From the moment I returned home after being held all day in a temporary police processing center, Cheryl noticed the change in me. It wasn’t the energy I had from being with people engaged in high-risk behavior, or the solidarity that comes with being part of an anti-establishment cause, but rather the obvious disdain for human life that I thought I recognized in those coming to the clinic. In my mind, abortion was becoming a form of genocide. It had to be stopped. Interposition—the act of placing oneself between a victim and a perpetrator, in our case between a pregnant mother and the “abortionist”—seemed to me then the only effective and moral way to do it.
I had been marinating in the ideology, the facts, and the grotesque anecdotes for months. Paul shared the theological literature with me, along with Schaeffer’s works and many photos of aborted fetuses floating in blood-red liquid. I was desperate to get up to speed on the issue—which should not have been presented as an issue at all but a moral catastrophe on a par with human slavery 120 years earlier. I came quickly to know that by ten or eleven weeks of gestation, all ten fingers and toes of a fetus were formed, and the face was clearly human. Sonograms were grainy and rough then, but there were plenty of photos, including in utero ones that showed childlike forms with cherubic faces and tufts of hair, some of them even sucking their thumbs. I also came to see that the Bible clearly condemned this, affirming the child in the womb as a full member of the human family. God told the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you . . .” There was no nuance here, no relative meaning, no justification. Abortion was wrong in each and every instance.
If my newfound activism had created a widening rift with Cheryl, it was reestablishing my connection with Paul and making it stronger than ever. Becoming a part of Operation Rescue seamlessly integrated me back into the community at New Covenant, given how disoriented I was when I returned from my walk. I continued to travel as a missionary, but now—in addition to talking about our work in Mexico and among the homeless of Buffalo—I would call for an end to the scourge of abortion. When some people who knew me before I was part of the movement questioned my new cause, I reacted much as I had done with Cheryl: I tried to persuade them and moved on. I remained congenial but basically wrote off the disinterested or unconvinced as benighted souls, unable to see the terrible threat abortion was to humanity. I found my support elsewhere; evangelicals were rapidly embracing the pro-life movement.
Once I committed myself to working with Operation Rescue, I was part of an inner circle that included Paul; Randall; Reverend Patrick Mahoney, an energetic and often hilarious Presbyterian minister from Boca Raton; and Pastor Keith Tucci, who had recently been hired as the movement’s director. FaithWalk had garnered some media attention in all the states through which I traveled, and I enjoyed modest fame that the Operation Rescue movement appreciated. We began orchestrating a massive nationwide movement to bring abortion into the consciousness of America. Randall was at the center of it all, barking orders, coming up with strategies, recruiting the soldiers in our pro-life army. He would pop up all over the country, getting arrested more times than I could count.
Yet, as prominent as abortion had become in our lives, at that point it was still not the sole focus of our activities. Paul and I had many other ministry outreach programs—for the homeless, ex-prisoners transitioning into freedom, and food and clothing pantries for Western New York’s many underemployed and out-of-work families. Cheryl was extensively involved in these other aspects of my work and in Operation Serve, but she remained distant from the anti-abortion ministry. For me, though, as Operation Rescue grew, it became a near-singular passion. Cheryl and I never discussed the distance between us. The topic was so charged, and my own immersion in the cause left no room for questioning, much less her lack of unwavering support.
My hyperkinetic schedule took its toll emotionally. As is too often the case, the one safe place where I was free to be impatient, and often unkind, was with the people whom I loved most in the world. During a rare dull day full of errands, Cheryl and I were alone in our minivan when she mentioned a conversation she had had with her mother. The mere mention of Virginia, who once told me how embarrassed she was when a friend learned her son-in-law was “a fundamentalist minister,” put me on high alert. I had also learned her mother was a new card-carrying member of the Pro-Choice Network of Western New York, the group that would later sue Paul and me for interfering with the constitutional right of women to seek abortion. Our family was a microcosm of the culture wars: progressive versus conservative, Unitarian Universalist versus born-again Christian, and, most important, the protective mother of a beloved daughter versus the guy who took her away. I was prepared for the worst when Cheryl told me she had spoken to my mother-in-law.
They had revisited an old conversation about Cheryl’s need to finish her associate’s degree so she could pursue her career in occupational therapy. Virginia was a formidable woman, and I had always known I would need to marshal all the emotional strength I possessed to withstand her pressure. As a teenager, I didn’t appreciate how natural it was for Virginia not to want her daughter to make an irreversible mistake as a teenage bride. Cheryl knew she had disappointed and hurt her mother, so it was complicated for all of us.
But in the van that day, I was oblivious to the deeper dynamics. When I heard Cheryl say Virginia was coaxing her to go back to school, I felt existentially threatened by the modest proposal. My anger turned to rage and spiraled into an epic temper tantrum. How could she dare consider this? Did she have any idea what this could mean for me in our community? What about our children? I slammed on the brakes and pounded the steering wheel, frightening her. She looked stunned. I had never reacted this way before to what should have been an open and honest conversation.
The explosiveness of my anger was disconcerting even to me: it reminded me too much of my father’s frightening and unpredictable rages. Seeing the shock on Cheryl’s face in some way reflected my own shock at my similarity with my dad. I felt I was having an out-of-body experience, looking down from the van’s ceiling, seeing myself menacing Cheryl—intimidating her, bullying her—caught between competing emotions of anger and shame. I took a deep breath to calm myself sufficiently to listen to Cheryl’s reasonable plan. She simply wanted to go back to the community college and resume the work our marriage had interrupted twelve years before. My vision was still blurred by anger, but I could not ignore how meaningful this was to her. In my youth and my arrogance, I had been convinced I could be everything for Cheryl. But I would need to learn that no spouse can be responsible for fulfilling every need, and if anyone should know that, a minister who preaches about the universal human need for God should. But I didn’t. Cheryl’s academic ambitions threatened me. Agreeing meant she would outshine me on the educational front, but losing her over a diploma would be far worse. Reluctantly, and somewhat bitterly, I accepted it.
My male ego, far more fragile than I realized, had taken a serious hit. Even though I resigned myself to the new circumstances of our lives, my insecurities were reignited every time someone in my community looked askance at the fact I had “permitted” my wife to go to school. My defenses were triggered, frankly, with every grade of A that she brought home. These were two different forces at play: both potent, both playing beneath the surface to become a constant undercurrent in our marriage. The reasonable man I wanted to be, driven by a kind of gender-neutral egalitarianism, would time and again give way to the patriarchal fundamentalist forming in my psyche.
* * *
With its constantly escalating number of high-profile demonstrations, Operation Rescue had commanded increasing national attention since our first blockades in 1988. The staff already topped twenty-three, and we sent mail to over thirty-five thousand supporters, who rewarded us with donations that, as I remember it, reached something like a million dollars. Randall had become a real celebrity, and it was impossible to count how many supporters we actually had. Often the contributions were anonymous cash donations. The leadership had strategically chosen not to incorporate as a nonprofit organization, which meant normally careful record keeping wasn’t required or desired. As for volunteers and boosters, we attracted hundreds, sometimes thousands, to our rescues, rallies, and other events. Paul and I worked nationally but also developed a highly visible local presence. We were intent on making Buffalo a linchpin in protecting the lives of soon-to-be-murdered babies. That first rescue in December was repeated over and over again at various clinics.
Paul’s role during this period was primarily to recruit, orient, and showcase clergy dedicated to the cause. He and I were always ecumenically oriented, and that quality served the movement well. Paul brought ministers, priests, rabbis, and even an imam or two into our ever-expanding universe of sympathetic religious leaders. What had started as a small collection of mostly marginal, small-church charismatic Christian pastors soon ballooned into a network of major denominational representatives including Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox, and Protestant.
My role was mostly as a rally speaker, a pro-life guest preacher for church pulpits, and media spokesman. I used the skills I had polished as an itinerant missionary evangelist to bring drama, humor, storytelling, and pathos to a subject that was too often presented in boring or pedantic ways. One of my particularly effective presentations was to tell the story of how a young girl, fourteen years old, had come to my office one day to ask for my help. She nervously explained to me that she was pregnant, and when she told her parents, her father exploded, demanding she get an abortion “or he’d do it with a kitchen knife on the dining room table.” Then I would step to the edge of the stage, point my finger into the audience, and ask, “How much is that girl and her baby worth to you? A thousand dollars? Ten thousand dollars? Five hundred dollars? A hundred dollars? Are they worth as much as you pay for cable television? Your yearly vacation? A new large-screen TV? You decide which is worth more.” Then I’d dramatically take out my checkbook and announce, “I know what it’s worth to me—and it’s not ten dollars or twenty dollars.” Then I would take my position at the lectern, or podium, or whatever was on the stage, and slowly write out the check in front of the audience and call an usher forward so I could be the first to place it in a collection plate—or, if it was a rally, a clean Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket.
As time went on, I became more involved in the tactical planning for rescues. This included the who, what, where, when, and how of blockades. How many people did we need? Where would they be recruited? Teams had to be selected to reconnoiter the targeted sites and choose which doors and driveways would be blocked, and by what means. Days and dates and even time periods were carefully selected to do as much damage as possible to the clinic’s scheduled “killing.” There were always highly experienced “captains” at the ready to keep the troops in line, especially if police would apply physical tactics to coerce compliance with their orders to disperse. Videographers and photographers were enlisted to document the entire experience, and pro bono lawyers were lined up to be available both on- and off-site to challenge court orders, police conduct, and arrests. I was often in those planning sessions, which were generally held surreptitiously in undisclosed locations known only to the participants.
In 1990 the Pro-Choice Network of Western New York—a group of abortion providers, lawyers, and advocates—found a pamphlet we had secretly distributed announcing our intent to shut down clinics with a blockade all over the western part of the state. Lucinda Finley, a law professor at the University of Buffalo, joined with ACLU lawyers and the National Organization for Women in a court complaint against Paul, charging that our plans threatened women’s access to health care and deprived them of their constitutional rights.
In response, the court established the “fifteen-foot floating zone,” a fluid boundary surrounding a clinic and those who entered it. Sometimes this distance would expand and other times it would contract, but demonstrators had to respect that sphere of privacy and stop talking to women or approaching them within those parameters. The day before the blockade was planned, federal district judge Richard Arcara issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting any activity that would impede clinic operations and women’s easy access to facilities. Pro-life activist clergy were even ordered not use their pulpits to recruit participants for our rescues. Paul saw this as an attack on our First Amendment rights and was intent on challenging it.
We were determined to preach about it and distribute Bibles and tracts to women entering clinics and other passersby to get our day in court. The order came down and the pastors went to their pulpits and openly defied it. Paul was summoned to appear before Arcara. He went to his initial hearing without legal counsel. “I’m not a lawyer, but I have read the First Amendment,” Paul told the judge, “and this fifteen-foot floating zone doesn’t sound like the First Amendment to me.” At the end of the hearing, Arcara upheld the floating buffer zone and included a new provision that created a fixed distance protecting the clinic entrances.
This judge’s courtroom would become a familiar place for us, and a dozen other Western New York pro-life leaders, as we fought the restraining order, defended ourselves against more contempt charges, and filed our own complaints. For me, the courthouse became an extension of our mission field, a place to give witness to the truth, plead the cause of unborn children, and flex our constitutional muscle. Each appearance was an ordeal, but I began to enjoy them.
If we didn’t block entrances, then we picketed. If we didn’t picket, then we knelt and prayed silently as staff and patients came and went. If we were not praying, then we called a news conference, and if we were not in a news conference, then we handed out pro-life literature to anyone we encountered. We weren’t restricted to the clinics; sometimes we demonstrated, prayed, and handed out literature in front of the homes of abortion providers. We even went after pro-choice churches, leafletting the cars in their parking lots. We were relentless.
In all of our communications, we avoided using the term “fetus,” even if it seemed unnatural to do so. “‘Fetus,’” I would announce to groups of activists in training, always carefully employing air quotes around the word to underscore my point, “is nothing but a pro-abortion propaganda term meant to dehumanize the unborn child.” In my pro-life sermons, which Paul and I routinely delivered from the pulpit at New Covenant, and that I carried with me to my church visits around the country, I asked, “Have you ever seen a little child point to her pregnant mommy’s belly and say, ‘Mommy’s going to have a fetus’? Why? Because even a little child knows what a baby is!” Who could disagree with that?
Our increased involvement meant more and more litigation against us, and we had to devise new tactics. Our opponents were videotaping the clinic blockades so they could use them to accuse us of violating the court orders restricting our activities. At one such blockade, Paul and I decided to make the videographer’s job a little harder by ducking behind a building and switching our glasses and neckties. If we were misidentified in a contempt hearing, it would render the tape useless. It seemed ingenious at the time, but it backfired badly.
The inevitable contempt charges were filed, and as Paul was cross-examined, he was specifically asked if he and I had ever exchanged identities. It was a very important point in that particular proceeding, because Paul was being sued personally for having participated in the rescues. Flustered and taken by surprise by the question, Paul denied we had done such a thing. During a confidential lunchtime conversation with our lawyers, I brought up the discrepancy and suggested it would be prudent for Paul to correct the record, say he had merely been confused, and acknowledge that we had done the exchange. Paul agreed it would probably be a good idea, but a member of our legal team advised him not to, arguing it was “immaterial to the case.” Paul was uncomfortable but went along with the advice. It proved disastrous.
In his decision to hold us both in contempt for violating his order, Arcara announced his additional finding that Paul had committed perjury by making false statements under oath regarding the neckties. He referred the matter to a federal prosecutor. This was a felony charge, and my twin brother potentially faced a year in a federal penitentiary and up to a $20,000 fine if convicted. But justice moves slowly, and other immediate demands confronted us. Nothing could stop the important work we had committed ourselves to. We organized smaller demonstrations and planned large ones, not only in Buffalo but also all over the country. I visited churches and preached about the sanctity of life and the evils of abortion. We were in a holy war, in which the forces of good would confront the forces of evil—and perhaps even triumph.
In July 1991, our most ambitious target was Wichita, Kansas, and we had our sights set on its three abortion facilities. We had become accustomed to traveling for our demonstrations, but this one was to be our biggest yet. Thousands of rescuers arrived from all over the country and were joined by an equal number of locals. No one was prepared for the scale of our presence. For forty-six days, thousands participated. We blocked cars, chained ourselves to clinic doors, printed and distributed “Wanted” posters of the doctors. We waved signs that read “Babies Killed Here” and passed out countless broadsides denouncing “baby killing” that included gruesome photos of aborted fetuses. I couldn’t tell you how many women we approached, pleading with them not to abort—and offering to help them.
The city assigned nearly a quarter of its police force to handling us, and the rescue ended in nearly 2,500 arrests. At one point a judge ordered federal marshals to keep the clinics open. It didn’t work. We managed to close all three facilities for a week. Our spokesman, Reverend Pat Mahoney, explained our strategy to the New York Times: “The abortion battle is not going to be decided in the trendy urban centers,” he said. “It will be decided street by street, town by town, village by village. Wichita is the heartland of America. In capsule form, Wichita embodies what we will see in the next three to four years.”
I arrived a couple of weeks into the campaign, after equestrian troops had been called in to scatter the blockaders. One morning I responded to a distress call from a site captain. A small band of nuns was occupying Women’s Health Care Services, run by Dr. George Tiller, one of only a few providers in the country offering late-term abortion up to day of delivery. The facility was known to us as “Tiller the Killer’s place,” where, we were told, two thousand babies were aborted each year. Many in our movement compared his clinic to Auschwitz, complete with a fenced compound and a chimney. We were sure the smoke belching from the clinic’s roof came from an incinerator and contained human ash—an argument that I can’t say I truly believed at the time. I rationalized my discomfort by thinking that even if this was technically not the case, symbolically it illustrated the important connection between abortion and Nazi genocide. Who did not know about the smoke from the crematoriums in Auschwitz? The site captain called me, fearful the police horses would trample the nuns. He figured I might be able to reason with the police commander at the scene.
A horde of photographers captured the vivid and irresistible images: the sea of middle-class midwestern Americans, along with college and career kids who could have just emerged from Sunday school, young moms with Farrah Fawcett hairstyles, paunchy middle-aged men, elderly couples—all sitting, jammed against a wire gate in the fence surrounding Tiller’s compound. On the sidewalk in front of them knelt nine nuns in bright yellow habits, praying with their rosaries. Wearing my clerical collar, I knelt with them. A few minutes later a phalanx of Kansas state troopers descended upon us and dragged us away one by one.
The horses came only after I was already in the back of a Ryder truck, heading to a local school where a cafeteria had become a processing center for arrestees. It was there I was told President Bush had sent someone to argue against the temporary restraining order that had been issued by a federal judge barring our activities. U.S. attorney John Roberts, future Chief Justice of the United States, was sent from Washington by President George H. W. Bush to argue the court order against us was unconstitutional. He prevailed and the court’s action was struck down. We were victorious, and those at the highest levels of power were now advocating on our behalf.
If I had any doubts about what we were doing, our experience in Wichita assured me we were on the right side of morality and of history. I was convinced monsters like “Tiller the Killer” could not be allowed to continue. We were engaged in a resistance movement—daring, edgy, risky, even dangerous. We left the comfortable zone occupied by most others who called themselves Christians. We brought many with us to confront and defeat evil—or die trying. We could get away with a lot when the cause was just and noble. Randall, Paul, and I would often point to references in the Bible about spiritual warfare, as when the apostle Paul told his protégé Timothy, “I am giving you this instruction in keeping with the prophecies previously made about you, so that by them you may strongly engage in battle . . .” Despite our often extreme rhetoric, we adjudged the battle was never physically violent, which would have been to stoop to the level of the abortionist.
Paul and I returned to Buffalo from Wichita that summer convinced the time was right for us to stage a similar event in our hometown after such a successful showing in Kansas. We set the dates for April 20 to May 2. Randall mobilized his vast Operation Rescue network to help us. Our Catholic, pro-life mayor, Jimmy Griffin, welcomed our forces with open arms, saying, “I want to see them in this city. If they can shut down one abortion mill, they’ve done their job.” We received letters of support from all over the country and even around the world. Mother Teresa, the famed Angel of Calcutta, wrote to say, “My prayer will be with you that you may allow God to use you more and more as instruments of his peace—the true peace that comes from loving and caring and respecting every person including the unborn child.” Flyers were sent to pro-life groups and churches all over the Eastern Seaboard: “The Macedonian Cry Has Gone Out—‘Come Over and Help Us!’ Please join us in Buffalo and Erie County for the Historic ‘Spring of Life.’ Let the church arise to move the gates of hell!”
We distributed a list of prayer needs for those who were unable to attend, urging them to ask the Lord to ensure the signs of division “in the pro-abort ranks . . . would continue and that the Lord would send or release spirits of confusion, despair, fear and negligence among them.” We implored heaven that “Buffalo’s known abortionists . . . be led to publicly renounce the abortion profession and quit.” We asked divine assistance for transportation that would be easily available for our pro-life demonstrators but delayed or prevented “to bring in out of town pro-aborts.” We prayed that the Buffalo police would arrest “those pro-aborts who get out of hand.”
After the success in Wichita, we needed a way to escalate the urgency of our hometown cause. An opportunity presented itself during a visit to a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After I preached at the service, my host pastor introduced me to a local pathologist, who explained he was responsible for conducting postmortem examinations on what he said were aborted fetuses. His responsibilities included issuing a death certificate for each one before destroying them. He wanted to show me what he had to face every day.
We arrived at the deserted pathology lab. Nothing prepared me for what I saw when he turned on the lights. Lining the walls were plastic buckets filled with fetal remains. The pathologist told me that before he destroyed them he would place a name on each one’s death certificate, usually just “Baby Doe,” but he wanted to do something more, wanted the babies to have proper Christian burials. I knew our network included plenty of people likely to have contacts with church cemeteries where these babies could be interred. Right there I pledged to do everything possible to get them into caring hands. The doctor said he would help me transport them wherever there were willing parties to bury them—in the process, confronting the public with the reality of death by abortion. We selected an initial four babies; he helped me to pack them safely with special solution in medical containers. The doctor then warned me it was illegal to transport them across state lines, so I stuffed them into the interior pockets of my overcoat to avoid detection at the airport.
Among our other objectives, Paul and I wanted to use the Buffalo demonstrations to show the public what an aborted baby looked like. During an afternoon press conference, we decided to display the largest baby I had brought from Tulsa: a perfectly preserved, fully formed African-American girl who was at approximately six months gestation. Gently cradling her in his hands, Paul laid the baby out on a table. Pastor Johnny Hunter, the single African-American rescue leader among us, had christened her “Tia.” Cameras crowded around us, with reporters shouting questions: “That’s not real, is it?” “Are you kidding me?” “Where did you get this?” “Is that legal?” “Goddamn—that’s fucking real!”
The next day hundreds of protestors assembled in front of 50 High Street, a medium-rise medical building that housed an abortion clinic on its fourth floor. Paul faced the “pro-deathers,” deliberately goading them into a confrontation by speaking softly and announcing he loved them in the name of Christ. They shoved him, and I boiled with rage. Ducking around a corner, I called a staff member and asked him to quickly bring me the remains of Baby Tia.
Within minutes I had a small tub in front of me. I exhumed the pinkish form from the liquid preservative and took her to the front lines, parading her in my hands along the yellow police tape. Pro-choice counter-demonstrators surrounded me.
“Is this what you are advocating for?” I asked repeatedly, passing the form beneath their chins. “A dead baby? Is that what you want?”
Many screamed and expressed their disgust at me, and when someone lunged and attempted to grab Tia, I lost my grip on her and she fell to the ground. I was appalled by the further abuse this innocent baby had to endure, but the spectacle served well in illustrating to the world how callous the pro-deathers were toward the unborn. I reclaimed the remains and held her now torn flesh high in the air. The whole thing was working perfectly, and I accused the mob of desecrating a child as police swooped in and arrested me. At first I held on to the baby, which was easy, because the officers didn’t want to touch her. Finally a lab worker in a white coat and gloves appeared and forcibly took the remains from my hand. Paul and I were charged with disorderly conduct, the police citing a law that prohibited “creating a physically offensive condition.”
After a night in jail, Paul and I appeared on Nightline with Ted Koppel, who devoted his entire show, “True Believers: Abortion Clash in Buffalo,” to the events leading to our arrests. When he introduced the segment, Koppel said, “The people you will see tonight on both sides of this issue are, as best we can determine, genuinely committed to their points of view. Nevertheless, the confrontation currently playing out in Buffalo has been staged with a certain degree of cynicism on both sides to be acted out as a contemporary morality play on television. When all is said and done, as you will see tonight, everything that happens is done with one eye on the camera.”
I would never have admitted it then, but he was right. Media exposure was enormously important to us. Our immediate goal was to close the clinics, as we had done in Wichita, but we also knew a key anti-abortion case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, was being argued before the Supreme Court. After Roe v. Wade established abortion rights, this was the case that had the potential to roll them back by creating a new legal standard giving states greater leeway to regulate the procedure. Even if it were impossible to destroy Roe v. Wade completely, it could be undermined incrementally. A Pennsylvania law, signed in 1989 by Democratic governor Robert Casey Sr., had made abortion much more difficult to obtain: a twenty-four-hour waiting period, informed consent rules for women seeking abortions, parental consent rules for minors, and the requirement that married women notify their husbands before terminating a pregnancy. Planned Parenthood sued to overturn the law, but so far the courts had ruled in our favor.
Months earlier, the liberal Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall had resigned, and the epic confirmation fight for Clarence Thomas got under way. The effectiveness of our anti-abortion work depended on justices like Thomas on the high court. The pro-abortion side decided to put the Planned Parenthood v. Casey appeal on the fast track, so it would be decided during the 1992 presidential campaign. Even though justices were ostensibly above political or public pressure, we knew they were aware of what was happening in Buffalo.
Paul and I now played leading roles on the national stage. The price was high: we were in deep legal trouble, spending enormous sums we didn’t have. The emotional toll on our families was also enormous, and there were days I wondered if it was all worth it. Still, we soldiered on. We were getting attention for a noble cause. I could announce a news conference, often with only hours’ notice, and see twelve trucks with satellite dishes roll into the church parking lot. But I was blind to the human implications; I ignored the anguished expressions on women’s faces as they tried to enter the clinic for this procedure and had to face our censure. I ignored how much I was losing my perspective on what was truly important.
Buffalo would prove to be only the dress rehearsal for a much bigger drama in New York City during the upcoming Democratic National Convention.