in the middle of what he calls a “no-win” situation almost since Cruzan became a patient there.

Although it was his job to keep the protesters at bay, Lamkins himself felt strong sympathy for their cause. “We (hospital administration) were against the disconnection of the feeding tube, too. I personally was against it. But I had to uphold the law,” Lamkins said. “I had no choice.”

Patrick Mahoney, an anti-abortion protester from Florida, tried to offer Lamkins a choice. He said the protesters would give him a year’s salary if he were fired for helping them.

Lamkins was not tempted. “I told them, ‘No, no, it’s too late now.’ What they were trying to do was simply too late.”

Because of the Cruzan case, Lamkins missed celebrating Christmas with his family. And he missed his 47th birthday party on New Year’s Eve, too, because it’s all starting over.

A court hearing may be scheduled this week to decide whether Lamkins can legally block the removal from his hospital of another patient, 20-year-old Christine Busalacchi.

Pete Busalacchi wants to transfer his brain-damaged daughter to Minnesota where she could die under a state provision that recognizes ethical decisions by doctors.

“They told me a long time ago that if the Cruzans won their case, Christine would be next,” said Lamkins. “But . . . we’re not going to let it happen again.”

From the heavily tinted windows of their daughter’s second-floor room, Joe and Joyce Cruzan could see the demonstrators outside. And they could read the hand-lettered signs that said “Please Feed Nancy” and “How Would You Like To Be Starved to Death?”

“Well, they have a right to their own opinions,” said Joe Cruzan, a 56-year-old sheet metal worker from nearby Carterville. “But I think it’s wrong that they went as far as they did, trying to get in, violating people’s rights. That’s what I was more upset with. I tried to get them back off the steps so (other) people who had family members inside could see them at Christmas time.

“As for changing our mind, that decision was cast in stone and I told them that. If the decision was to be changed, it would be through God’s intervention and certainly not through theirs.”

Joyce Cruzan avoided direct contact with the 70 to 100 people gathered around the hospital during the last 12 days of her daughter’s life. However, on one bitingly cold morning, Joe Cruzan took a coffee pot out to a group holding a 24-hour prayer vigil. Another time, he thanked demonstrators for their prayers, assuring them that “we’re all praying for a miracle.”

He understood that most of the protesters had their roots in the anti-abortion movement and said he could understand their views on that issue. “To some extent, I am anti-abortion too . . . . But there’s absolutely no connection between Nancy’s condition and the unborn babies they talk about. Nancy had no potential; she was just existing.

“Some of them sincerely believed in what they were doing. But we believed just as strongly in what we were doing.”

For the last 12 days of her life, 33-year-old Nancy Cruzan occupied a room in a hospice unit with several other terminally ill patients. A cozy place, with softly patterned wallpaper and pastel linens and a sofa that pulled out into a bed, Nancy’s room was home for her parents and, often, her two sisters.

“We were quite isolated at the last,” Joe Cruzan said. “And we didn’t hear any of this going on out in the hallways. (The protesters) didn’t cause us any inconvenience. To some extent, they made it a little easier for us because the hospital was a bit more cooperative in providing an area for us to stay close by Nancy.

“I have no problem at all with the person who opposes what we did or who would’ve made a different decision, but if they think I’m going to sacrifice my daughter and go against what I know would be her wishes just to appease a few people afraid of where this thing might go, they’ll have to find someone with broader shoulders than mine. . . .

“I would have gladly traded places with any one of them protesting down there. But I wouldn’t have been out trying to influence their decisions. I’d be home enjoying my daughter.”

This story was based in part on interviews conducted after the Cruzan protests ended.