Closed: 99 ways to stop abortion.

WHEN DR. JOHN KELLY, of Oak Park, Illinois, discovered that his county taxes were being used to pay for abortion, he withheld the amount he calculated was being used for that purpose. It came to less than $2. After three years his tax debt had mounted to $5.75, and the county decided it had borne enough: It threatened to auction off Dr. Kelly's home to get the money. Dr. Kelly saved it the trouble. He sold his house and moved, with his wife and most of their 14 children, to Ireland.

He did not depart quietly, or permanently. He boarded the plane for Ireland at O'Hare Airport with reporters and TV cameras in attendance, and his protest helped close the abortion ward at Cook County Hospital. He now lives in Oak Park again.

Dr. Kelly's story is only one of many Joseph M. Scheidler relates in Closed, far and away the best book I know of on the pro-life movement. As the subtitle, 99 Ways to Stop Abortion, tells you, it's essentially a how-to book. But it's also a fascinating book about power, politics, publicity, and grace, written by a remarkable man.

Joe Scheidler comes to rumble. He isn't debating an abstract issue. He's saving lives. As head of the Pro-Life Action League, he has managed to shut down 18 abortion clinics. He uses prayer, sidewalk counseling, sit-ins, graffiti, lawsuits, "inflammatory rhetoric," horror stories, ghastly pictures, pressure of all sorts.

For instance: "The best way to call public attention to a doctor's abortion involvement is to picket his home. Find out where he lives, and pick a time when his neighbors will be home. A Sunday afternoon is generally a good time." Many abortionists manage to live in respectable neighborhoods and conceal the nature of their enterprise from those who know them. Pickets, augmented by signs and leaflets, can be an effective tactic in bringing public opinion to bear against such people.

As this example suggests, Scheidler knows how to get inside other people's skin. He is sensitive to their feelings, their hopes, their ambitions. He also recommends infiltrating pro-abortion groups, which he himself has done several times. He doesn't think you should let your enemy remain an abstraction: You should get to know him as a person.

Scheidler has found that abortionists and their advocates are much more ambivalent about their activities than their public rhetoric intimates. They know they are killing, and they are much less likely to lie about this among themselves. They have nightmares, not to mention drinking, drug, and marital problems. They can be converted.

Scheidler has mixed (though not at all confused) feelings about his enemies. He has made it a point to maintain personal contact with them; without illusion, he tries to exhume their buried consciences. One of the tactics he recommends is to "adopt" an abortionist. Meet him, engage him in conversation, if possible befriend him, give him a little link to the anti-abortion community. More than one abortionist assailed by friendly harassment has changed his practice.

This is more than a tactic: "If God loves the abortionists, we must love them too." Without expecting mass conversions, Scheidler aims much of his campaigning at the potential for conversion in the other side: "People are fighting us today who will be prolife leaders tomorrow. We love them when they join us. We should love them before they join us."

Direct action, yes--but never violence. Violence doesn't work, and isn't part of Scheidler's program. He forces issues in the most direct way, but always on the assumption that he is dealing with people who are essentially redeemable even if they finally choose to reject the opportunity of redemption. He puts heavy emphasis on sidewalk counseling to dissuade women from getting abortions at the very door of the "clinic." At least nine out of ten go ahead with their abortions, but those who change their minds are often grateful that someone cared enough to stop them in their moment of weakness, while women who have already had abortions often wish bitterly that someone like Joe Scheidler's people had stood in their way.

His style is a rare combination of tough hide and tender heart. He is used to rebuffs and threats, even from the police: He points out that policemen will often lie about the law just to get rid of demonstrators. He urges you to demand that the policeman produce the ordinance. Threaten to sue for false arrest. If the law permits, use bullhorns. Stop abortion.

Scheidler thinks of everything. One of his tactics is to inform garbage collectors at abortuaries that they are hauling human bodies. This can have a surprisingly disruptive effect on the abortion trade. The support personnel who work inside the "clinics"--receptionists, secretaries, nurses--get rattled when even the garbage collectors recoil from their busienss. Money is nice, bus so are morale and self-respect.

The pro-life movement is having problems these days, including its ostensible success. It keeps getting people elected. It has even won the great symbolic victory of having an unequivocally pro-life President of the United States. And babies are still being killed in the womb with the support of the law. Pro-life leaders may be rising socially, which is fine, but where are the results?

Joe Scheidler wants results. He gets them. There is no telling how many lives he has saved, and his organization is oriented to concrete goals. He counts it a success not when he is invited to the White House but when he closes an abortuary or dissuades a woman from having her child aborted. Since changing the law is not his only purpose, he can draw encouragement from his day-to-day achievements in saving lives one at a time.

He keeps his name in the phone book and his board of directors at the legal minimum of three: himself, his wife, and his secretary. He maintains an undistractedly instrumental view of his organization. "My goal is to go out of business," he says.

He is often described as "colorful" and "larger than life," as people tend to be when they don't stop to worry about what other people think of them. I met Joe Scheidler last year in washington and again recently in Chicago, and, trully, he is one of a kind. Toweringly tall and bearded, 57 years old, he the order days before his scheduled ordination as a priest in the late Fifties: Already he saw signs of change he didn't like in the Church. He and his wife, Anne, now have seven children. Imposing as he looks, he turns out to be friendly and funny. He gets a kick out of telling the story of a local bishop who recently told him, "Scheidler, you're full of it."

"If there were fifty Joe Scheidlers," somebody remarked to me in Chicago, "there wouldn't be any more abortion." No reader of Closed with doubt that.