Thousands Join “Rescue Movement” around Nation

UPDATE

A Louisiana sheriff set up a temporary his entire staff for duty. In the District of Columbia, police officers were assigned to special patrols. For law-enforcement officials across the nation, the last Saturday in October was a busy one as they braced for a “National Day of Rescue,” when thousands demonstrated against abortion.

According to Operation Rescue, the New York-based group that coordinated the protests, 2,631 were arrested in 42 cities, encompassing 19 states and Canada. Another 2,019 risked arrest by sitting or lying in front of clinics, while an additional 5,443 sang hymns, prayed, picketed, and pleaded with women to complete their pregnancies.

The rescue movement has met its stiffest oppostion in Atlanta (CT, Nov. 4, 1988, p. 34), where in early October police used what some regarded as excessive force in making arrests. Operation Rescue spokesman Bob Nolte said the Atlanta demonstrations “were a virus that infected and caused great courage to come upon Christians around the United States.”

In Pittsburgh, 367 people were arrested outside the nation’s third-large stabortion clinic, while 251 were arrested in Sunnyvale, California. The arrest totals were high also in Falls Church, Virginia (238); New Orleans (208); and Providence, Rhode Island (206).

The protests on October 29 bore little resemblance to the Atlanta confrontation a few weeks earlier. Police in many cities complimented demonstrators, most of whom walked to paddy wagons instead of going limp, and gave their legal names to law-enforcement officials. They now await court dates on misdemeanor charges, in most cases for trespassing or blocking access.

Saving Babies

“The idea is not to get arrested,” said the founder and leader of Operation Rescue, Randall Terry, who was arrested along with about 80 other people outside an abortion clinic near his headquarters in Binghamton, New York. “It’s to participate in rescues, and to save babies and mothers,” he said.

Terry called the National Day of Rescue a success. “We know of 17 women who definitely changed their minds and are planning on keeping their babies, and close to 100 women were turned away who were scheduled to have their children killed,” he said. “It gave many women a second chance to rethink their decision.”

The generally peaceful protests around the country also indicated a softening in the approach of law-enforcement officials, attributed “to the backlash of the Atlanta situation,” Terry said. Atlanta police came under attack after their rough treatment of protesters. One commanding officer in Atlanta, Maj. Kenneth Burnette, was videotaped kicking one.

But at a rally for Operation Rescue on the eve of the National Day of Rescue, Major Burnette addressed the crowd of 600. He told them he had become a Christian prior to joining the Atlanta ranks in 1962, and after the incidents of physical force this summer, he had received volumes of hate mail “from my so-called brothers and sisters in Christ.” He promised an end to forceful tactics, and the next day the tension of earlier protests was missing as police joked with protesters and were greeted by name in return. Most law-enforcement agents carried, instead of dragged, protesters who refused to walk.

Other law-enforcement officials were torn between their moral beliefs and their duties. “I’m not opposed to what these people stand for. I don’t believe in abortion on demand, but I have to do my job,” Sheriff Larry Golbert, of Okaloosa County in Florida, told the Associated Press after arresting demonstrators at a Fort Walton clinic.

In many cities, the protesters were faced by counterdemonstrators with pickets and T-shirts advocating a prochoice view of abortion. Norma McCorvey, who filed as “Jane Roe” in the landmark abortion suit, spoke at a prochoice rally in Austin.

But Terry called the counterdemonstrators “radical fringe types” whose small numbers “show that the number of American people who support child killing is very small.”

Although police were quoted as saying that the decreasing resistance from protesters showed a waning of their movement, Operation Rescue is already forming an agenda for 1989, Terry said. A Leadership Summit on Rescue, scheduled for December 8 in Atlanta, was planned to recruit further support. Terry hopes as many as 500 religious leaders will come to the summit, where no arrests are planned.

“I’m thrilled with the way the rescue movement has grown,” he said, adding that he hopes that the 10,000 “rescuers” nationwide will swell to ten times that many in the next six months.

By Michelle Hiskey.

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