Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Operation Rescue: right or wrong? READERS RESPOND Going to the rescue Ardsley-on-Hudson, N.Y. To the Editors: I congratulate Charles R. DiSalvo ["What's Wrong with Operation...
...Freedom of Choice" hasn't helped her...
...They are few compared to the peaceful people...
...The prisoners may spend hours-tightly handcuffed and still fasting-sitting in a paddy wagon or bus, then more hours in jail before receiving (if they're lucky) a sandwich for supper...
...So how does one intercede for living human beings who, like the unborn, cannot even take up their own case...
...DiSalvo's suggestion that silence and more loving nonviolence be displayed strikes home to me...
...JULILOESCH wiley The bias is in the media Rockville, Md...
...RICHARD stith The writer is professor of law at Valparaiso University...
...In Pennsylvania, for instance, the leaders of rescues are Catholics and people like Dennis Sadler of Liberals for Life...
...One twenty-year-old woman we took in two years ago, after she had first come to our crisis center, was in her tenth pregnancy...
...But the pro-choice media will find them, and feature them...
...it comes to put it out...
...Wiley states rescuers have convinced some women not to abort...
...There's the Catholic Worker couple in Massachusetts...
...It works because blockading the doors buys time for sidewalk counselors to talk to would-be clients approaching the clinic, and offer alternatives which can turn mother and child away from an abortion...
...When the police come, stand up tall and walk to the paddy wagons...
...MARY MEEHAN Enforcing righteousness Ogdensburg, N.Y...
...We each signed a pledge before each rescue to refrain from such behavior...
...I have talked with rescue people about their experiences...
...The movement's problem, perhaps, is not that I report the image, but that the movement has not overcome the image it projects...
...I know this doesn't purify the action but they are a far cry from the Randall Terry type...
...The "rescue pledge" to "be peaceful, prayerful, and nonviolent in both word and deed" has been, to my knowledge, universally required of all participants by rescue organizers...
...Having lived in the Binghamton area and seeing the beginnings of Operation Rescue and, while in Ogdensburg, having the privilege of hearing Joan Andrews, something about the movement always kept me from embracing it...
...However, as the Chicago archdiocesan respect life director, I acted as the diocesan host for a prayer service for rescue members and for other prolife people last spring...
...I became involved in rescues after my wife and I had taken in seventeen women in the past six years, all unwed and the victims of sexual abuse, all but two of whom were pregnant...
...Having said all this, I would like to chorus my agreement with Professor DiSalvo that a loving, Christian community might be expected to create a just, compassionate world in which no woman would ever want to, or need to, kill her unborn child...
...But I have, and I don't understand how anyone could begrudge them the solace of their religious hymns and prolife songs...
...Perhaps the media's own arrogance-and the commitment of many reporters to the cause of abortion-are distorting many news reports...
...In support of the necessity defense, Mr...
...Both in theory and in practice, Operation Rescue is worthy of the classic civil disobedience tradition...
...have seen a few rescues myself...
...The charge of arrogance appears to me also misguided...
...People who get their information about the rescue movement from the media hear about the white male fundamentalists, because that's the image that confirms the establishment's preconceived ideas about prolifers...
...The rescuers I know are good, compassionate people...
...Pursuant to my teaching and research in the field of penal law, I have had myself on the mailing list of most rescue communities around the country and...
...Nonetheless, I judge the movement to be coming up short...
...the little girl she delivered while she was with us is the last child she will ever have...
...In the past year this woman had contracted uterine cancer and recently had a hysterectomy...
...I have seen a videotape of Los Angeles police using this weapon against Operation Rescue people...
...they press their moral claims by shouting at incoming pregnant women...
...I suspect that among its numbers are individuals who are difficult to deal with, who have few political skills...
...This has "brought home" to us the fact that women are the second victims of abortion, victims who carry the pain of abortion through a lifetime...
...It is this type of undeserved suffering that could be the catalyst for a dramatic change in public opinion-but only if the suffering is gladly accepted by the disobedient...
...2. The media love the Randall Terry image...
...I say again: it works...
...DiSalvo suggests that the media "are alienated by the arrogance of rescuers...
...Part of my dilemma about Operation Rescue has been that if I believe God has given each of us freedom of choice, then we have no right to coerce others into actions they reject, even if their action is morally right or wrong...
...Many police are courteous and professional, but some are brutal...
...Many Operation Rescue people could tell Professor DiSalvo more about sacrificial suffering than he may want to know...
...With this ability to withstand pain comes the possibility of injury, since a greater degree of pain is required to induce compliance by the arrestee...
...However, the shortcomings of Operation Rescue do not excuse printing an essay which appears to be so short on first-hand research, so lacking in direct contact with rescue people...
...DiSalvo's recommendation that rescuers cooperate fully with the police at the rescue site, and later with the judge and prosecutor at the arraignment and trial, has already been followed...
...How that can happen is going to involve a deeper and more honest evaluation of the rescue movement itself...
...But there was plenty of shouting obscenities and hooting by the pro-abortion demonstrators surrounding us...
...Charles DiSalvo says he has noticed harsh and accusatory words, avoidance of suffering, and general belly-aching among those who blockade abortion sites...
...To that I would say that the lines from the rescuers to the public are not open...
...December 1,1989], on an original, provocative analysis of civil disobedience...
...If the necessity defense stands, the killing stops...
...Richard Cowden Guido (who edited Joan Andrews's prison letters in her book, You Reject Them, You Reject Me, Trinity Communications) writing in the October 1989,30 Days ("The History of Operation Rescue"), described the second West Hartford rescue in June 1989 this way: "Again the police were savage...
...The Operation Rescue folks are a minuscule part of the Christian community...
...First is to keep trying to save the babies...
...My wife is the center's director and both of us serve as counselors...
...My reply is based on my personal experience at rescues...
...We did exactly that when arrested at a 1988 Chicago rescue...
...There is Mary Rider in the South, of the Caritas Community...
...In San Diego and Los Angeles last year, they faced an Okinawan martial arts weapon called the nunchaku...
...Our personal, hands-on experience convinced me that I had to do more than just try to salvage the few lives of babies and their mothers we were reaching, when millions of these lives were being affected every year by permissive abortion...
...they give pseudonyms to the police...
...Jail time is spent praying for that...
...But since we are American citizens, we take advantage of our citizenship, much as Paul did of his Roman citizenship...
...Nearly all rescuers have the same viewpoint...
...Film was openly destroyed by police, who had all removed their name tags and badges...
...Missing the point(s) Johnson City, Tenn...
...It looked like torture to me...
...Mothers with babes in arms could carry posters and banners with two themes, one, an antidespair motif listing sources of help and available local alternatives...
...The public, confused by abortion, can be converted...
...I place my complete trust in the Holy Spirit to direct us to do what is right, and I leave the establishment free to respond in whatever way God allows...
...No, blacks were clear in their intent to put pressure on the federal government so that society-wide gains could occur...
...CAROL CROSSED Voice of experience Orono, Maine To the Editors: The article by Charles R. DiSalvo titled, "What's Wrong with Operation Rescue...
...As pro-choice victories mount ever higher, rescuers must realize their mission is to move America from indifference to caring and to shape a prolife consensus...
...Until we change our attitudes toward sex, love, power, self-esteem, self-discipline, freedom, and responsibility, "society" will only get worse...
...I am a comparatively small-time participant, publicist, and putzer...
...judges have suspended sentences...
...The large majority of them are gentle people, good people...
...it aims to shut it down...
...I am not a member of Operation Rescue...
...They may be monkey wrenches in the gears of a legal system that sanctions the killing of unborn children-and that is an important secondary goal-but it is not the primary purpose, which is to save a human life today...
...To the Editors: Thank you, Charles R. DiSalvo...
...To the Editors: It is flattering to be mentioned (in "What's Wrong with Operation Rescue...
...But he would have been more successful had he actively participated in some rescues, gone through the arrest and trial procedure as a rescuer, and gotten to know some typical rescuers in the process...
...We sing religious hymns and patriotic songs to keep up our morale in the face of impending arrest and possible police brutality...
...That is why I became involved in rescues...
...Hughes states that "the goal of rescuers is not to serve long jail terms," but to save babies by conducting more rescues...
...The only ones among us who spoke to the pregnant women seeking an abortion were our sidewalk counselors, who always pled quietly and offered help...
...During the 1989 rescues in West Hartford, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and San Diego, where police brutality was blatant, all three TV networks ignored the story...
...It's uptight liberals like myself who allowed this to happen...
...As far as I have seen, despite the passions of the moment, these promises are nearly always kept...
...It is time that we go past the diatribes of both extremes of the abortion problem and begin dialog...
...I agree that Operation Rescue has not been able to explain its strategy in a way that has won a commensurate number of "sympathizers...
...I found that DiSalvo's article is illustrative of a viewpoint that is widespread in academic and establishment circles where a pro-abortion bias exists...
...Seventeen female college students had their clothes ripped off their bodies, they were forced to walk in the nude, in some cases crawl, and some of them were sexually assaulted...
...Since living with us, she has recovered from drug and alcohol addiction, manifestations, my wife and I believe, of post-abortion syndrome...
...Wiley posits, to close clinics for a day or to persuade individuals not to abort...
...I have not even been an observer at a rescue demonstration...
...To the Editors: I congratulate Charles R. DiSalvo ["What's Wrong with Operation Rescue...
...The goal is to save abortion-bound babies and their mothers...
...But in large cities and some of the national media, there is often strong bias for the clinics and the police-and against the prolifers-in news reports...
...To the Editors: Charles DiSalvo's piece on Operation Rescue makes up in courage what it lacks in objectivity...
...BONNIE PLUMERI FRANZ Gentle people Chicago, 111...
...Walking passively "to the lions" is an act of last resort, not first...
...In fact, the singing often helps reduce tension at sit-ins...
...TERENCE J. HUGHES The author replies: I have known and corresponded with rescuers for some time...
...Therefore, the "consequences" (babies) should not be so easily disposed...
...Also, I know a number of the rescue people, including priests, some of them quite well...
...It tipped the hand of whoever put it in...
...The reason for this ability, in my opinion, is that many think they deserve whatever they get because they knew the truth for so long and did not stand with the least of their brethren...
...In the article I acknowledge the suffering resulting from police brutality...
...But I am astonished by his suggestion that most Operation Rescue people don't understand sacrificial suffering...
...As for use of the "necessity defense," we certainly do use it in court because violating a trespass law to save a human life in imminent danger of death is part of America's legal inheritance from English common law...
...Noisy crusades are noxious...
...Blacks did not get their skulls cracked at restaurants and on buses for the right to sip coffee and travel to Aunt Mary's...
...In my article ["A Secular Case Against Abortion on Demand," November 12,1971 ], I criticized anti-abortionists for relying exclusively on religious arguments against abortion instead of using the many good secular ones...
...To the Editors: I can only affirm Charles DiSalvo's conclusions about gaining public sympathy through persecution...
...One rescuer was cuffed face-down on the ground and an officer then placed his billy club on the back of the victim's neck, knelt on the club, and screamed at the rescuer, 'Get up, you...!' In agony, the rescuer cried,' I can't, you're kneeling on my neck!' Another activist was treated to a bizarre police lineup...
...Rescuers in jail aren't doing that...
...More to the point, I came into the rescue movement as a learner-not a teacher-of nonviolence...
...These are the tools for communicating the movement's suffering and message on open lines to the public...
...In his article, Richard Cowden Guido quotes Congressman Guy Molinari's reaction, following congressional hearings, to police brutality at the March 11,1989 rescue in Pittsburgh: "Despicable...
...The heading was the work of the editors...
...My criticism was uncalled-for because prolifers had all along been making primarily secular civil rights arguments...
...It is not...
...they don't think a bunch of white-bread-eaters with Bible College bumper stickers could ever be "real" satyagrahis...
...Police used it to force them to walk, often producing serious sprains, nerve damage, or even broken bones...
...bore the subtitle, "Uncivil, Unloving, Unconvincing...
...That's why, on some (admittedly rare) occasions, district attorneys have refused to prosecute...
...that they will not respond to the taunting and the shouting of the "pro-choice" people who will harangue them...
...And, it appears to me that Operation Rescue generally is trying to enforce righteousness by intimidation...
...At the first West Hartford rescue in April 1989, police seized George Lynch, the seventy-two-year-old retired Catholic bishop of Raleigh, North Carolina, handcuffed his wrists behind his back, then shoved crossed billyclubs between his wrists and hoisted him up in the "strappado" torture method...
...In small towns and cities, sit-in reports tend to be fair to favorable...
...The volunteer fire department doesn't come to "protest" a fire...
...juries have refused to convict...
...I have sung "God Bless America" to keep my mind off the pain when handcuffed...
...To characterize this as being "self-righteous" is judgmental at best...
...We were so slow on the rescue concept that we abandoned the preborn to the fundamentalists...
...Civil law itself recognizes-or should recognize-that trespass statutes were not designed to be enforced against persons involved in saving somebody's life...
...To the Editors: Charles DiSalvo, in his article on Operation Rescue, seems to have fallen into the same error I did when I first wrote on abortion for Commonweal...
...The list could go on...
...Helen Westover, president of Stop Planned Parenthood, was present at the second West Hartford rescue and reported (in the group's newsletter, Stopp News, August 4,1989): "Ball-point pens were applied to pain points behind the ears...
...If confronted with a judge who believes in abortion, ask, like Gandhi, for the maximum punishment...
...In addition, rescuers have a philosophical and moral commitment to the babies to not cooperate with the legal system that allows them to be killed wantonly, and that persecutes those who try to rescue them...
...It would be pointless to get all huffy and deny that any such less-than-noble behavior has ever been observed at anti-abortion interventions...
...What DiSalvo missed, however, is that people like Randy Terry, Joan Andrews, and Christy Anne Collins have called the many prolife sit-in groups around the country to a uniform code of "peaceful, prayerful" behavior and repentant acceptance of jail time (rather than paying bail or fines) which has become common-almost standard-throughout the movement...
...Pain, for many of the demonstrators, is a catharsis for past failure to take action against abortion...
...He assumes that a sit-in at an abortion site is a form of symbolic protest...
...They are doing something...
...But DiSalvo has misunderstood something else which is so basic that it makes me think he hasn't really been paying attention...
...I don't know if DiSalvo has ever watched rescue people confronted by hel-meted police with nightsticks, mounted police, and hostile clinic supporters...
...The police at the second West Hartford rescue told John Rathschmidt, a Capuchin provincial, that "persons without names have no rights...
...ROGER J. COUGHLIN Tardy liberals Rochester, N.Y...
...SIDNEY CALLAHAN Wrong charges Valparaiso, Ind...
...It is time for reasonable people to speak out and ask questions...
...In many other places, they have faced police using "pain compliance," such as bending fingers, twisting ears or wrists, and using extreme pressure on mastoid nerves...
...as one of the supposedly few prolife activists who really understand nonviolence...
...Many rescuers have what police have called an astonishing capacity for suffering...
...But that is easier to do when they are not unfairly criticized by their friends...
...I have read the jail diaries of rescuers...
...This statement lends credence to the charge that rescuers "fake" pain when they cry out...
...DiSalvo states that rescuers "self-righteously chant and sing at their demonstrations...
...A statement like that suggests that its author has formed a view shaded by the pro-abortion bias of the establishment, including the major media...
...Without an appreciation for the reasons their disobedience has not led to these changes, rescuers are doomed to failure...
...The pseudonym we gave to the police was "Baby Doe" to identify ourselves with the babies about to be killed without ever having received a name...
...Some face false charges of assaulting police...
...For my money, he is too pessimistic about rational persuasion, but his thoughts on how to succeed in suffering for your cause were on the mark...
...they are integral to it...
...And then we have the gall to be critical...
...Before a major rescue, many Catholic participants rise at 4 or 5 in the morning, attend Mass, and-still fasting-sit in front of an abortion clinic for hours in a broiling sun or a miserable rain...
...However, the real purpose, I would hope, is not, as Ms...
...To the Editors: Charles DiSalvo makes some good points in "What's Wrong with Operation Rescue...
...Perhaps some people think the nonviolent tradition exists only among folks who wear Gandhi buttons on their lapels and have some history with the Left...
...My own twenty years' experience with the United Farm Workers, the no-nukes movement, and other campaigns bears this out...
...In that time, my wife and I also founded a pregnancy crisis center in Bangor, Maine...
...Some points: 1. Operation Rescue is only one expres-sion of the rescue movement...
...The pledge also forbids all struggling with the police and all yelling...
...I wonder if this might be DiSalvo's problem...
...My advice stands: knock off the self-righteous praying, singing, and sidewalk counseling...
...The strategy worked not simply because blacks were brave, but because they had a strategy...
...This shouldn't surprise any of us...
...I don't want my wife involved in rescues because the police single out women rescuers for more abuse than men...
...Perhaps he has it backwards...
...I am familiar with the rescue pledge...
...If my image of the movement is similar to the media's, then my criticisms are all the more important, for that is the image America is receiving...
...Then they're dragged or carried away by police...
...3. There certainly are angry people in the rescue movement...
...The watchword of all the rescue literature is "repentance" for failing to try to save the millions of innocent lives lost during the first fifteen years after Roe v. Wade...
...Ending abortion is God's task, not ours, to be completed in God's time...
...I agree that "symbolic protest" is not the movement's purpose...
...Filing bogus charges is a common police tactic to "divide and conquer" rescuers, and experience has taught us that solidarity and witholding cooperation and identification is the only way to get such charges dropped...
...With his back-bent arms and wrists bearing his entire weight, the police attempted to carry the bishop to the police van, but he cried out in such pain that the police finally let him walk...
...He would like to teach us something about nonviolence from the perspective of the law classroom...
...articulated what I could not...
...You'll be surprised at the results...
...DiSalvo recommends that, "The [rescue] movement's real allies are silence, cooperation with police at the point of arrest and with the judge and prosecutor at the point of trial, and an uncomplaining submission to punishment...
...Would that I had such humility...
...I have not been on a rescue...
...Resisting arrest is always advocated by Joan and Juli, both women, both pacifists...
...Please, read what I wrote...
...He tries to be objective and to offer helpful suggestions...
...It is time for us to say there are limits...
...I have seen police brutalize rescuers on video...
...In the five rescues I made, no rescuer shouted at incoming women, abortion personnel, or police...
...The point that I made was that, because of the arrogance of rescuers, this suffering is being wasted...
...Some lose their jobs because they're spending so much time in court and in jail...
...Their dominant mood, however, is better described as one of sorrow and repentance...
...The point is to get prosecutors, judges, and juries to accept it so rescuers can stop the killing at the clinics...
...As for Professor DiSalvo's charge that the rescue folks are "detached from the sacrificial suffering" needed "to generate sympathy," I think it would be easier to discuss that issue after the rest of us have gone through the scary experience of being arrested, fingerprinted, incarcerated in a smelly holding cell from six to twenty-four hours, and have paid a minimum fine of $250 for "disturbing the peace...
...Women are the targeted victims of the abortion industry, whether they are seeking abortions or trying to prevent them...
...However, as a number of recent articles have pointed out, we are a disposable society and that attitude permeates our life and environment...
...I wish to present another view, that of one who has actively participated in five rescues, one as a prayer supporter and four in which I risked being (and was) arrested...
...Moreover, the goal of rescuers is not to serve long jail terms...
...Judges typically disallow that defense, but we ask for it to call attention to the humanity of the child about to be killed...
...Therefore, the demonstrators have an unusual capacity to withstand pain...
...The stakes, however, are much greater...
...On this and so many other points, rescuers seem to have reacted to the subtitle of the article rather than its content...
...My own viewpoint on rescues is quite simple...
...The public may not appreciate the "necessity defense," but that is not the point...
...She told us she had aborted five babies, including twins, and had miscarried the last four, holding their dead or dying bodies in her hands...
...Show it some modesty: Suffer in silence...
...Abortionists had forced so many entrances into her womb that her cervix had lost all elasticity, and scar tissue inside her womb now allowed for only a weak attachment for the placenta...
...I think he could learn a great deal with us out on the street...
...That's why Operation Rescue participants, arrested for trespass, must offer the court a "necessity defense...
...Yet the movement harvested some of its most favorable publicity during Joan Andrews's lengthy imprisonment...
...The article also sparked an idea that only women, children, and babies should participate in the inner ring of protestors...
...I heard the instructions to the people who considered participating in the rescue action: how they must sign a promise that they will remain silent during the march...
...Nerve damage and torn ligaments are commonplace among rescuers...
...Joan Andrews is a woman of legendary courage and limitless commitment, the stuff that heroes and saints are made of...
...The police don't regard rescuers as strangers to "silent suffering...
...Early in his article, Professor DiSalvo states that, "The great majority of Operation Rescue disobedients are no friends of silent suffering...
...I would not claim that rescuers have never uttered "self-righteous" remarks at rescues...
...If one is going to have the courage to be arrested and suffer, the message should clearly be one of life, love, and hope for women and children...
...The first arrest was not of a rescuer, but of a sixty-two-year-old female picketer who was flung to the ground, seriously injured, and viciously handcuffed like a dangerous criminal...
...The other posters could detail successive developmental embryonic pictures from NOVA's science program "The Miracle of Life," ending with the birth scene...
...Joan Andrews and Juli Loesch Wiley are not exceptions in the movement...
...It isn't faked...
...Rescuers are suffering but it isn't being communicated to the public by the media...
...On the other hand, I also believe that, except in cases of rape or incest, the "choice" to have sexual intercourse was also freely made...
...it is also terribly inaccurate...
...But anyone who's been a participant, and not just a theoretician, knows that these (Continued on page 120) CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 98) lapses are seen-and frequently-in all nonviolent movements...
...They are not "self-righteous, moralistic, arrogant men and women, detached from the sacrificial suffering resulting from their civil disobedience...
...I am not arguing that Operation Rescue is an effective, successful strategy...
...I had formed an erroneous opinion because I had relied on reports in the hostile pro-abortion press Similarly, Professor DiSalvo seems to have been taken in by a false, media-generated image of rescuers as violent and arrogant...
...they resist arrest...
...We have women's testimony and living children to prove it...
...Operation Rescue doesn't aim to "protest" a particular child-disposal center on a particular day...
...Your "What's Wrong with Operations Rescue...
...Joan is one of the first, as are all the folks of the Prolife Nonviolent Action Project...
...Writing in the Village Voice (November 14, 1989), Nat Hentoff quotes the sworn testimony of Captain Patrick McKinley, commanding officer of the Metropolitan Division of the Los Angeles Police Department: "It is my experience that many of the Operation Rescue demonstrators consider themselves on a religious mission...
...CHARLES R. DiSALVO Editors' note: Some correspondents object to the subtitle of Professor DiSalvo's article: "Uncivil, Unloving, Unconvincing...
...Some appear as a young child welcoming punishment for past transgressions...
...After the police broke two of her ribs by throwing people on her as she was lying on the floor of the bus, cuffed to a seat, they then lined up and spat on her...
...Let the great majority of us get on with the creativity and sacrifices needed to create that just world...
...Instead, I volunteer as a consumer representative to a prenatal council, trying to improve infant life, and pray for women who decide to get an abortion: my way of trying to do something positive...
...He is absolutely right about the need for Operation Rescue participants to love their adversaries...
...When the babies she "wanted" became a pound or two in weight, gravity pulled them free and prematurely sent them down the birth canal...
...Those who think the journey from zygote to neonate is no longer than neonate to adult can use pictures (preferably moving) to point out the continuity of life...
...Listing me on a par with Joan Andrews invites a distorted view of "who's who" in the prolife rescue movement...
...But despite that, we were charged with criminal trespass, resisting arrest, and mob action...
...Having had police officers rip my right bicep from its elbow socket during a Providence, Rhode Island rescue in 1988, and grab and squeeze my testicles during a Buffalo, New York rescue in 1989, and having been dragged hundreds of feet by police up and down staircases with handcuffs that cut into my wrists, I can appreciate that some rescuers cry out...
...I have covered Operation Rescue fairly closely for the National Catholic Register and Human Life Review since November, 1987...
...Throughout American history-in the women's suffrage movement, in the civil rights movement, in the antiwar movement-the dis-obedients who changed minds were those who accepted their punishment...
...Hughes implies that when I say rescuers "are no friends of silent suffering," I am accusing rescuers of faking their pain...
...they throw up legal defenses in court by saying the harm associated with violating trespass laws is justified by the need to prevent the greater evil of abortion...
...Sincerely to acknowledge such a duty and such an omission leaves no credible basis in a rescuer's own mind for moral arrogance...
...Five of the first thirteen arrests were of accredited journalists with identification...
...Not exactly your stereotypical prolifer...
...I fear DiSalvo has seen too many of the latter and that he takes them at face value...
Vol. 117 • February 1990 • No. 4
