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The book was published just as a third passion reached its peak. For years Alcorn had preached outspokenly against abortion. He served on the board of Portland's first Pregnancy Counseling Center. He and Nanci took a pregnant teenager into their home while she prepared to give birth and give up her child for adoption.

Yet nothing seemed to make any difference. Year after year, abortion clinics killed hundreds of thousands of unborn children.

"The issue was consuming my mind and heart," Alcorn says. "When that light is turned on, you can't turn it off."

In 1986 Randall Terry had launched Operation Rescue, a national effort that tried to break the abortion stalemate through civil disobedience. By blocking clinic doors, protesters hoped to prevent at least a few abortions. Alcorn agonized. He had always respected the law and never dreamed of participating in civil disobedience.

Nevertheless, in January 1989 he asked his church elders for permission to participate in local protests. With some reluctance they granted it.

To scan headlines from that period in The Oregonian is to re-enter a forgotten world of struggle. Rescue protests marched repeatedly to Portland abortion clinics, blocking access with their bodies. Clinics fought back ferociously, enlisting all the powers of law to their side. In clearing protesters, police were often less than gentle.

Accusations and counteraccusations filled the air. Rescuers claimed that press accounts were highly biased and sometimes false. Prochoice voices claimed property damage and savage emotional harassment of women who were in desperate straits. Though Alcorn says the rescue movement in Portland (not affiliated with Operation Rescue) worked hard to be peaceful and respectful toward women seeking abortions, leaders always had to contend with fringe individuals who favored more dramatic tactics.

The prochoice cause got the courts to level harsh fines and jail sentences against protesters, particularly those who refused to promise future good behavior. Clinics pursued civil suits, hoping to bankrupt those who participated in rescues.

Alcorn emerged as a vocal leader, frequently quoted. It was an intensely lonely time for him and his family. A private person, Nanci began to hate going to the grocery store, or even to church, because of the "cow eyes" people would show her.

Only when she went to her daughters' sporting events did she find refuge. People there knew her only as the mother of Karina and Angela.

She despised being the object of others' sympathy. "I wanted to take people aside and say, 'You know, we're not nuts.' "

A lawyer for the abortion clinic made a statement in court that stuck in Alcorn's memory. "My clients," he said, "have every bit as much right to perform abortions as McDonald's has to sell hamburgers." Alcorn knew perfectly well that the man spoke truly, in a legal sense; but what an upside-down world they lived in, where selling hamburgers was on a par with taking the lives of babies.

Though arrested a number of times, Alcorn spent only one night in jail. Chained hand and foot, pushed down a corridor full of gawking spectators and flashing cameras, stripped and subjected to a body cavity search, refused food or medicine when guards wouldn't believe that he was an insulin-dependent diabetic, he learned what it meant to be treated as a criminal.

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April 2003, Vol. 47, No. 4