Has violence killed the anti-abortion movement?

Operation Rescue's Buffalo fizzle showed that big clinic protests are a thing of the past, but they may have already done their damage.

By Jeff Stein

Apr 28, 1999 | The right-to-life movement left Buffalo this weekend claiming victory.

Any more victories like this one and it'll be dead.

Outnumbered by counter-demonstrators and police at every clinic, shunned by the high school students it tried to educate and ignored by the bookstore patrons it attempted to awaken to the threat of pornography, the pro-life organization Operation Rescue left in its wake a largely Catholic, conservative city that was remarkably glad to see it go.

"We're certainly relieved that it ended peacefully," said Peter Cutler, spokesman for Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello, who had given a cool welcome to the protesters the week earlier. Operation Rescue had chosen the city as an anti-abortion battleground only days after an abortion doctor had been slain there last October, a decision Masiello protested. The killer of Dr. Barnett Slepian is still at large, but indictments are expected to be handed down by a Buffalo grand jury any day.

Seven years ago, in April 1992, anti-abortion protesters got a very different reception when Operation Spring to Life targeted Buffalo for a militant anti-abortion challenge. Then-Mayor Jimmy Griffin welcomed the group, which proceeded to shut down clinics by chaining and locking themselves to the doors, a technique perfected by James Charles Kopp, the fugitive wanted for questioning in connection with Slepian's murder. Over 1,000 pro-life activists flocked to Buffalo then, and more than 600 were arrested.

This year Operation Rescue hoped to repeat or even surpass that record, mailing out some 60,000 invitations to activists nationwide, imploring them to turn Buffalo into "a battleground for life." But only about 250 people showed up. And despite signaling that they would attempt to shut down clinics, or at least challenge a last-minute injunction keeping them 60 feet away, the protesters stayed within the law with their posters and slogans.

Only two people were detained by police during the seven days of demonstrations, which began April 18 in Buffalo and spread to Rochester, N.Y. One was a pro-life man who spooked police by videotaping them too extensively. Another was a pro-choice man who mimicked shooting pro-life demonstrators with his thumb and forefinger. Guns were later found in his car and Rochester apartment. No clinics were shut down, and none even curtailed their operations.

A typical day last week found perhaps 50 pro-life demonstrators outside the clinic where Slepian once worked, praying, chanting anti-abortion slogans and holding large color posters of bloody fetuses said to have been victimized by late-term abortions. Their number was usually equaled or even topped by a combination of stern-faced police and raucous abortion advocates, who charged that the fetuses had been surgically altered to make them more gruesome.

The pro-life protesters also received largely cool or indifferent receptions at high schools and bookstores, where one patron passing by told Salon News that if people "don't like what's in the store, they shouldn't go in." Customers at a Barnes and Noble in the suburb of Amherst seemed unconcerned as a pickup truck circled the store with oversize billboards of bloody fetuses. At Kenmore East High School in Buffalo, a student emerged to lecture the protesters on their "bad manners."

All of which turned the much-ballyhooed events into a bust.

"We're calling it Operation Fizzle," said Shelley Hirshberg, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Buffalo and Erie County.

Operation Rescue, not surprisingly, claimed it was a victim of "media expectations" -- and the group had a point. If analysts had looked at trends over the past decade, they would have seen that clinic demonstrations are largely a relic of the past. Frustrated by recent federal racketeering laws and prosecutions, which made harassment of clinics a crime (and bankrupted Operation Rescue's founder, among others), and hamstrung by new restrictions on how close protesters can get to clinic entryways, the pro-life tactic of civil disobedience has been rendered ineffective. While more than 12,000 anti-abortion demonstrators were arrested in 1989, only 12 were handcuffed last year.

Sporadic violence has also scarred the movement's public face, and no doubt further dampened the enthusiasm of some people to be identified with the pro-life cause. The murder of Slepian, the 1998 bombing of the All Women New Woman clinic in Birmingham, Ala., the gassing of clinics in Florida and the rash of anthrax threats against clinics across the nation last winter cannot have helped build public support for the movement.

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