One More Terrorist Act

The fatal shooting of Dr. Barnett Slepian was a terrorist assassination, just as surely as the murder of a president. The Buffalo, N.Y., area doctor--who delivered hundreds of babies, treated women with cervical cancer and, yes, performed abortions--was gunned down in his kitchen Friday night. A sniper in the woods nearby fired a single shot through Slepian’s window. The bullet hit the physician in the back as he sat with his family.

Saturday morning, anti-abortion protesters who had for a decade threatened Slepian and terrorized his family and staff took their usual stations outside a clinic where he had worked. By Sunday, an Internet site that collects “dossiers on abortionists” for their “crimes against humanity” had a line through Slepian’s name, indicating “a fatality.”

Slepian is the third physician and the seventh person killed in anti-abortion-related murders since 1993. Attempts have been made on the lives of more than a dozen others in the last five years; clinic bombings and fires are no longer unusual events.

By no stretch can this reign of violence and intimidation be called legitimate protest by those who oppose a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. This violence should be seen for what it is, an effort to subvert our system of laws.

The activities in Congress and state legislatures to mire abortion in legal restrictions are one thing; Slepian’s murder and the violence that dogged him and his colleagues are another. The depth of evil threatens all Americans, whatever their views on abortion. If the right to abortion can be silenced by a threatening crowd or a sniper’s bullet, so too can our right to assemble, to speak or to vote.

The FBI’s offer Monday of a $100,000 reward for information leading to his killer’s arrest is a welcome signal of resolve by law enforcement. More must be done, and the anti-abortion groups that properly recoil at violence have a duty to help stop the escalating terror visited in their name.

The mostly quiet protesters who appeared at clinics in years past have become snarling and confrontational--at clinic after clinic across the country, they mean to intimidate. The protesters have clearly wanted patients and their doctors to feel both shame and fear.

The tactic has worked. More than 80% of U.S. counties have no abortion providers. The Buffalo area now has just two doctors brave enough to offer the service. The terror that took Dr. Slepian’s life is an assault on all our liberties.