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The defenders also found legal weapons. Although a federal clinic-access bill is still in committee in the House and awaits floor action in the Senate, most of the sites have recourse to local laws, like those in Minnesota against blocking a clinic entrance and "stalking" doctors and nurses, or San Jose's 8-ft. legal privacy "bubble" around clinic clients. Local officials have been heard from. Declared Philadelphia Mayor Edward Rendell: "I want to say clearly and unequivocally to Operation Rescue that lawlessness will not be permitted in this city."
Rescue will be under tight scrutiny because pro-life radicals stand accused of neglecting their quest's spiritual side and turning to bravado and brutality. In Milwaukee, not a Refuge city, one of the newer forms of protest is "speed-bumping" -- throwing oneself under the cars of patients headed for clinics. Local doctors have received death threats in person, and bullets were fired through a clinic window last week. Declares pro-choicer Joan Clark: "The blockaders are not from here. They're all from somewhere else, and they're paid by the missionaries. They're thugs, and they travel."
Increasingly, those who once made common cause with Terry and his group have been alienated. Bill Price, head of Texans United for Life, is boycotting the current Dallas campaign, citing incidents including a case in which a Rescue member allegedly made a bomb threat to a Dallas clinic from a phone in New Jersey. "These are the tactics of the Mafia," says Price. Earlier this year, Twin Cities Catholic Archbishop John Roach urged militant antiabortion groups to avoid his area. "I do not find Operation Rescue to be a positive element in the pro-life movement," he said, "and I just wish they'd stay wherever they are." Operation Rescue ignored his plea. This week the group's challenge will be to regain the confidence of its less radical fellow believers.