Portland Finds Itself on the Front Lines of Abortion Wars

It is 3 p.m., and Marion Hije has taken up the poster he bears like a cardboard cross on 25th Avenue Northwest, much as he almost has every weekday for 12 years.

“Stop Murder. Stop Abortion. Let us help you. Give him or her to us,” the sign says. At 93, Hije doesn’t make it up and down the length of the Lovejoy Surgicenter, Portland’s largest abortion clinic, as fast as he used to. No matter. It’s the message that counts, not how fast you spread it.

“A woman walked up to me today, said she had a Bible, and the Bible said you should not judge,” Hije says, stopping his pacing for a moment, only a little winded. “I said, ‘The Bible says you should not kill, and they’re killing in there.’ ” The woman went back inside the clinic. Hije kept walking.

These are the quiet front lines of the abortion wars in Portland, where a jury last month--in the largest judgment ever rendered in an abortion case--ordered activists who targeted doctors in a series of “wanted” posters to pay a record $107 million in damages.

Nowhere in the country have the political lines on abortion been more sharply drawn than in this relatively liberal, cosmopolitan city that is also home to one of the most radical anti-abortion groups in the nation. Only a few miles from Planned Parenthood’s headquarters, a small gray bungalow houses the Advocates for Life Ministries, a group that has promoted a growing national dialogue in defense of murder as a tool to protect the unborn.

As Hije plods up and down the sidewalk while clinic workers gaze idly from behind bulletproof glass, there are growing fears that the celebrated trial has etched even more deeply the lines of conflict, 26 years after abortion was legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I think it’s gonna be God [who resolves the conflict], one way or another. We are so far beyond human solutions. Read the book of Revelations, read Isaiah, read Job if you want an idea of some of the things God is capable of doing,” said Paul deParrie, editor of Life Advocate magazine, the anti-abortion journal published by Advocates for Life Ministries.

Although deParrie was not named as a defendant, his magazine was one of the main voices for the defense in the case that attempted to establish that the “wanted posters” and a Nuremberg trials-style Internet site constituted threats to abortion providers.

“Planned Parenthood argues that, while nothing the pro-lifers did was either an explicit or implied threat against the butchers,” deParrie said, “it made the poor dears feel threatened while they sucked babies’ brains out.”

Now, deParrie fears the $16.7-million judgment against Advocates for Life Ministries could result in closure of the magazine, with circulation already down to less than 1,200 in recent years with its increasingly vigorous defense of violence against abortion providers.

But the defendants, he said, have no fear of the multimillion-dollar judgments. “I owe a half a million now, with interest. I have the judgment up on my wall, with a sign saying I can pay by Visa or MasterCard,” deParrie beamed, referring to previous cases brought against him by Portland clinics.

A few miles away, at the headquarters of Planned Parenthood, executive director Lois Backus still feels uneasy about the weeks she spent in the courtroom. After years of seeing protesters outside her clinics, she said, it was the first time she had ever encountered them face to face, the first time she ever heard them articulate their belief that murder is justifiable in defense of the lives of the unborn.

“It has been my experience in 10 years with Planned Parenthood that people who are active in the pro-life movement tend to be courteous, polite. . . . That was true at the trial. But there was also this undercurrent of hatred,” she said.

Backus’ office is protected by a security vestibule, buzzer doors and bulletproof glass. Her mail is screened; envelopes with no return address are handled with rubber gloves and put through a metal detector.

“A couple of times a week, I find myself thinking about work on the way home, and all of a sudden I realize I haven’t been paying attention to what’s in my rear view mirror--one of the basics,” she said. Now more than ever, she says, she must not forget. “With this case, we gave them a target,” she said. “And we made them angry.”