COLUMN ONE : Abortion’s Wary Line of Defense : Volunteers who escort doctors and patients fear increased danger after the slayings in Florida. They and protesters play a cat-and-mouse game of intimidation and protection.

While watching anti-abortion demonstrators wave crucifixes and ministers plead aloud for the lives of “the little ones” at an Indiana medical clinic last week, Ann Horn kept an eye out for several familiar figures she hoped not to meet again.

An organizer of volunteer escorts for patients and doctors at the Women’s Health Organization clinic here, Horn found herself reliving old, unnerving encounters in the aftermath of the recent slayings of a Pensacola, Fla., abortion doctor and his escort.

Horn’s first brush came several years ago when a fervent abortion foe approached her as she walked to her car after a protest. Spewing insults, the man threatened to molest her. The second encounter involved a drifter known to show up at anti-abortion rallies clad in camouflage fatigues and wearing a hunting knife. During one demonstration, the man fingered his blade and grinned at her.

“One of these days,” he told her, “I’m going to cut your hands off.”

The murders last month of 74-year-old clinic escort James H. Barrett and Dr. John Bayard Britton have made such incidents chillingly real again for many abortion rights activists. Barrett’s murder--the first of an abortion rights volunteer--widens the threat of violence previously faced primarily by physicians, confronting thousands of clinic escorts with the realization that their social activism may come at a dangerous price.

“Each death casts the net a little wider,” said Horn, 40, a spiky-haired veteran of abortion demonstrations since 1978. “First it was doctors. Now, it’s us. You begin to realize how vulnerable you are just because of what you believe in.”

Since the late 1970s, escorts have emerged as crucial linchpins in national abortion defense strategy, first used to accompany patients into clinics past jostling protesters and, in the past year, to shield clinic doctors marked for harassment and, perhaps, assassination. Unarmed and trained in civil resistance techniques honed during the Civil Rights Era, escorts are most often young feminists but can be elderly and male, like Barrett, a retired Air Force officer.

They are trained to take abuse. They also dish it out. They match each anti-abortion placard with an abortion rights poster of their own, howl out songs to drown out their opposition’s chants, and videotape and photograph their foes even as they too are being caught on camera. Many are targeted for harassment not only during protests but also at their homes, in supermarkets and in their cars.

“It may be open season on us, but we’re not going away,” said Nancy Michael, 48, who regularly escorts abortion doctor U. George Klopfer to his clinic in South Bend, Ind. “There’s a lot of young women--a lot of poor women--whose lives would be in utter chaos if it weren’t for escorts.”

Escorts say that despite their quickening fears, they will not be intimidated from escorting doctors and patients into clinics. Last week, abortion rights supporters from around the Southeast arrived to staff Pensacola’s beleaguered clinic. One Georgia abortion clinic shut down temporarily to allow its workers to make the trip.

“More people are volunteering for clinic defense and escort service than ever before,” said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which has trained more than 32,000 clinic volunteers since the late 1970s.

Anti-abortion activists counter that abortion rights leaders are exploiting the deaths in Pensacola to sully the entire opposition. “They are using a few vigilantes as an excuse to go after all of us,” said Flip Benham, national director of Operation Rescue. “When we’re on the streets, there’s safety. They know we’re governed by the gospel of Christ.”

Despite the determination of abortion rights forces to carry on, Barrett’s death poses new difficulties for their movement even as it has prodded the Clinton Administration to dispatch federal marshals to protect clinics in Pensacola, Ft. Wayne and eight other hotbeds of anti-abortion sentiment.

After feminist groups sent 20 bulletproof vests to Pensacola’s clinic volunteers last week and ordered trained clinic defense organizers to other anti-abortion strongholds, some leaders acknowledged there is not much else they can do to protect the lives of their escorts. For now, abortion rights lobbyists plan to urge Congress to allow escorts to sue people who harass them, a right already granted doctors under an existing clinic protection law.

And while clinic defense strategists have begun talking about altering their tactics to confront the possibility of violence aimed specifically at escorts, they say they have no intention of pulling back student volunteers--sometimes as young as high school age--as patient escorts.

“We are telling people to look realistically at the dangers,” said Katherine Spillar, national coordinator for the Feminist Majority Foundation’s clinic defense project.

After 16 years working as a volunteer in Ft. Wayne, Ann Horn steels herself with realism. Like many escorts, she has learned to take what she considers reasonable precautions. She carries a camera with her constantly. On protest days, she often borrows a car owned by the clinic so opponents cannot identify her private vehicle.

“I’ve got a bright red sports car. It’s a dead giveaway,” she said.

Earlier this year, Horn woke up one morning to find two radical anti-abortion activists from Missouri camped on the street outside her rural house. They left after she confronted them, but then Horn discovered that the clinic car she had borrowed had been rifled. She filed a report with the sheriff and installed a motion-detector floodlight above her garage.

On sabbatical from a job as manager of a meeting hall, Horn volunteers once a week at the Ft. Wayne clinic--usually on “procedure day,” when patients file in for abortions and when demonstrations are most likely to occur.

She has been a volunteer in Ft. Wayne since 1978, about the time the National Organization for Women and other national feminist groups began institutionalizing the concept of using escorts to chaperon patients through angry crowds and defend clinics from paralyzing abortion protests.

Previously, Horn had only given money to the cause. But after friends persuaded her to work as an escort during one Sunday protest, she recalls, she was angered to hear anti-abortion demonstrators call clinic defenders “baby killers.” Then, a protester pulled her aside and whispered: “I hope I catch you in a dark alley.”

“From that moment, I was on board,” Horn said.

Escorts were first used as what Smeal calls “friendly faces”--sympathetic feminists who steered abortion patients into clinics. But training changed as abortion protests grew more tense in the early 1980s, which were often dominated by aggressive nonviolent protest techniques that used the power of crowds to overwhelm clinic defenders and frustrate police.

The role of the escort became to “provide confidentiality and get patients and clinic workers in without harassment,” said Jeanne Clark, a veteran escort organizer. Trained in daylong sessions, for example, escorts learned how to use their bodies and placards to shield patients from persistent “sidewalk counselors” and other demonstrators.

In 1993, the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola--the first of an abortion doctor--was a turning point for escorts. Clinic directors began asking volunteers to accompany physicians during protests. These nerve-racking assignments have evolved into elaborate cat-and-mouse games replete with rented cars, ever-changing highway routes and motel reservations made under assumed names.

Phyllis Erwin, a 48-year-old volunteer who escorts abortion doctors to a besieged clinic in Melbourne, Fla., feels “humiliated” each time she drives to work. The doctor she escorts lies in the back seat, stuffed into a bullet-proof vest and hidden under a sheet.

“This is insanity,” Erwin said. “I have to smuggle him (into the clinic) like he’s a bank robber or a murderer.”

Veteran escorts and volunteers all have stories of being shadowed by protesters, confronted in restaurants, harangued as they shop. South Bend, Ind., clinic escorts Nancy Michael and Jill Chambers looked up from Michael’s kitchen table one day last spring to see themselves being photographed from a van parked outside. The women tried to tail the van in Michael’s car, but they lost it.

“The nerve of those people,” Michael said. “It’s like they just want you to know they’re watching, like they have the power to get you or something.”

Veteran escorts acknowledge that they too are often caught up in the war of nerves but insist that they steer clear of harassing their opponents.

Yet Horn spent much of her “procedure day” last week snapping photographs of Operation Rescue activists--from meek ministers to hulking provocateurs in tank tops. Horn cheerily told of driving past a Northern Indiana Rescue prayer service the night before to videotape suspected radical anti-abortion activists.

Horn was lucky last week. None of her old foes showed. Instead, she spent seven hours watching activists carry photographs of dead fetuses, hoist crucified rubber baby dolls and listen to Benham’s anti-abortion sermon across the street from the clinic.

Darla McMillan, a housewife opposed to abortion, stood near the clinic and offered prayers for patients who rushed past her and the escorts who opposed her.

“I stand here by myself a lot and pray that God will open their eyes,” McMillan said. “We don’t hate them. They don’t understand us because they don’t understand the Lord.”

The hard-edged give-and-take between escorts and protesters often leaves police in the middle. Activists on both sides have a keen understanding of how far they can go without breaking the law.

“It’s frustrating for the people who are targeted,” said Sgt. Judy Bradshaw, a police spokeswoman in Des Moines, Iowa, where U.S. marshals have been dispatched. “They want action right then and there, but the perpetrators know exactly what they can get away with without breaking the law.”

Abortion rights leaders hope to break the stalemate by broadening the legal rights of volunteer escorts. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, signed by President Clinton this year, gave abortion rights leaders a new legal tool to thwart harassment. The law, known as FACE, set criminal penalties for harassment during anti-abortion demonstrations and gave doctors, health workers and patients the right to seek civil suits if they are intimidated while providing or receiving abortions.

But escorts and other volunteers are not eligible to seek civil remedies, which feminist leaders hope to address when Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the bill’s original sponsor, holds hearings on whether to amend FACE in coming weeks.

“We want to see escorts with the same protection that doctors have,” said Susan Hill, national director of the Women’s Health Organization.

Meanwhile, feminist leaders talk of amending escort training to emphasize the possibility of violence. “People need to know exactly what they face when they go out on the line,” said Nancy Kohsin-Kintigh, an organizer with the Feminist Majority’s Los Angeles office.

They are still scrambling, though, to sort out the new realities wrought by James Barrett’s death. Despite the recent violence, abortion rights leaders defend the occasional use of student escorts during tense protests. Activists say that many students volunteer with their parents but admit that some teen-agers come on their own.

“Each teen-ager will have to make their own assessment,” said Spillar. “Hopefully, they have the emotional maturity to be there.”

Most physician escorts are middle-age and older veterans like Barrett and his wife, June, 68, who was injured in Pensacola--committed and willing to risk violence in order to protect abortion rights.

Last week, while Ann Horn supervised patient escorts outside the Ft. Wayne clinic, four physician escorts in blue shirts quietly followed Dr. Klopfer as he whisked into his office past raucous demonstrators.

The four had left South Bend earlier that morning in a clinic car that trailed Klopfer’s battered Mercedes “just in case,” said escort Roger Snow. Armed with a video camera and a cellular phone, they were unarmed, but “we could at least act as witnesses,” Snow said.

On the drive, the escorts talked about the prospect of violence. But the trip was uneventful--at least until they reached Ft. Wayne. A few blocks from the clinic, Klopfer’s car broke down. The muffler had torn loose.

In a pounding rainstorm, two escorts helped Klopfer refasten the muffler with duct tape.

Once the doctor was safely inside, the escorts milled in front of the clinic, visibly relieved, ignoring the crowd that roiled around them.

“For a few moments there, we were wondering, you know, if there was sabotage or something,” Snow said. “But when nobody showed up to harass us, we figured, well, it’s just his old car. At least I hope it was.”

Times special correspondent Mike Clary in Miami and researchers D’Jamila Salem in Los Angeles and John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.