The run of whose life?

Randall Terry, a fundamentalist Protestant and the leader of Operation Rescue, one of the anti-abortion movement's most violent organizations, is running for Congress against incumbent Maurice Hinchey, a Democrat in New York's twenty-sixth district. Terry views his candidacy as "a natural referendum on abortion and homosexuality because anti-life and anti-family groups across America will support Representative Hinchey." However, Terry's candidacy is also a referendum on his advocacy of violence and death, and if he gets the support he expects from so-called pro-life groups, they expose themselves to the charge of being pro-death.

Terry has been a staunch advocate of assassinating medical personnel involved in abortion clinics. In 1989, he and his followers gathered in front of Boulder, Colorado, physician Warren M. Hern's office and prayed for the doctor's execution, In 1993, following the assassination of Florida doctor David Gunn, Terry again broadcast a call for Hern's murder.

Even so, in a letter in the January 5, 1998, issue of the far-right Catholic periodical the Wanderer, Terry speaks of his opponent as a "hard core pro-death leader in Congress" and a "leader of a growing number of treacherous politicians who support special rights for the militant sodomites." He uses such extremist language because he claims, "Hinchey wants to use our tax money to promote homosexuality to the teenage generation" and speaks of "Hinchey's support of forced abortion in Red China."

In his appeal to readers of the Wanderer for funds to begin his advertising attacks on Hinchey, Terry actually used his Operation Rescue as a campaign ploy. He wrote:

I don't just talk about what I'm

going to do; I do it. For example,

in 1988 when I launched

Operation Rescue, I said I would

lead tens of thousands of

Christians to the abortion mills

to save babies from abortion.... By

God's grace I did it. The results

were hundreds of rescue

missions that saved thousands

of babies who otherwise would

have been killed.

There is no evidence that Terry or his groups intimidated enough women to prevent that many abortions. There is evidence, however, that Terry intimidates doctors. In her March 15, 1993, column, Ellen Goodman wrote:

Anyone who wants to check the

fertile soil in which fanaticism 

grows has only to listen to the

leader's responses to the

assassination of [Dr. David]

Gunn, the 47-year-old doctor and

father of two. For example,

Randall Terry... said, "We have

to recognize that this doctor was

a mass murderer."

Anthony Lewis of the New York Times quoted Terry at a rally in Melbourne, Florida, as saying, "We've found the weak link is the doctor.... We're going to expose them. We're going to humiliate them."

According to Time, "Doctors, their staffs and families find themselves stalked, harassed and threatened over the phone.... Even the children of clinic workers are targets." Thirteen-year-old Justin Merritt, whose mother is a counselor at a clinic in Melbourne, was approached by a girl and a woman in her thirties, picked up in a car, and driven to a restaurant. There they produced a Bible and told Justin that he and his mother were going to burn in hell. "They identified themselves as members of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue," Time said, "and asked the boy whether he had names of patients at his mother's clinic."

When I testified before a Kansas Senate committee in March 1992 on behalf of religious liberty for women, including Roman Catholic women who sought abortions even though threatened with excommunication and ostracism, a young Catholic woman testified immediately following my statement. Between sobs she said that she had already given birth to two children and never dreamed she would seek an abortion. When the fetus she was carrying in her third trimester was diagnosed as having only about one-fourth of a heart and would die a painful death, she got no support from her priest and could not get a late-term abortion in Virginia.

When she arrived in Wichita, Kansas, to get the abortion, fanatical Operation Rescue demonstrators surrounded the bus in which she and others approached the clinic. Demonstrators shouting "Murderer" and "Baby killer" imprisoned her on that bus for forty-eight hours. As she cried, she pleaded with the committee not to permit such actions again. When the public hearing ended, she threw her arms around me and thanked me for speaking for Roman Catholic women as well as for all women. She had spoken anonymously because, as a Catholic, she dared not give her name.

Some Roman Catholic bishops have participated in Operation Rescue actions designed to harass women and shut down clinics. An August 9, 1991, Associated Press story about the massive protest at the Wichita Family Planning Clinic said that eighty-one clergy members, most of them from Roman Catholic or evangelical churches, were arrested on trespassing charges. Bishop Eugene Gerber of the Roman Catholic diocese was not one of the 2,700 arrests made during the six-week blockade of clinics in Wichita.

Roman Catholic bishops cannot duck responsibility for Operation Rescue and similar groups. The bishops started the "right to life" movement. They started the idea that birth control just after conception is abortion and that abortion kills babies. They sought participation of other religious groups.

Jerry Falwell was one who responded, contributing $10,000 to Operation Rescue. New York Catholic Bishop Austin Vaughn joined the organization in 1988. And Pat Robertson, addressing the Wichita demonstrators, praised Operation Rescue's tactics there: "America owes these people not prison but a profound sense of gratitude."

Randall Terry is not only the apostle of violence but also the advocate of intolerance and hate. He is quoted in Jim Wallie's book Who Speaks for God? as saying:

I want you just to let a wave of

intolerance wash over you. I want

you to let a wave of hatred wash

over you. Yes, hate is good.... We

have a biblical duty, we are called by

God to conquer this country. We

don't want equal time. We don't

want pluralism.

No one can take lightly the candidacy of Randall Terry for Congress. Roman Catholic and evangelical church leaders who claim to be pro-life can be expected to support him, as they have done despite his practices and his statements about assassination. Already the Wanderer has printed his picture and the following caption as an endorsement:

Randall Terry saved thousands of

babies from abortion when he

launched Operation Rescue in 1988.

He galvanized and led tens of

thousands of Christians to the

abortion mills. Now he has the

opportunity to bring his

extraordinary leadership skills to

bear on Congress. He's fighting to

unseat a stubborn, hard-core, pro-abortion

leader, a fight he can and must win.

With endorsements such as this, does anyone doubt that "pro-life" refers only to fetal life and not to the lives of women and doctors threatened by Randall Terry?

John M. Swomley is professor emeritus of social ethics at St. Paul School of Theology, an advisory board member of the Midwest Bioethics Center and the Missouri Family Health Council, and the 1998 Humanist Distinguished Service Awardee.