A War of Attrition Against Abortion

Let’s say someone is trying to put one of the nation’s largest banks out of business.

Let’s say that in the last seven months, two of its presidents have been shot to death. A third was shot but survived. Before they were shot, picketers harassed them at home. Their photographs were reproduced on “wanted posters.” Anti-bank activists followed them into restaurants and churches, yelling that they were sinful money changers.

Let’s say that in the last year, nine branch offices have been firebombed, causing more than $3 million in damage. (Some branches are closed for good; insurance companies won’t issue policies.) At many branches, picketers scream and yell at customers and bank employees, making it impossible to do business. Employees and their families are barraged with death threats. Each bank is like an armed camp.

Anti-bank propaganda is filled with stories urging more violence--the ends, pamphlets say, justify the means.

For some reason, law enforcement officials fail to discern a pattern in any of the violence. Each act of terror is seen as an isolated incident. Legislators fail to act on bills making bank obstruction a crime. What about the anti-bank people, they say? Don’t they get to enjoy freedom of speech?

As a result, people in many communities are no longer served by the bank--or any bank at all. Why would a bank be so foolish as to put its employees and customers in that kind of danger without any help from the authorities?

A preposterous scenario? Of course.

Anyone messing with banks would be arguing their position from behind bars in no time.

But do this: Substitute the words “women’s health clinics” for bank, and “doctors who perform abortions” for bank presidents.

And then the scenario is frighteningly real.

Just ask David Gunn Jr.

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David Gunn Jr. is long-haired and lanky, 22 years old, and clearly uncomfortable in the national role his family’s tragedy has thrust upon him.

Gunn’s father, a doctor who performed abortions at clinics in Florida and Alabama, was killed last March in Pensacola, Fla. He was shot three times in the back by anti-abortion activist Michael Griffin, whose trial date has been pushed back to December.

Dr. Gunn, said his son, did not exactly enjoy his job since it had become so stressful. But he was unbowed. On last year’s anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, Dr. Gunn walked out of one of the clinics he served and sang “Happy Birthday” at the protesters.

“I get so frustrated because nobody wants to see the real picture,” said Gunn, a senior at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, who was in town last week to host a Rock for Choice concert.

“Nobody wants to face the facts that these so-called pro-life people have turned their backs on their doctrine of pro-life and are going out and shooting people,” said Gunn. “They are gonna do it again and again and again, because their leaders tell them it is OK. We supposedly have a pro-choice president. . .but the anti-blockade bill is still sitting in the Senate and the House because it might violate somebody’s freedom of speech.

“Well, I don’t think if this bill passes every pro-life person is going to lose their tongue. You can still yell at somebody from across the street.”

But no one is telling abortion foes they have to stay across the street. And violence only seems to embolden some; now they talk about “justifiable homicide” and “use of force.” (After Dr. Gunn was killed, Dr. George Tiller was shot and wounded in Wichita, Kan., and Dr. Wayne Patterson was killed under mysterious circumstances outside a nightclub in Mobile, Ala.) Last June in Oklahoma, the editor of “Life Advocate,” an anti-abortion monthly, adopted the famous Malcolm X phrase “by any means necessary.” He told an anti-abortion conference that “People should be willing to take a life to defend another.”

And terrorism took another unfettered step forward.

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It is not enough to keep abortion legal. Abortion must be available . Many women in Bakersfield no longer have the option of terminating a pregnancy now that their only abortion clinic has been firebombed. And they are not alone. Like dominoes clattering, clinics have closed in Boise, in Missoula, in Mobile.

“This is a war of attrition against abortion clinics,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Fund for the Feminist Majority. At a press conference Monday in Washington, Smeal demanded that Congress pass the Freedom of Access to Clinics (FACE) Bill, which would extend federal protection to clinics and their staff.

The bill would reverse an ill-founded Supreme Court decision that stripped abortion clinics of an important legal weapon they had used to break up blockades by anti-abortion groups. An organized campaign to prevent women from obtaining abortions, the court said last January, does not violate federal civil rights laws.

Smeal also called upon the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the campaign of terror against abortion providers.

If bankers had been shot, if banks were firebombed, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

Robin Abcarian’s column is published Wednesdays and Sundays.