The right-to-life rampage: anti-abortion groups step up the terror - Cover Story

Progressive, The, August, 1993 by Laura L. Sydell

Jeri Rasmussen lives in a quiet bedroom community of St. Paul, yet she does a careful sweep of her front lawn every day, looking for signs of vandalism. Before she starts her car, she checks the muffler to make sure there's nothing in it, examines the tires to assure herself they're full of air, and searches the driveway for nails. Then, when she turns the key in the ignition, she prays it doesn't trigger a bomb or any other device she's failed to notice.

Rasmussen owns a women's health clinic in St. Paul that provides gynecological services, birth control, prenatal care, and abortions. While she never imagined this daily routine would become part of her job description, she says "the abnormal has become part of the normal routine" for abortion providers around the country.

Over the last three years, Rasmussen has received threatening letters both at work and at home, she says. One morning she awoke to find that someone had dumped a pile of roofing nails in her driveway. Another day she discovered that a "huge hunk of concrete" had been thrown through her window with a note attached telling her not to kill babies. She says she's been followed to and from work.

Before Rasmussen persuaded the city to enact an ordinance outlawing targeted residential picketing, dozens of demonstrators appeared outside her home, sometimes daily. They chanted and put Wanted posters in her neighbors' mailboxes, giving her name and phone number and suggesting that the neighbors call her if they were against "child killing." She says many of these tactics have been used against the doctors and other employees at her clinic.

In Melbourne, Florida, Patricia Windle is having similar experiences. Owner of Aware Woman Center for Choice, Windle says attacks against her have been relentless. Her home was picketed regularly until she managed to get an injunction barring picketing within 300 feet of her condominium. She says she's received death threats, and her friends and employees have been picketed and harassed at home. One day, says Windle, "I had to hold an employee's fifteen-year-old daughter, who was screaming and scared because her mother went to work and one of them [anti-abortion activists] had come to the door."

And, of course, the February murder of Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider in Pensacola, Florida, by an anti-abortion fanatic makes the threats and harassment all the more frightening.

Windle owns three clinics in Florida, and all three have been attacked with butyric acid, a noxious chemical which produces an overpowering stench that causes nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and headaches. Windle says one employee is still out of work with respiratory problems after eight months. To get rid of the smell, Windle was forced to put in new carpets, chairs, and other furnishings. She says anti-abortion demonstrators also follow patients home, contact their friends and family, and inform them of the women's abortions.

Anti-abortion activists harass even service workers. During a recent hurrican the roof at Windle's Melbourne clinic was damaged. After repairing part of it, the roofing company quit because its workers were being bothered constantly by anti-abortion protesters. Then, says Windle, anti-abortion activists called city officials to report that her clinic was violating safety standards because its roof hadn't been repaired.

One repairman who hasn't quit confirms that working at Aware Woman Center for Choice is not easy. Locksmith Kim Pollman was called in after someone glued all the locks shut. Windle says she called several locksmiths trying to find one who didn't mind working at an abortion clinic. When she called Pollman, he said, "Lady, right-to-lifers don't bother me."

But "right-to-lifers" certainly tried. According to Pollman, they attempted to block his truck in the driveway, and the entire time he was there they kept calling him "murderer." While working at the clinic, he says, he got a lot of hang-up calls at his business number, which is painted on his truck.

"Everyone with whom we have to deal is afraid of the harassment," says Windle. Even two newspaper reporters told her they were afraid of the anti-abortion protesters, she recalls.

Windle, a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother, has been an abortion provider for almost twenty years and says the litany of harassment is so long that "if I talked nonstop for two weeks, I couldn't even remember all the things to tell you."

Both Rasmussen and Windle say they have lost almost all their privacy. According to Rasmussen, anti-abortion activists, claiming to be a documentary-film team, came to her high-school class reunion with video cameras and tried to steal the class list--presumably so they could inform her classmates of her line of work.

Back in Melbourne, Windle is kept under surveillance by high-powered equipment, including long-range microphones capable of listening in to conversations hundreds of feet away and through windows. At a picnic for volunteer clinic defenders, Windle says, one of the volunteers, an Episcopal minister, left early but soon returned. Windle, who is a Louisiana native with a thick Southern accent and a wry sense of humor, says the minister looked white when she returned--"like who hit Nelly in the belly with a flounder." It turned out that the minister had gone home to find her picnic conversations recorded on her answering machine.