ANTIABORTION VIOLENCE HAS EBBED, SURVEY FINDS.

Byline: Mireya Navarro The New York Times

In a state that has been one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in the abortion debate, the antiabortion pickets outside the office of Dr. Ben Graber, a legislator who sometimes performs the procedure as part of his gynecological practice, would not have been surprising in the past.

But that protest two weeks ago was the first he had faced in three years, and their actions paled in comparison to those of the past, he says, when he has been threatened and stalked, and demonstrators chained themselves to his office door and forced him to shut down a clinic.

A new survey by abortion providers found that the lull that Graber experienced was not unique: violence and harassment by abortion protesters across the nation dropped significantly in the first seven months of 1995.

The survey of 310 clinics, to be released this week by the Feminist Majority Foundation, an advocacy group in Arlington, Va., attributes the trend to a 1994 federal law guaranteeing access to clinics that provide abortion and to a Supreme Court ruling that year that upheld the constitutionality of ``buffer zones'' to keep protesters away from the offices.

It is the first time in the three years of the survey that more clinics reported decreases in violent incidents than increases, the group said.

``It is definitely a major improvement and it is directly correlated with law-enforcement response'' said Eleanor Smeal, the Foundation's president.

Clinic blockades have all but disappeared and death threats, which have in the past been a prelude to violence, were noticeably down.

Among surveyed clinics, 39 percent reported instances of serious violence and harassment such as arson and death threats in the period of study last year, compared with 52 percent in a comparable period in 1994.

The proportion of clinics that suffered acts of vandalism - from nails in clinic driveways, to broken windows and tampered utilities - dropped from 35 percent to 25 percent, the survey found.

But the number of clinics reporting that their staff members were being harassed, including some workers whose homes were picketed, was about the same as in 1994, about one in five.

Clinics in general took extra security measures after two receptionists were killed at abortion clinics in Brookline, Mass., in December 1994, but about a third of those surveyed were also protected under civil injunctions or buffer zones that limit protesters to a certain distance from entrances.

In Florida, the only state where antiabortion extremists have killed doctors, an eight-foot ``law-enforcement area'' at the murdered doctors' clinics in Pensacola brought in a permanent police presence and has kept away all but small prayer groups that do not interfere with patients, local abortion rights advocates say.

Gone are the bullhorns, the video cameras and what a former clinic escort called the ``party'' atmosphere of earlier protests.

``It's 300 percent better than it was a year ago,'' said Hallie Joyce, a clinic escort for two years who now heads the Pensacola chapter of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

In Tallahassee, tensions between antiabortion groups and Graber rose when, as chairman of the state House of Representatives' health-care committee, he refused to schedule hearings two weeks ago on a bill requiring a 24-hour waiting period for women requesting abortions.

But he said he has faced only a one-day protest with little of the vehemence of the past.

Far from intimidated, Graber, who does not perform many abortions or act as a major advocate, settled a lawsuit last year against a church and others who had regularly blocked doors to a clinic in Pompano Beach, winning damages and an end to blockades.

``It's something you do because it needs to be done,'' Graber, who is now running for Congress, said of abortions. ``When you don't have legal abortions, women die.''