Abortion Opponents Picket Santa Ana Doctor’s Home : Protest: Acting on neighbors’ complaints, sheriff’s deputies order crowd out of the Lemon Heights neighborhood.

About 20 abortion opponents who aim to challenge tougher anti-blockade laws at women’s health clinics briefly protested at a Santa Ana physician’s home Friday morning, distributing leaflets to neighbors accusing the doctor of “killing babies.”

After receiving complaints, Orange County sheriff’s deputies dispersed the knot of demonstrators from Operation Rescue California from in front of Dr. William Moss’ Lemon Heights home. No arrests were made.

The hourlong demonstration, which included prayers for Moss’ salvation and graphic placards depicting aborted fetuses, followed an earlier protest Friday of a Riverside physician by the same Operation Rescue group.

The demonstrators left affluent Lemon Heights about 12:30 p.m. to reconvene at a Norwalk church, where group leaders said they would prepare for a major protest at an unnamed clinic in Los Angeles today.

“We are here to try to save the babies,” said Jeff White, 37, director of Operation Rescue California, who also said he intends to get arrested today to test a year-old federal law that makes it a crime to block access to a women’s health clinic.

Moss did not return phone calls Friday to his home nor to his Tustin medical clinic, the target of small and sporadic Operation Rescue protests over the past three years.

Judy Moss, the physician’s wife, interrupted the protest Friday, blasting her horn at the protesters as she drove into her garage. Moss, who would not answer questions about the protest, was overheard telling a neighbor as she left her home minutes later: “They are trespassing. We can have them arrested.”

Picketing physicians’ homes is part of a new strategy by Operation Rescue California, which intends to pressure it targets into stopping performing abortions, said group members.

Several of Moss’ neighbors reacted angrily to Friday’s demonstration.

Neighbor Linda Long posted a sign reading “This is a pro-choice house” on her driveway gate and denounced the protesters as “jerks.”

“I believe a woman’s choice is a constitutional right,” said Long, 34. “It should be illegal what they are doing. It’s wrong.”

Also, members of abortion rights activists, who track Operation Rescue’s activities, warned the Santa Ana protest could motivate extremists to violence. In the past two years, anti-abortion activists have killed two abortion doctors, two clinic receptionists and a volunteer clinic escort.

“I know it seems what they are doing today is non-threatening, but it’s very threatening when your colleagues have been murdered,” said Katherine Spillar with the Feminist Majority Foundation. “This is a campaign of terror.”

But White, one of three defendants named in a federal civil complaint filed in April by the U.S. attorney for threatening and harassing a Riverside doctor, denies his group engages in or condones violence.

“Does this look like terrorism or people just disagreeing?” said White, who lives in Lake Arrowhead and is the father of seven. “It’s just disagreeing. We need to be careful not to blur those lines.”