Feature

‘Operation Rescue:
the ‘shock troops’
for the ultra-right

A court injunction and continued arrests
have not deterred members of Rescue
Canada — the Canadian arm of the U.S.-
based anti-abortion organization Operation

e€scue — from continued action against

British Columbia’s only free-standing abor-
tion clinic, Everywoman’s Health Centre in

Vancouver. Pro-choice groups in Toronto

ave also applied for an injunction against
escue Canada as operations at three

Toronto clinics continue to be disrupted.

As the Supreme Court in the U.S. prepares
10 reconsider the landmark Roe vs Wade
ecision which legalized abortion in the early
19 7 0s, Operation Rescue has stepped up its
action. But the pro-choice majority demon-
Strated its strength last Saturday with a dem-
onstration of some 600,000 people in
Washington. This backgrounder article on
Operation Rescue appeared in the April 6
ISsue of the People’s Daily World.

By CHUCK IDELSON

One of their nameless recruits calls them
the “shock troops of the lord,” probably
unaware of how that appellation conjures
Up Images of Nazi storm troopers.

They are the minions of Operation
Rescue, the militant right-wing group that
has become the most prominent face of the
anti-abortion movement with its human
assaults on family planning and other
health clinics where abortions are per-
formed.

_ By now their tactics are well established.
Actions are planned in large media centres.
Recruits, predominantly white, often fun-
damentalist Christians though with a rising
Number of Catholics, are brought from
around the country. Participants are not
told where they are going, just to show up at
the gathering site, usually a fundamentalist
church, the morning of the action.

_ Scout cars are dispatched to various clin-
Cs to find on where pro-choice demonstra-
tors are not already forming. The recruits
descend on the clinic, block the doors,
harass arriving women and health workers,
Physically abuse counter demonstrators,
and wait for police to haul them away.
‘taken to jail, many give their names as

Baby John Doe” or “Baby Jane Doe.”
Seeking to snatch more media notice and
Clog the courts.

eading into a week of clashes in Los
Angeles March 23, Operation Rescue had
already assaulted clinics in 28 cities and
curred, by varied estimates, about 17,000
atrests since their first appearance in late

87. The pro-choice National Abortion
Federation (NAF) lists 182 blockades at 138
Clinics in 1988 alone.

At 6’ 4”, 235 pounds, Joseph Scheidler
as long used his bulk to harass health
Workers and patients at clinics. “I want
them to be afraid of me,” he told a Gannett
reporter in 1985. “This is psychological war-
are.” he said. Some would assert it goes
ven farther,

In the early 1980s Scheidler, a former
€nedictine monk who rejected the priest-
od because of liberalism in the Catholic

church, broke from the more mainstream
Conservative anti-abortion groups to found
the Pro-Life Action League (PLAL)
€cause he felt they were not aggressive
€nough. His idea was to engage in direct
Confrontation. The main tactic was physical
1sruption of clinics, out lined in Scheidler’s
tract “Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion.”
€ir activities also coincided with a rash of

clinic bombings.

Scheidler was investigated in four of the
cases, though no conclusive evidence has yet
been found, notes Susan Kennedy, director
of the California Abortion Rights Action
League. Publicly he denies any connection,
but said in 1985, “‘we use the bombings. It’s
pretty cheap publicity and it makes them
afraid.” He termed his 1985 campaign the
“year of pain and fear” and turned up at his
group’s conference that year wearing a lapel
button emblazoned with two sticks of
dynamite and the slogan, “Have a Blast.”

In 1986 the National Organization for
Women (NOW) filed a class action lawsuit
charging Scheidler and PLAL with a
nationwide campaign to close clinics by ille-
gal means, prompting Scheidler and his
associates to look for a new front.

A young used car, salesman, Randall
Terry, was added to the PLAL steering
committee in 1986. It was Terry, reports Ms.
magazine in its April 1989 issue, who pro-
posed the new blockade tactic at the 1987
PLAL conference. Within a few months
they would have a new organization, osten-
sibly free of Scheidler’s baggage, to carry it
out.

“They’ve played a coy game to make it
look like there’s no connection between
them,” notes Sara Diamond, a researcher
on the religious right and the author of a
forthcoming book Spiritual Warfare. Though
Terry is widely viewed as the initiator of
Operation Rescue, NOW’s suit has estab-
lished Scheidler was also a founder.

Operation Rescue made its formal debut
with a week of actions in New York City in
which 1,6654 were arrested. Followers came
from 35 states, as far away as Alaska. Stand-
ing in the background the first day was
Scheidler, who told reporters he merely
“wanted to see how this one was done.”

While the larger and more mainstream
National Right to Life Committee has dis-
tanced itself rom Operation Rescue, many
on the far right have been actively embrac-
ing it. At the anti-abortion conference in
Atlanta last December, Falwell hailed
Operation Rescue as the “wave of the
future.” Terry also has backing from Pat
Robertson, on whose “700 Club” TV show
he has appeared.

The behaviour of Operation Rescue
members at actions sharply resembles
“shepherding,” a far right Christian move-
ment which has more than a million follow-
ers across ‘the U.S. Shepherding enforces
extreme discipline and submission on its
followers and combines religious rituals
with political activism.

Shepherding leaders, who Diamond says
“have a far broader agenda than abortion”
— from support of apartheid and right-
wing activity in Central America to assaults
on public education — "signalled their
support” for Operation Rescue last summer.

Terry himself is a graduate of the Elim
Bible Institute near Rochester, New York,

Pras eR Me st eS AI Ga RE Le a RES RR a Re ee ae D
It’s actually a civil war. They’ve given the court a loud message that not
all people agree abortion and women’s right to control their own bodies
is a fundamental right. Some judges are saying, “How can a fundamen-

tal right be a controversy?”

Operation Rescue’s widest notice came
with weeks of action in Atlanta coinciding
with the Democratic National Convention
during which Moral Majority founder Jerry
Falwell presented Operation Rescue with a
$10,000 cheque, and praised Operation
Rescue for the “same sacrifice” made by the
Underground Railroad during slavery and
those saving Jews form the Nazi holocaust.

In consciously imitating the civil disobe-
dience tactics of progressive movements,
Terry and Scheidler frequently compare
themselves to the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. and the civil rights movement. But there
are significant differences in ideology as well
as behaviour.

“Dr. King’s actions enlarged civil rights,
the Operation Rescue tactics seek to deny a
‘constitutional right of all American women,”
Molly Yard, formerly NOW president, has
said. Ten civil rights leaders, led by former
Georgia State Senator Julian Bond, also
blasted the comparison. Operation Rescue,
said the statement, is more like “the segrega-
tionists who fought desperately to block
Black Americans from. access to their

rights.”

one of whose founders, Bob Mumford, is a
shepherding leader. Bob Nolte began doing
publicity for Terry after leaving an assign-
ment at The Forerunner, monthly tabloid
of Maranatha Campus Ministries, a
shepherding outfit on 56 universities in 31
states that Diamond calls “the most aggres-
sively evangelistic and politically right wing
of any campus crusaders.”

Terry’s rhetoric resembles that of the
Christian right. At the Atlanta conference
he proclaimed that “the blood of babies is
crying out for vengeance and God is ready
to smash this country.” In a Washington

Post interview March 13, he said abortion is’

a sign of moral decay and American must
“repent.” He also said he opposes all con-
traception, that he “hates” feminists, and
gay people should be shunned as “immoral.”
Like Scheidler, Terry offers a de factor
endorsements of the bombings — “I believe
in the use of force”: — saying that bomb-
ings are only “‘counterproductive because
the American public has an adverse reac-
tion to what it sees as violence.”
Pro-choice counter demonstrators cite
many instances of belligerent behaviour by
Operation Rescue activists, some of whom

Operation Rescue activists blockading a stairway to an abortion clinic in Austin,
Texas last October.

have been arrested for assault and battery;
notes NAF’s Ann Sollee.

And there’s the abuse rained on women
using the clinics. In ordering Terry and
Operation Rescue to pay a $50,000 fine to
NOW for contempt of court orders after the
New York clashes, District Judge Robert
Ward said that a woman entering the facil-
ity during such actions “suffers irreparable
physical and emotional harm.”

Operation Rescue has yet to make good
on that debt and, according to Ms., appears
tc be engaging in subterfuge with its finan-
ces to avoid payment. It now faces an IRS
investigation and the threat of a court order —
to turn over donation cheques. Some
believe the financial strain is a reason more
prominent right wing leaders have not more
actively embraced Operation Rescue.

There is also considerable doubt about
Operation Rescue’s success rate. “They
have not prevented women. from having
abortions. We’re able to get patients in
before, or after, or rescheduled to other
clinics. They’re lying to their people and the
public; they need to cling to some image of
victory to keep people active,” says
Kennedy.

Terry says his goal is larger. “Every
major political change in this country is
preceded by social upheaval and that has
been the missing element of the pro-life
movement.”

With the Supreme Court about to recon-
sider the landmark Roe vs Wade decision
there is concern about Operation Rescue’s
effect. Operation Rescue is “shaping at least
one tone or mood. It’s actually a civil war.
they’ve given the court a loud message that
not all people agree abortion and women’s
right to control their own bodies is a fun-
damental right. Some judges are saying
“How can a fundamental right be a con-
troversy, and if it’s a controversy, how can it
be a fundamental right?” says Shauna
Heckert, administrators of the Feminist
Women’s health Centres, in Chic, Redding,
Sacramento and Santa Rosa, Calif.

But, Operation Rescue has had at least
one positive result. Pro-choice activists note
that public opinion polls continue to show
at least two-thirds of the general public still
favour abortion rights. “We're getting
deluged with calls from men and women,
many who have never been politically
active, asking what they can do” says Heck-
ert.

Pro-choice supporters are galvanized,
agrees Amy Weitz of San Francisco-
Alameda Planned Parenthood. “People are
outraged that this extremist group would
try to prevent women from getting safe
medical care.”

Pacific Tribune, April 17, 1989 « 7