Woman Charged After Abortion Doctor Is Shot : Violence: Oregon activist is arrested in Oklahoma after the Wichita attack. Physician returns to clinic.

An Oregon woman was charged with attempted murder Friday in the shooting of an abortion doctor, who returned to work here less than 12 hours after he was wounded in both arms while leaving his clinic.

Rachelle Ranae Shannon, 37, of Grants Pass, Ore., was arrested late Thursday night at the Oklahoma City airport, about 160 miles south of Wichita. She was described as an anti-abortion activist who participated in numerous protests around the country, and who mailed out a newsletter written from prison by a man convicted of firebombing an abortion clinic.

Police said Shannon offered no resistance when they approached her as she was trying to return a rental car.

Shannon was later charged with attempted first-degree murder and, at a hearing in Oklahoma City, waived extradition to Wichita. Friday evening, she was being held in the Sedgwick County Jail in Wichita. Bail wasn’t immediately set.

The target of the shooting was Dr. George Tiller, 52, who was shot twice as he drove his Chevy van from the abortion clinic while still dressed in surgical garb. A spokesman for Tiller, Peggy Jarman, said a third bullet was lodged in the door of the van.

“She took a couple of steps toward the van and started firing,” said Jarman of the woman assailant. “At first he pursued her in the van for about 50 feet before he felt some pain and saw the blood.”

The woman escaped in a four-door Pontiac Grand Prix, which was traced to the National Car Rental Co. in Oklahoma City. Capt. Bill Citty, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City police, said an airport policeman told the National clerk to call if the driver of the car tried to return it. He said she did so about 11 p.m.

Tiller, a target for protesters in part because he is one of a handful of U.S. doctors who will do third trimester abortions, was the second abortion doctor to be attacked this year. The first attack was fatal. That occurred on March 10, when Dr. David Gunn of Pensacola, Fla., was shot and killed outside an abortion clinic there. An abortion foe, Michael Griffin, was charged with Gunn’s slaying.

Thursday’s shooting also came less than a week after a Roman Catholic pastor in Magnolia, Ala., tried to run an ad in the Mobile Register calling the killing of abortion doctors “justifiable homicide.” The paper refused to run the ad but did print an interview with him. Last Tuesday, church officials ordered him to recant his position or resign.

Witnesses said Tiller’s attacker had been handing out leaflets in front of the clinic, where a small protest was under way. At the same time she was asking about when it opened and closed as well as questions about the size of the staff. Witnesses said she fired four or five shots from a small-caliber pistol at Tiller as he drove out.

Tiller has been the object of numerous protests. Most notably, his clinic was one of three to be picketed during Operation Rescue protests two years ago during which 2,700 people were arrested.

Tiller has said he performs abortions after the 26th week of pregnancy when there are severe fetal abnormalities or the life of the mother is endangered. Abortion protesters have accused him of performing abortions up until the moment of birth; he denies it.

Tiller’s wounds proved to be superficial, and he returned to work at 7 a.m. Jarman said she had received four calls since the shooting saying that Tiller would not live to see next week.

“They all sounded like crazy people,” said Jarman. “But we’re not going to go away. We’re here to stay. We all know that we operate in an atmosphere that is very charged. These are random acts of violence that are horrible, and they are encouraged and facilitated by these anti-choice leaders that causes their followers to do this.”

Both abortion-rights and anti-abortion groups condemned the shooting.

Abortion rights leaders in Washington said they were frustrated that neither Congress nor the Clinton Administration had moved quickly to stop what they see as a national campaign to threaten and intimidate abortion doctors.

Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, said such violence is “domestic terrorism” that should be attacked by federal investigators and federal judges, not just local police.

She noted that Shannon, though described as a churchgoing mother of two, had outstanding arrest warrants from anti-abortion actions in Milwaukee and San Francisco. Shannon also mailed periodic letters from John Brockhoeft, who is serving a seven-year sentence for the 1985 firebombing of Planned Parenthood’s clinic in Cincinnati.

“We believe she is only one part of a nationwide conspiracy and campaign of violence and terrorism at the clinics,” Ireland said, adding it was “very frustrating” that Congress has not outlawed such violence.

Barbara Radford, president of the National Abortion Federation, said President Clinton and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno need to make clear that “we will not tolerate lawlessness, terrorism and violence in this country.”

Officials of the National Right to Life Committee and Americans United for Life joined in deploring the shooting. “We oppose without exception all forms of violent activity,” said Paige Comstock Cunningham, president of the Chicago-based Americans United. “Our purpose is to protect and defend human life, not to assault it.”

The White House also condemned the shooting. “We deplore that kind of violence,” said White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers. “It’s just reprehensible.”

While groups such as the National Right to Life Committee and Americans United for Life have fought legal abortion in the courts and the legislatures, a much smaller but even more devoted core of anti-abortion extremists has taken the battle directly to the clinics.

In February, Operation Rescue’s founder, Randy Terry, proclaimed that doctors were the “weak link” in the abortion business, and he vowed a stepped-up campaign of harassment against physicians who perform abortions.

The month before, the Supreme Court had stripped federal judges and U.S. marshals of the legal authority to intervene in local blockades of abortion clinics.

Hart reported from Wichita and Kennedy from Houston. Times staff writers David G. Savage and Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story from Washington.