Camp For Crusaders

By Paul Gray

No caps and gowns, no Pomp and Circumstance, but a graduation of sorts took place last week, casually celebrated at a local restaurant in the Florida city of Melbourne. After three months of work, 22 men and women, ranging in age from 16 to 67, became the nation's first formally trained class of abortion protesters. Following the meal, and an Easter weekend of demonstrations at nearby abortion clinics, the graduates began dispersing to their homes across the country, where they will teach the tactics they learned in Florida.

This small ceremony underscored the growing organizational savvy of the militant pro-life movement. The Melbourne boot camp, organized and led by Keith Tucci, a pastor and executive director of Operation Rescue National, offered its first batch of students a comprehensive curriculum of conflict. Antiabortion demonstrations seem, to the uninitiated, noisy, chaotic affairs. The Melbourne IMPACT training (which stands for Institute of Mobilized Prophetic Activated Christian Training) disclosed some recommended methods behind the madness.

A private detective lectured on how best to obtain information about everyone associated with an abortion clinic. License plates make it easy to trace home addresses; Social Security numbers and public records can be useful in assessing a subject's financial status. The point of such snooping is to lay siege to people who perform or facilitate abortions: pray or picket in front of their houses, confront them in the supermarket, identify them as "murderers" to their neighbors and children. A lawyer instructed the Melbourne volunteers on how far they could go with such harassing activities while remaining within their First Amendment rights. The attorney took them to the Brevard County courthouse and showed them how to file lawsuits against local officials, police, abortion doctors and activists in order to tie them up with paperwork.

Some instructors appeared via videotape. One featured a woman named Karen Black, whom pro-lifers describe as one of the nation's most successful "sidewalk counselors," which means that she is good at persuading women not to have an abortion during the 20 seconds or so it takes to walk from a car to a clinic door. Her advice was peppy pop psychology: Be well groomed. Don't shout or intimidate. Recite the alternatives to abortion, and be prepared to deliver on any of them, including cash, immediately. If the subject seems to be wavering, use a plastic model of a fetus at 10 to 12 weeks to sell her on life.

Other lessons included schemes for infiltrating abortion clinics. In one scenario, a man and a woman posing as husband and wife make an appointment and then stage a dialogue in the waiting area, one pleading with the other not to go through with the procedure; witnesses to this scene are usually rattled and discomfited. In another, a protester uses a borrowed urine sample that indicates she is pregnant, and then goes through all the steps at a clinic up to reclining on the operating table. Her goal is not only to disrupt but also to gather information about clinic routines and personnel.

Supporting and abetting such activities is a sophisticated array of technology, all of it provided or paid for, according to Tucci, by individuals and small businesses: still and video cameras, computers, cellular phones, walkie-talkies, copiers, fax machines. Pro-choice activists in the Melbourne area claim that the volunteers have also been trained in the use of phone taps and long-distance surveillance devices. Boot-camp officials neither confirmed nor denied the charge.

Tucci argues that his organization wants to abolish totally the practice of abortion through legal and nonviolent means. Boot-camp volunteers were required to sign a pact of nonviolence before every demonstration. And lessons were not given, as far as reporters allowed to witness some of the classroom sessions could determine, in several of the antiabortion faction's most extreme tactics: torching abortion clinics and suffusing them with noxious chemicals.

Such omissions do not much comfort pro-choice advocates or those responsible for the approximately 1,500 increasingly beleaguered abortion clinics in the U.S."They've changed their tactics -- more harassment, more stalking, more violence," says Eleanor Smeal, president of the Fund for the Feminist Majority, who last Friday took part in a pro-choice demonstration at a Melbourne church surrounded by about 150 clinic defenders. One statement from a boot camp graduate aptly underscored the persistence of those who took the course. He remarked, "You can draw a lot of comparisons between the fight over abortion and slavery. The abolitionists' movement lasted some 60 years, and it could be the same with abortion."

With reporting by Sarah Tippit/Melbourne and Nancy Traver/Washington