Dispatches

By MICHAEL RILEY, in Jackson, Mississippi

As the burgundy Cadillac races along the Mississippi highway, droplets of rain stipple the windshield and storm clouds signal rougher weather ahead. Dr. Tom Tucker, a circuit-riding abortion doctor, is on his car phone with a clinic. "How's it look?" he asks. There's a problem: it seems a large, angry man is raising hell in the parking lot while 40 antiabortion protesters picket the clinic. "This," says Tucker, his right hand slowly sliding down to touch the 9-mm Glock pistol wedged beside his seat, "is where I start to feel the tingle."

Tucker cranks up the CD player and blasts out his theme song, Simon and Garfunkel's Keep the Customer Satisfied. With fingers tapping on the steering wheel, he belts out the lyrics ("I get slandered/ Libeled/ I hear words I never heard in the Bible"). Then he unsnaps the gun's holster. "They may kill me," he says, "but I'm going to take some of them with me." Tucker knows that someone out there may really mean business; only last winter an antiabortion extremist shot and killed David Gunn, an abortion doctor who rode the circuit just to the south.

Tucker, 50 years old, blustery and heavyset, mans the front lines of America's abortion wars. In his Cadillac, usually littered with fast-food wrappers, he travels hundreds of miles each week back and forth across Mississippi and Alabama from one to another of three of the abortion clinics he owns. In a typical year he will perform nearly 7,000 abortions and will make about $200,000. Protesters jam his car's locks with Super Glue, dive under his tires, trail him across the South, phone in bomb threats and even distribute a wanted poster with his picture on it: notorious!! Working six days a week, his only real diversions are playing golf and spending each Tuesday night playing blackjack and craps at the Splash Casino on the Mississippi over in Tunica County.

Arriving at the Mississippi Women's Medical Clinic in Jackson, Tucker learns that the cops have chased away the crazed protester, but someone yells, "God will bring you down! Woe to the man who will take the blood of an innocent child!" A young mother displays a diapered infant. Tucker shakes his head and walks inside; he changes into blue scrubs and starts on the first of this afternoon's 23 abortions.

Ten years ago, Tucker started doing abortions for the money, but has since become a strong pro-choicer. Of the pro-lifers, he says, "They've got me pissed off, and I'm not going to quit." Yet he can betray an uneasy ambivalence. "I wish I would never ever have to do another one," he says. "I don't like it. It's not fun. It's not like you're curing a cancer or fixing a broken bone. You're terminating a potential life."

At day's end, Tucker slumps on the clinic sofa eating a bag of salted nuts when a nurse hands him his latest piece of hate mail -- "No one has to kill you. You are already dead," it reads. To get home to Birmingham, Tucker must drive 250 miles that night.