2009-06-03 The murder of Dr. George Tiller recalls the long history of anti-abortion violence

2009-06-03 \Angela Williams\Fiona Morgan Independent Weekly \George Tiller/murder\Operation Rescue\anti-abortion http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A395948 The murder of Dr. George Tiller recalls the long history of anti-abortion violence The murder of Dr. George Tiller recalls the long history of anti-abortion violence  In 1989, Operation Rescue came to Washington, D.C., where I lived while attending graduate school. They planned a rally at a football stadium and advertised it as a big national event. People from all over the country would descend on D.C. to basically take over clinics in the area and shut them down.

A group of us in the direct action group OUT! (Oppression Under Target!) worked with a liberal Catholic peace and justice organization called the Quixote Center and other groups to organize a counterprotest. I had done protests surrounding AIDS and gay rights, but this was the first clinic defense I ever did. It was very different.

At the time, I had this fairly naive notion that abortion protesters didn't believe the way I did, and of course we both have the right to say what our beliefs are. I didn't yet think of them as violent. So I was really surprised by what happened.

We knew what Operation Rescue planned to do: They would create a circle of people around the building, starting at the entrance. As the police arrest the person blocking the door, the next person steps in. With enough people, they can keep the doors blocked and the clinic closed all day.

Our goal was to create a line of people that broke their line, so that eventually clients could enter the clinic again. But Operation Rescue kept secret the locations of the clinics they planned to target.

We had a map of different clinics in Washington, and we positioned groups of people in cars around the city near the clinics. Several people from OUT! infiltrated the event at the stadium. This was before cell phones, so they used walkie-talkies and pay phones to get the word out as soon as Operation Rescue announced which clinics they were going to.

We didn't count on them going to Baltimore. My group was the closest to Baltimore, and we got there first. But Operation Rescue beat us there.

It was chaos.

There were a lot of very angry people screaming and holding fetus signs, yelling at everyone that they're murderers. By the time we got there, their line was three-people-deep around the building. They sang, they yelled. They were blocking the front door. The police were there in force. The newspeople showed up.

We had two or three carloads of people, while they had busloads. Reinforcements on our side eventually arrived, but we were seriously outnumbered. More groups were showing up every hour or so.

I stood right in front of a woman who was screaming in my face, yelling "murderer," just saying all these horrible things. I was thinking, "It's going to be really hard to stand here all day and take this." So I tried to think of a nonviolent way to just get this woman out of my face. She kept putting this photo of a dead baby right in front of me. So I licked her arm. She was completely appalled, but it worked. She didn't get in my face again.

Angela Williams of Chapel Hill recalls an experience 20 years ago in which she faced down abortion opponents organized by Operation Rescue and became convinced of their violent extremism.   