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Even the children of clinic workers are targets. Lisa Merritt is a counselor at a clinic in Melbourne, Florida. She says that last month her 13-year-old son Justin was approached by a woman and a teenage girl who told him they were thinking of moving into the apartment complex where he and his mother live. A day later, the girl phoned to ask Justin to join her at a Burger King. The girl picked him up in a car driven by a woman in her 30s whom she identified as a friend.
At the restaurant, the pair suddenly produced a Bible and asked Justin if he was aware that both he and his mother were going to burn in hell. According to Merritt, they identified themselves as members of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue and asked the boy whether he had names of patients at his mother's clinic. Justin refused to answer, and bolted for home. "We're all tight as guitar strings around here," Merritt says. "I can't believe they came after my son."
Pro-life organizations were divided last week about how to respond to Gunn's killing. Even groups that have supported clinic blockades issued unequivocal condemnations. "To shoot and kill a human being in the name of saving human life is grotesque," said the Rev. Richard D. Land, who heads the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. But more militant outfits played rhetorical games, dancing around the crime. Don Treshman, national director of Houston-based Rescue America -- which had mounted protests at Gunn's home -- called the doctor's death "unfortunate." Then he added, with a logic long familiar among extortionists: "This will have a chilling effect on this business."
The murder in Pensacola has already led to the resignation of two doctors at the clinic in Melbourne. Antiabortion groups had featured them on wanted posters similar to those that Gunn had appeared on before his death. Clinics elsewhere are finding themselves compelled to take expensive precautions against attack. The Houston chapter of Planned Parenthood is spending $100,000 on security devices for its new headquarters. Last week their clinic in Kansas City, Kansas, hired an armed guard.
After Gunn's murder, representatives from three abortion-rights groups held a joint press conference with two Democratic Congressmen to call for an FBI probe of the antiabortion movement. Congress is expected to speed up action on a bill that would make it a federal crime, punishable by up to three years in prison, to blockade an abortion clinic. At a meeting with the President on Thursday, members of the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues urged him to support legislation that would strengthen federal antistalking laws. The President, says Colorado Democrat Patricia Schroeder, "was fully in agreement that this was a real crisis."
A federal law protecting clinics could give stronger authority to the FBI and other agencies to investigate attacks. The record of state law-enforcement efforts so far has been mixed. In the 28 cases of arson and fire bombings against clinics from 1990 to 1992, only one suspect has been arrested. Earlier this month, representatives of the Feminist Majority Foundation met with Florida attorney general Robert Butterworth. Katherine Spillar, national coordinator for the foundation, says he refused their request to seek a state court injunction that would keep protesters away from clinics.