From Abortion Opponents, a Renewed Vow

Federal approval of the abortion pill Thursday presents anti-abortion activists with new obstacles, especially at the grass-roots level.

The drug, which can be administered by almost any obstetrician/gynecologist or family practice doctor, is likely to make it more difficult for activists to determine which doctors are providing medical abortions and, as a result, harder for them to determine where to demonstrate.

“If you don’t know if a local obstetrician/gynecologist provides RU-486 or if the local teaching hospital does, then you don’t know where to picket,” said Ann Glasier, director of clinic security for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which has 148 affiliate clinics that offer abortion.

Nonetheless, many tools remain at the anti-abortion movement’s disposal. Interviews with anti-abortion activists, as well as abortion rights advocates, suggest there will be continued efforts to protest at doctors’ offices and to erect legal barriers to discourage doctors from offering the drug.

Anti-abortion activists, who feel passionately that abortion ends a human life, have proved themselves expert at figuring out which doctors are offering the service, even those who do not advertise. Women posing as patients who say they are pregnant and want an abortion, for example, can ask a doctor whether he provides abortion services. Or an anti-abortion activist can call a doctor’s office to inquire. Doctors who do not advertise, of course, face the prospect that few women who need abortion services will come to them.

“The doctors who distribute this drug will be picketed. They will be treated like the abortion doctors,” said the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, who leads the anti-abortion Christian Defense Coalition and is a Presbyterian minister.

Mahoney offered this hypothetical example of how grass-roots activists would target an obstetrician who decides to offer the abortion pill: “We will picket him. Do all the other doctors in that facility want to be picketed as if there is an abortion clinic there?”

Abortion rights advocates acknowledged that such tactics can be successful in smaller cities and in areas where there is little support for abortion rights.

“It’s towns or cities in more rural states that these people will target, especially those where there is less pro-choice support for abortion providers and a history of government anti-choice activism,” said Simon Heller, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, which has provided legal representation to abortion providers and women seeking abortions.

Another tack, said Heller, could come in the form of state or local regulation of abortion providers’ facilities. Already in at least a dozen states, abortion clinics must meet such requirements as having a nurse on duty at all times or having a certain amount of ventilation and other architectural specifications.

Those same requirements likely would apply to any doctor who offers the abortion pill in those states. And a physician might choose not to offer the abortion pill rather than make expensive office modifications.

“It’s partly going to be a matter of whether doctors will want to deal with the other restrictions already on the books in many states, all of which will apply to the doctors who prescribe even a single dose of mifepristone,” Heller said. “It’s not as if the pill lands in a vacuum. It lands in the morass of criminal statutes the states have already put in place.”

Without a doubt, the ruling has been a wake-up call to the anti-abortion community, which almost certainly will redouble its efforts to slow distribution of the abortion pill.

The movement plans to turn its attention to the Food and Drug Administration.

“The FDA was previously seen as not being part of the political machine,” said Laura Echevarria, spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee, one of the leading opponents of legal abortion. “But after this . . . , it will be. For the FDA, it was a watershed event, because this was a highly charged, highly political event. . . . This puts them with the Supreme Court . . . as more in the political spotlight.”

A demonstration is planned Tuesday at the FDA offices here, Mahoney said. “The pro-life movement has to get into the 21st century and realize the technology is such that a lot of the pro-life activity is archaic. We have to focus on FDA commissioners.”

Already, legal challenges to the agency’s ruling are under discussion. A court challenge, however, could be hard to win because federal agencies have considerable latitude.

“There’s a serious question about improper interference with the FDA approval process by the political people at the White House,” said James Bopp, a lawyer who has represented the National Right to Life Committee in high-profile lawsuits, most recently the Supreme Court case that ruled unconstitutional Nebraska’s ban on so-called partial-birth abortions. He said questions also would be asked about the FDA’s acceptance of evidence from foreign studies of the drug.

“We believe that lawsuits will eventually shut this drug down, but that will take years, and many women’s lives will be affected before then,” said Jenny Biondi, spokeswoman for the Right to Life League of Southern California, which runs crisis pregnancy centers and maternity homes.

She and other anti-abortion activists said the drug will make their jobs tougher because of what they say is a mistaken public perception that it presents a less traumatic alternative to surgical abortion. But they said that it will not alter the fundamental terms of the debate.

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Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson in Los Angeles contributed to this story.