Operation Rescue Leader Looking for a Test Case

In the war over abortion, plans are executed with the precision of an early morning coup.

When Operation Rescue California takes its latest shot at protesting abortions by blockading the entrance to one chosen clinic Saturday, not even its troops will be told the location until early that morning, when it’s time to be ferried there. Ditto for everyone else, reporters included.

“To let you know where that would be in advance would be like an Underground Railroad conductor telling you what slaves they planned to scurry away,” said Jeff White, the controversial director of Operation Rescue California, invoking his favorite metaphor: the anti-abortion rights movement as the Underground Railroad.

As incidents of extreme violence and tougher anti-blockade laws whittle away the numbers of people willing to protest abortion rights, White has decided to challenge the year-old federal law that makes it a crime to block access to women’s health clinics or to threaten patients and employees, as well as a week-old Los Angeles city ordinance prohibiting the same actions. He and his supporters claim that the laws essentially ban civil disobedience by making their nonviolent protests a crime.

White, who is based in Blue Jay, near Lake Arrowhead, has a history of friction with the national office of Operation Rescue, from which White’s state organization has now separated. White refused to join national Operation Rescue officials in denouncing anti-abortion activists who have killed two abortion doctors, two clinic receptionists and a volunteer clinic escort during the past two years. Two killings were committed in July in Florida by former minister Paul Hill.

“There is one more man who will judge Paul Hill--the Almighty,” said White, 37, who describes himself as a nondenominational minister and the father of seven children, ages 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. “I’m not going to condemn Paul Hill. I will condemn the violence he did in terms of shooting the doctor.”

Nonetheless, White and his equally controversial colleague, Joseph Foreman, come to Los Angeles firmly pledging nonviolence. White, who will soon begin serving a two-month jail term in Modesto for interfering with a police officer during a clinic demonstration, said he is here “fishing for” federal and city prosecutors to press criminal charges against him and his supporters under the new laws.

White hopes for more than 300 protesters--only 20 to 30 of whom he figures will be willing to get arrested. Most of those were expected to be present at a rally scheduled for Thursday night at a church in Norwalk.

Pro-choice activists dismiss the idea that the new laws take away any of the protesters’ rights.

“They have all the rights in the world except they can’t threaten or intimidate people,” said Suellen Craig, executive director of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.

At a news conference Thursday outside the federal Justice Department offices Downtown, White was vague on the details of his protest, saying he and his followers would protest at several clinics today but “probably” not risk arrest. He did specify that anti-abortion activists would meet early this morning to picket a clinic in Riverside run by Michael J. Morris, a gynecologist whose San Bernardino home has been continually picketed by White and others.

Activists plan to reserve their biggest action for one clinic--on Saturday--for obvious reasons. “Once we get arrested, we won’t be too available,” said White, who estimates that he has spent “one of every eight days for the last seven years in jail.”

White says he chooses his targeted clinics secretly, waiting until a couple of days before the action to widen the circle of the informed so they can make maps for supporters. Then, White divides those supporters into two groups: the protesters who simply show up at a clinic to picket and the much smaller group of “rescuers,” the people who are willing to face federal and local charges by blocking entrances to clinics.

This Saturday, according to White, the two groups will be told to arrive about 7 a.m. at two intermediate locations--”muster points,” White calls them. From there, they will proceed to the clinic site, the rescuers going first in hopes of securing entrance to a clinic.

Meanwhile, the abortion rights forces and the police are relegated to monitoring Operation Rescue’s movements and guessing which clinics will be likely targets. Groups supporting abortion rights, such as the Feminist Majority Foundation and Planned Parenthood, doubt that White can either muster a significant group of supporters or disrupt much business at clinics in Los Angeles County.

For one thing, all Planned Parenthood clinics in Los Angeles County are closed this Saturday, a long-planned holiday for the Memorial Day weekend, activists say.

But according to White, there are more than 80 clinics in the county that provide abortion services. (Only three of 10 Los Angeles County Planned Parenthood clinics do abortions.) “The one that we are going to is open,” White said. “We are not going to a closed clinic.”

Whatever the numbers, activists who support abortion rights will be mobilizing at four sites in the county two hours before the Operation Rescue people are scheduled to meet.

“Sleep in on May 26 & 27 and you could wake up to a nightmare,” reads one flyer put out by the Feminist Majority Foundation, which has a clinic defense program.

“We can be anywhere in just a few minutes,” said Katherine Spillar of the Feminist Majority Foundation at a Monday night gathering to show volunteers how to form their own protective stance around clinic entrances if they--as their organizers hope--get to the clinic first.

Even if they do get to a clinic site after Operation Rescue activists arrive, abortion rights activists are prepared to escort patients and doctors into clinics. They have a little subterfuge of their own to deflect anti-abortion activists who try to confront patients. “We frequently disguise patients to look like pro-choice clinic defenders and then we all walk in,” Spillar said.

Planned Parenthood’s Craig said her organization was not planning any large counterdemonstrations Friday. “We’re not doing so because of the risk of violence,” she said. “We talked to law enforcement about what we could do that would be most helpful to them. They said if they have to spend a lot of time splitting up two groups of people that makes their jobs harder.”

Times staff writer Eric Malnic contributed to this story.