Buffalo Bracing for Abortion Protests

Vowing to turn this Lake Erie city into the “next Wichita,” militant anti-abortion activists made preparations here Monday for a massive protest.

The campaign, organized by the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and dubbed “Spring of Life,” is patterned after the group’s 46-day siege of abortion clinics in Wichita, Kan., which resulted in 2,600 arrests last summer.

In a day of relative calm before major demonstrations are scheduled to begin today, abortion opponents held protests outside a local clinic and conducted passive-resistance training sessions and a rally at a suburban Roman Catholic church.

“Our only objective is to save a life,” Keith Tucci, Operation Rescue’s national director, told reporters at a morning news conference.

Tucci was met with obscenities and chants of “Operation Rescue, go away!” from a crowd of about 200 abortion-rights advocates when he showed up at one of the five Buffalo clinics that Operation Rescue has targeted for its planned two to four weeks of demonstrations.

There were no reports of violence and only one arrest on Monday. Operation Rescue organizers said they expect the protests to begin in full force today at clinics around the city.

Operation Rescue leaders declined to estimate how many supporters are in Buffalo for the anti-abortion campaign. But abortion-rights advocates said they expect up to 1,000 out-of-town supporters to join 1,000 local activists in countering the anti-abortion demonstrators.

“There will never be another Wichita,” Eleanor Smeal, head of the Feminist Majority Foundation, told a group of abortion-rights activists here Monday.

Leaders on both sides of the abortion issue have pledged to avoid violence during the demonstrations.

But one militant feminist group, the National Women’s Rights Organizing Coalition, has created a rift with fellow abortion-rights advocates by saying it will do whatever is necessary to keep Buffalo’s clinics open.

“This is not a question of violence versus nonviolence,” said Tania Kappner of Ann Arbor, Mich., a spokeswoman for the coalition. “This is a question of keeping the clinics open.”

Buffalo Mayor James D. Griffin set the stage for Operation Rescue’s campaign when he invited the group to stage a protest here and said that police would treat demonstrators “with compassion.”

“If they can close down one abortion mill,” said Griffin, a Roman Catholic and staunch foe of abortion, “then I think they’ll have done their job.”

More than 400 abortion-rights activists gathered before dawn Monday at local clinics. They carried blue-and-white placards reading, “Keep Abortion Legal” and yellow banners reading, “Say No to Operation Rescue. Boot ‘Em Out of Buffalo.”

By midday, after the clinics had reported that all abortions scheduled for the day had been completed, the crowds of abortion-rights protesters dwindled down to about two dozen people outside a single clinic--the Buffalo GYN Womenservices on Main Street, where Tucci had appeared earlier.

Anti-abortion activists, meanwhile, were gathered at St. John Maron’s Church in suburban Amherst, where they watched a film on the life of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and were rehearsed in civil disobedience tactics.