WHEN SHE HEARD LAST WEEK that a doctor had been gunned down outside an abortion clinic in Florida, B.J. Isaacson-Jones was shaken -- but not surprised. At the St. Louis, Missouri, clinic where she is president, staff members always vary their routes home from work. Mail is opened only by employees trained by a bomb and arson squad to detect suspicious envelopes or packages. "Those of us providing abortion services feel very vulnerable," she says. Even more so since December 1991, when a man in a ski mask opened fire with a sawed-off shotgun at a clinic in Springfield, Missouri. Two people were wounded, including the clinic's office manager, who is now paralyzed. The gunman, who walked calmly away from the scene, has not been apprehended.
In the eyes of abortion-rights activists, the killing of Dr. David Gunn is simply the culmination of years of violence, vandalism and harassment against clinics all around the country. Far from denouncing his murder as the work of a lone extremist, some of the more militant antiabortion groups warned that more violence was likely to follow. "What do you expect when the government and the President do all they can to crush peaceful, nonviolent protests?" asks the Rev. Joseph Foreman of Missionaries to the Preborn, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. "We will not be outraged over the one death and not the other 4,000 precious human beings that were killed today by abortion," he says. Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, said he regretted the act but noted that, after all, Dr. Gunn was a murderer of babies.
The rising violence may reflect in part the sense of stalemate among antiabortion groups. Now that the Supreme Court has stopped short of overturning Roe v. Wade and a pro-choice Administration rules Washington, clinic operators fear that frustrated pro-life militants will become even more aggressive and threatening. According to the National Abortion Federation, a Washington-based advocacy group, in 1992 alone there were 116 cases of clinic vandalism, 12 reported incidents of arson, 9 cases of attempted arson, 5 burglaries and a bombing.
This year is not shaping up any better. In Corpus Christi, Texas, last month, arsonists burned from one of the city's abortion clinics, along with four neighboring businesses in the same building. A new tactic is to spray the interior of clinics with butyric acid, a chemical that ruins carpets and furnishings and leaves behind a revolting stench. During one night last week, five San Diego clinics were made a stinking mess. "It smells like rancid meat and a sewer together. It's awful," says Ashley Phillips, whose WomanCare Clinic was one of those attacked.
Property damage, bad as it is, is not what frightens clinic workers the most. Doctors, their staffs and families find themselves stalked, harassed and threatened over the phone. After he was confronted several years ago by a man who threatened to cut off his fingers, Dr. Buck Williams, the only doctor who provides abortions in South Dakota, got a licensed .38 revolver. He jokes grimly about it now: "I figured if I had only one finger left, I could use it to pull the trigger." After he learned about the Pensacola killing, Williams upgraded his weapon to a .45.