Antiabortion Movement

Early Organizations

By 1980, two of the most significant direct-action antiabortion groups had been founded. Paul and Judie Brown, of Stafford, Virginia, started the American Life League (ALL) in 1979. A year later, Joseph Scheidler, widely considered to be the father of antiabortion direct action, created the Pro-Life Action League (PLAL) in Chicago. (PLAL is now known as Pro-Life Action Network [PLAN].) Both the Browns and Scheidler were part of the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), the largest antiabortion group in the United States. Scheidler had been the executive director of the Illinois chapter of the NRLC from 1973 until he was dismissed in 1978 because of his radical tactics. Similarly, the Browns formed ALL to raise the level of direct action in their protests.

Sign at abortion rights rally in New York City, February 1986.

© Owen Franken/Corbis.

Bolstered by the conservative political climate of the 1980s, ALL and PLAL chapters and other like-minded groups sprung up around the country. Clinic violence and antiabortion picketing were regular features on the news by the early 1980s. In January 1982, the Hope Clinic for Women in Granite City, Illinois, was gutted by fire. Four months later, antiabortion activist Don Benny Anderson set fire to two clinics in Florida. That August, Anderson and brothers Matthew and Wayne Moore kidnapped Dr. Hector Zevallos, of the Hope Clinic for Women, and held him, along with his wife, for eight days. During that time, Zevallos was ordered to make an antiabortion tape to be sent to President Ronald Reagan in support of anti-Roe legislation. The kidnapping was the first of its kind; it was the debut action of the Army of God, a group that, by the end of the 1990s, was one of the most feared in the country.

While clinic staffs were terrorized by the threat of more kidnappings, antiabortion activists continued to disrupt clinics in increasingly creative ways. Activists cut the hoses to abortion equipment in Toledo, Ohio; placed nails in parking lots in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; called in bomb scares in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and successfully firebombed clinics in Washington, Maryland, and Florida. In 1984, activists twice bombed the Ladies Center, one of two abortion clinics in Pensacola, Florida, as part of a well-coordinated attack that included two private physicians' offices. Despite the escalating violence, in December 1984 FBI director William H. Webster claimed that clinic bombings did not conform to the federal definition of terrorism and were therefore not a federal priority.

...