Abortion Opponents Target Torrance Doctors : Protests: Pickets demand that nine obstetrician/gynecologists stop offering abortion services.

One mother marched angrily up and down the sidewalk, pushing her infant in a stroller with a huge, full-color photograph of a decapitated fetus balanced on top. Her colleagues waved signs at passing cars.

“Does your OB/GYN deliver babies in the morning and kill babies in the afternoon?” demanded several of the signs carried by picketers.

In the first of four planned demonstrations on Lomita Boulevard on Wednesday, about 40 protesters demanded that nine Torrance obstetrician/gynecologists stop offering abortion services to their patients.

Several of the doctors targeted by the protest declined to comment, but Dr. Reinhold Ullrich called the picketing “a horrendous distortion.”

“What I do is very infrequent therapeutic abortions, legal abortions that are only done after excellent counseling takes place,” he said. “I’ve seen women die when abortions were done illegally, and I wouldn’t ever want to see that happen again.”

Organizers of the picketing, coordinated through local churches by Operation Rescue and the South Bay Pro-Life Coalition, said the demonstration resulted from anonymous telephone calls to local doctors to determine which offices provide abortion services.

“This is our ‘No Place to Hide’ campaign,” coalition spokesman John (J.T.) Finn said. “Our goal is to expose these abortionists to the community and to let people know that their doctor is killing babies.”

The demonstrators also planned to picket the Holiday Inn in Torrance on Wednesday evening to protest a Planned Parenthood meeting there. The group will be opening a South Bay family planning clinic, described by protesters as an “abortion mill,” in Torrance this summer.

“That term, abortion mill, is just not correct,” said Charlotte Lobb, South Bay spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood. “More than 80% of all clinic visits countywide are related to contraception. . . . Only about 7% or 8% of our overall countywide visits are related to abortion, and yet the big ‘A-word’ is the thing we have to deal with all the time.”

The number of abortions taking place does not matter, protesters said Wednesday. What matters to them is that any take place.

Among the pickets was Georgette Buckley, who was pushing her 5-month-old daughter, Patricia, in a stroller as she waved an “Abortion Exploits Women” sign.

Though some drivers honked their support for the demonstration, Buckley pointedly ignored those who drove by yelling: “Pro-choice!”