Operation Rescue

Soon after the Roe v. Wade ruling, abortion foes—mostly Catholic—began protesting abortion clinics and organizing activist groups for peaceful and non-coercive opposition. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leaders like theologian Francis Schaeffer and surgeon C. Everett Koop led conservative Protestants to join the fray, and with this broader constituency came more coercive rhetoric and action. With electoral and lobbying efforts seemingly ineffective against abortion statutes well into the Ronald Reagan era, movement offshoots began searching for more direct means of effecting change. In 1984, several groups convened an Action for Life conference, where activist Joseph Scheidler led a seminar on effective confrontation that drew on civil rights tactics and included a 200-person blockade of a Fort Lauderdale clinic.

This new phase of direct action spawned the Pro Life Action Network (PLAN) and in 1986, after PLAN's third annual conference, activist leaders Ken Reed, Randall Terry, Rev. Joseph Foreman, and Joseph Scheidler formed an organization, Operation Rescue, which would stage large clinic blockades across the country. Some suspect that Scheidler encouraged this after women's groups filed a class-action lawsuit against him in federal court that year (NOW v. Scheidler). Whatever the case, the fledgling organization finalized its structure in 1987 and held its first protest in New Jersey in November.

Operation Rescue swiftly acquired national attention in 1988, when police arrested 1,200 protesters in the organization's “siege on Atlanta” during the Democratic National Convention. The movement flourished, with autonomous Operation Rescue cells springing up across the country: The groups staged 400 rescues across the country in 1988 and 1989, garnering almost 25,000 arrests in the process. Protests had several similarities: Participants gathered at 6:00 A.M. to learn their target, and leaders informed police of their intended nonviolent demonstration. At the site, the largest protesters blocked doorways while [Page 1058]other protesters glutted windows or entrances. Activists sang or prayed but generally did not address the public; instead, designated speakers led speeches or prayers, “sidewalk counselors” spoke to women accessing the clinic, and delegated leaders addressed the media.

The initial blockades surprised clinics and abortion rights organizations, and several clinics closed or became inaccessible during blockades. By late 1988, however, groups like ACT UP, Refuse and Resist, and the Bay Area Coalition Against Operation Rescue emerged to defend clinics. The growing presence of both organized blockaders and defenders decreased the “casual participant” population on both sides and raised tensions to intense, sometimes violent, levels. Police, initially slow responding to the blockades, became increasingly efficient at removing blockaders.

Clinic owners and abortion rights groups soon turned to the courts for protection against Operation Rescue, and several states issued injunctions against the group in 1988 and 1989. Courts increasingly stiffened sentences and fines for repeat offences and violated injunctions, so that in February 1990, federal marshals seized Operation Rescue payroll accounts after OR ignored a $50,000 contempt fine (by that time, the group had racked up more than $450,000 in fines). In the wake of this legal and financial pressure, the organization reorganized and splintered, totaling only 1,200 arrests in 1990. Randall Terry, who had led the group from its founding, left the organization that same year, and with a few notable exceptions (the Wichita, Kansas, blockades in 1992 and the Buffalo, New York, protests in 1993), Operation Rescue withered as an organization. Skip Benham became the organization's leader in 1994, renaming it Operation Save America in 1998.

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