No Longer Alone Against Vengeful Mobs : The Supreme Court has at least given pro-choice women a tool to defend themselves.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal racketeering law applies to people who use mob techniques against abortion clinics. This exposes the abortion protesters to liability for substantial civil and criminal penalties. It thus promises to do for women what the troops in Little Rock, Ark., a generation ago did for black schoolchildren--telling them that they no longer had to be alone with a mob.

As a technical matter, the opinion does not find the defendants, Chicago attorney Joe Scheidler and his organization, the Pro-Life Action League, guilty of or liable for anything. That will await a federal trial. The opinion says that the federal court in Chicago was wrong when it held that the campaigns against clinics were immune from the federal laws against racketeering and mob action, generally known as RICO. The Supreme Court said that RICO applies, even if making money is not the organization’s reason to exist.

But the significance of the decision extends far beyond the limited reversal of a mistaken interpretation of RICO. When the Supreme Court decided in Roe vs. Wade in 1973 that most laws against abortion were unconstitutional, it removed the restraint of state criminal law from women making that choice. Nonetheless, in the years since Roe vs. Wade, private pressure groups, encouraged perhaps by what looked like an erosion of support for the decision in the conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, have tried to create a private system of sanctions to make it impossible for women to exercise that choice. These “private prosecutors” tried to stop the exercise of abortion rights by targeting sites where local law enforcement authorities were less than enthusiastic about protecting the constitutional right to abortion. The Justice Department, which was arguing for reversal of Roe vs. Wade, was completely unavailable to protect the clinics. The ultimate development came last summer when a follower of Randall Terry’s anti-abortion organization killed Dr. David Gunn of Pensacola, Fla., for his role in providing abortions.

Throughout this period, women’s and abortion rights groups tried repeatedly and without success to invoke federal criminal and civil law to protect their constitutional rights. But the Supreme Court ruled that even the civil-rights acts did not apply to protect women, because people might try to cut off abortion rights for reasons other than bigotry. The 5-4 civil-rights decision revealed a conservative court refusing to treat sex as entitled to special treatment, like race. It began to look as if a constitutional right that applies only to women’s needs would be a constitutional right that could not be enforced.

In this way, abortion rights were like the right to be free of domestic violence. As women have been saying about such violence for years, too often the rule of law stops at the bedroom door, leaving women unprotected by police, state’s attorneys and courts. As a technical matter, women have the right to be free of domestic violence, as they have the right to choose an abortion. But without the rule of law and the agencies of law, the right is often nothing more than a technicality. Just as the American people have witnessed the state of war outside the abortion clinics where there was no effective law enforcement, many women live in just such a state of war in their domestic situations. For all intents and purposes there is no government in their lives at all. The trials of media stars John and Lorena Bobbitt revealed to all avid watchers the state of war in which many men and women coexist.

But no member of the Supreme Court was extremist enough to accept the lower court opinion in the the RICO case, which seemed to say that women seeking abortions were not even entitled to the minimum protections of criminal law. By refusing to carve out an exception to the federal criminal law for abortion protesters, the Supreme Court has indicated that one piece of that private state of war may be drawing to a close.

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