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5/27/10

Not A Lone Wolf Scott Roeder is now serving a life term for murdering abortion doctor George Tiller. But did he really act alone? By AMANDA ROBB



Not A Lone Wolf

Scott Roeder is now serving a life term for murdering abortion doctor George Tiller. But did he really act alone?

By AMANDA ROBB



AS SOON AS SCOTT ROEDER WAS NAMED THE SOLE SUSPECT IN THE point-blank shooting death of Wichita, Kan., abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in the vestibule of the Reformation Lutheran Church Tiller attended, a predictable story began to be told. Following the lead of a recent Department of Homeland Security report characterizing right-wing terrorists as lone wolves, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, ABC, NBC and FOX News all ran stories calling Roeder a “lone wolf” gunman.

It is the oldest, possibly most dangerous abortion story out there.

August 13, 1994, The Washington Post: “Many anti-abortion leaders have… denounced Paul Hill [who killed abortion provider Dr. John Britton and his security escort James Barrett]…as a lone, sick extremist.

October 26, 1998, The Independent (London): “A doctor defiant [is] shot dead for his beliefs by a lone abortion terrorist [referring to James Kopp, who killed Amherst, N.Y., abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian].

But for loners, these guys have a lot of friends. A lot of the same ones, in fact.

Over the past six months, I have interviewed Scott Roeder more than a dozen times, met several times with his supporters at the Sedgwick County Courthouse in Wichita where he was tried and convicted, and permissibly recorded numerous three-way telephone conversations Roeder had me place to his friends. Using information gleaned from these sources, along with public records, it is possible to piece together the close, long-term and ongoing relationship between Roeder and other anti-abortion extremists who advocate murder and violent attacks on abortion providers.

Now, meet Roeder’s anti-abortion associates, beginning with Roeder himself. Scott Roeder, 52, was born in Denver. His family moved to Topeka, Kan., when he was a toddler. He worked for the Kansas City electric company, and at age 28, he married and had a son. For about five years family life was stable, but then in the early 1990s Roeder suddenly could not cope—with anything.

While under financial stress in 1992, Roeder happened upon right-wing televangelist Pat Robertson’s 700 Club on television. He claims he fell to his knees and became a born-again Christian. According to his own recollections and those of his ex-wife, he immediately fixated on what he considered two earthly evils: taxes and abortion.

In very short order, he affiliated himself with Christian anti-government groups such as the Freemen militia and eventually became involved with antiabortion groups such as Operation Rescue and the Army of God, the latter of which openly sanctions the use of violence to stop abortion.

Roeder told me that his first act as an anti-abortion activist was to protest outside a Kansas City women’s clinic. Among the protestors he came to know were Anthony Leake, a proponent of the “justifiable homicide”of abortion doctors, and Eugene Frye, the owner of a Kansas City construction company who, together with another antiabortion activist, had been arrested in 1990 for attempting to reinsert the feeding tube of a Missouri woman in a persistent vegetative state. Frye had also been arrested for blockading abortion clinics during the 1991 Summer of Mercy in Wichita, which was organized by Operation Rescue.

Through Frye, Roeder says, he soon met Rachelle “Shelley” Shannon. She, like Frye, had attended the Summer of Mercy protests; over the next two years she would commit eight arson or acid attacks on abortion clinics in the Pacific Northwest. Then, most horrifically, on August 19, 1993, she would try to murder Dr. George Tiller, succeeding only in shooting and wounding him in both his arms.

Roeder says Frye took him to visit Shannon where she was incarcerated in Topeka. Roeder was instantly smitten with the intense, unrepentant shooter. Frye had made a match. Roeder began visiting Shannon without Frye: Over the years, while she served her 30-year-long sentence for the clinic attacks and the attemptedmurder, Roeder would see her some 25 times. As his marriage
began disintegrating, he even considered asking the raven-haired Shannon about beginning a romance. But, he told me, he did not because of the obvious obstacles involved in dating an incarcerated woman.

Still, Roeder and Shannon stayed close—and he began contemplating killing Dr. Tiller himself. Maybe it would be a car crash; maybe he’d shoot him sniper-style from a rooftop near Tiller’s clinic. Or maybe he would just cut off Dr. Tiller’s hands with a sword. Roeder testified to all of these at his trial.

While protesting at a Kansas City abortion clinic, Roeder also met Regina Dinwiddie, who had been arrested along with Frye during Operation Rescue’s 1991 Summer of Mercy in Wichita. A nurse from Kansas City, she was the first person to face a civil restraining order under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act because, according to the complaint, she would not stop screaming threats at abortion clinic patients and personnel. The clinic director said Dinwiddie once told her, “Patty, you have not
seen violence yet until you see what we do to you!” Dinwiddie, an admitted member of the violencepromoting Army of God, was also arrested at Operation Rescue’s 1988 Siege of Atlanta. Authorities housed the anti-abortion activists in a separate unit—which became a terrorist seedbed. Also arrested and incarcerated along with Dinwiddie were Shannon, Jayne Bray and James Kopp. Bray is the wife of Michael Bray, the so-called lifetime chaplain of the Army of God, who was, at that time, incarcerated elsewhere for a series of clinic bomb attacks.

Kopp went on to murder New York abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian in a sniper attack in 1998 at Slepian’s home, and is the lead suspect in the shooting and wounding of four abortion providers at their homes in upstate New York and Canada between 1994 and 1997. It is widely believed some of those jailed in Atlanta in 1988 were involved in the creation of “The Army of God Manual,” in which they receive “special thanks” under monikers such as “Shaggy West” (Shelley Shannon), “Atomic Dog” (James Kopp), “Kansas City Big Guys,” the “Mad Gluer” and “Pensacola Cop Hugger,” among others.

The how-to manual for would-be terrorists provides instructions on vandalizing clinics, including arson, super-gluing locks, constructing bombs and “disarming the persons perpetrating the [abortions] by removing their hands.” The manual was discovered buried in Shannon’s backyard during a search by law enforcement following her attempted murder of Dr. Tiller in 1993.

Back in 1994, Dinwiddie had enjoyed special fame in anti-abortion circles because Paul Hill had stayed at her house two weeks before he shot and killed Dr. John Britton and his volunteer escort James Barrett outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Fla. Shortly after that double murder, Scott Roeder enters our story again: He is invited to Dinwiddie’s along with Frye to meet a special guest, Michael Bray.

Bray is a linchpin among the extremists; his influence over those who commit abortion-related violence is hard to overstate. Author of A Time to Kill—a theological justification for violence—Bray is a convicted clinic bomber (he served from 1985 to 1989 for his crimes). He helped draft and was the first to sign the “Defensive Action” statement endorsing the murder of abortion providers that Hill began circulating in the months before he killed Britton and Barrett. Shannon says she was moved to violence by reading Bray’s writings; according to her diary, when an early arson attempt failed to produce much damage, she wrote to him in despair, and Bray reassured her, “Little strokes fell mighty oaks.” James Kopp first met Bray in 1983 at an extremist religious retreat in Switzerland and, according to law enforcement sources, stopped at Bray’s home in 1998 as he was fleeing the country after murdering Dr. Slepian.

Bray has obviously privately supported violence as a means to stop abortion since the mid-1980s, but by 1991, he and his wife Jayne were open enough to discuss his views with a reporter from The Washington Post.

“Is there a legitimate use of force on behalf of the unborn?” Bray asks rhetorically. “I say yes, it is justified to destroy the [abortion] facilities. And yes, it is justified to… what kind of word should I use here?” “Well, they use ‘terminate a pregnancy,’” Jayne Bray says.

“Yeah, terminate an abortionist,” he says.

When Scott Roeder arrived at Regina Dinwiddie’s house with Eugene Frye in 1994 or 1995 to meet Michael Bray, he was nearly giddy, by his own recollection to me:

Roeder: I think it was right after Paul Hill…I got to meet [Bray] and I heard that he’d been on 60 Minutes. …I just kept asking Mike [Bray] questions because I was so fascinated with him, you know…As a matter of fact, Gene [Frye] had to tell me to quit asking him
questions.

Amanda Robb: [But] did you guys discuss justifiable homicide? If it was justifiable to shoot a doctor?

Roeder: Oh yeah, yeah. We definitely discussed that, and like I say, Michael [Bray], he’s been outspoken, and he’s always said, as long as I’ve known him, he’s always said it’s been justified to do that.

Another admitted Army of God member that Roeder has become close to is Jennifer McCoy. In 1996, she was arrested and pled guilty to conspiring to burn down abortion clinics in Norfolk and Newport News, Va. During her two and a half years in prison, she was in contact with Bray, who honored her in absentia at the White Rose Banquet in Washington, D.C.—an annual event organized by Bray to recognize those jailed for their (mostly violent) antiabortion activities, and attended by many in the extremist network (including McCoy in 1996).

After her release, McCoy began protesting regularly with Operation Rescue in Wichita shortly after its president, Troy Newman, moved the headquarters there in 2002 for the sole purpose of tormenting Dr. Tiller into shuttering his clinic.

As Roeder’s conversations with me have indicated, McCoy has been among his most regular visitors since he was arraigned for Dr. Tiller’s murder, although according to Roeder, they did not know each other before May 2009. But McCoy is close to people Roeder is connected to, people Roeder could try to implicate as co-conspirators and/or accessories, such as Bray or Newman, the latter of whom extremely angered Roeder by denying their acquaintance.

Perhaps this is why McCoy has been more than a supporter; she has been a flatterer and even a fabulist. At one point, according to Roeder, McCoy told him that a 17-year-old woman in Wichita was scheduled to have an abortion but after Dr. Tiller’s murder changed her mind and had the baby. Roeder believed that young woman would testify in court on behalf of his defense that the murder was justified to save lives. But there is no evidence that any woman who was planning to abort her pregnancy before
Dr. Tiller was killed changed her mind afterwards.

In April 1996, Roeder was pulled over by Shawnee County, Kan., deputies for driving without a valid license plate. Instead, Roeder had a tag on his car that read, “Sovereign private property. Immunity declared by law. Noncommercial American.” The kind of plates frequently used by Freemen. And in his trunk he had gunpowder, ammunition and bomb-making materials. Roeder was sentenced to 24 months probation and ordered to stop his association with violence-advocating anti-government groups. He told his son, then 9 years old, that everyone assumed he was going to bomb a federal building (his arrest occurred near the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.) But really, Roeder said, he had been planning to bomb an abortion clinic.

After his probation ended, Roeder resumed his anti-abortion activities; in 2000 he was caught on surveillance cameras on two occasions super-gluing the locks at the Kansas City clinic where he frequently protested with Frye. The clinic’s manager says he reported the incidents to an FBI agent who said he would question Roeder. After that, Roeder disappeared for a while. He would be caught on camera again gluing the clinic’s locks both the week before and the day before he murdered Dr. Tiller in Wichita.

Roeder first stalked Tiller at his Wichita church, Reformation Lutheran, in 2002, the year Operation Rescue moved there. Operation Rescue had already begun demonstrating at the church, and on the group’s website Newman had announced plans to gather at Tiller’s clinic, church and home.

Also that year, Roeder says he went to lunch with Newman and asked him about using violence to stop abortion.

Robb: What did you say to him?
Roeder: Oh, something like if an abortionist—I don’t even know if it was specifically Tiller…was shot, would it be justified? … And [Newman] said, “If it were, it wouldn’t upset me.”

According to Roeder’s trial testimony, he became an active and regular participant in Operation Rescue events. He told me he has donation receipts, event T-shirts and a signed copy of Newman’s 2001 book, Their Blood Cries Out, to prove it. During an Operation Rescue event at Dr. Tiller’s clinic in 2007, Roeder posted on the Operation Rescue website:

“Bleass [sic] everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to bring as many people as possible to attend Tillers [sic] church (inside not just outside) …”

Moreover, when Roeder was apprehended for Dr. Tiller’s murder, news cameras photographed a piece of paper on the dashboard of Roeder’s car: It contained the phone number of Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s senior policy advisor, who served two years in prison for conspiring to bomb abortionclinics in 1988. Roeder also told me that Sullenger was present at the lunch
with Newman where they discussed “justifiable” homicide, and that Newman had given Roeder the autographed copy of his book just three months before Roeder killed Tiller when Roeder visited Operation Rescue headquarters. Sullenger was there as well, Roeder said.

Yet Newman has denied any formal link between Roeder and Operation Rescue. He said to me, “I have no recollection of ever meeting Scott Roeder.” Immediately after Roeder killed Dr. Tiller, Newman issued a statement saying, “We deplore the criminal actions with which Mr. Roeder is accused…Operation Rescue has diligently and successfully worked for years through peaceful, legal means [to stop abortion.]” In his writings, though—his book, Their Blood Cries Out, still for sale on the Operation Rescue website—he talks about the bloodguilt of those who condone abortion. The biblical atonement for bloodguilt is death. Scott Roeder, Eugene Frye, Shelley Shannon, Regina Dinwiddie and Michael Bray all know one another.

Jennifer McCoy and Anthony Leake know all of them, too, except perhaps Shelley Shannon.

Troy Newman knows McCoy, Frye and possibly others.

McCoy, Shannon, Dinwiddie and Bray are admitted members of the Army of God.

“We’re like circles that overlap,” McCoy told me in an anteroom in the Sedgwick County Courthouse near where Scott Roeder was being sentenced on April 1, 2010. “We all don’t know each other—we may not agree on a lot of things, like religion, say—but we’re all completely committed to one purpose: stopping abortion.”

“Uh-huh,” Dinwiddie concurred, looking up from the character statement she was getting ready to give on Roeder’s behalf. “That’s right.”

Across from the women was Frye, along with David Leach—who calls himself the secretary general of the Army of God and is another justifiablehomicide advocate. They were working on their statements on behalf of Roeder’s character, too.

They let me sit with them because I said I was Scott’s acquaintance, and also because I’m the niece of Dr. Barnett Slepian, the abortion provider murdered by James Kopp in upstate New York. I was especially close to Bart because he lived with my family
for nearly a decade after my own father died when I was 4 years old. During Roeder’s trial, and again at his sentencing, I explained my presence to his supporters the same way I had explained my interest in him when I had first written to him six months earlier: I really need to understand how someone could be moved to murder to stop abortion.

I feel that I now understand.

Circles that overlap.

One circle encompasses the Army of God, including Bray, Shannon, Leach, Dinwiddie, McCoy and Kopp, the man who killed my uncle.

A second circle includes justifiablehomicide advocates Bray, Shannon, Leach, Dinwiddie, Leake and the murderer Paul Hill, who was executed in 2003 by the state of Florida.

And a third circle holds Operation Dinwiddie and Bray have signed “Defensive Action” (justifiable homicide) statements, stating in part, “We, the undersigned, declare the justice of taking all godly action necessary to defend innocent human life including the use of force.” Leake has said publicly he supports the use of deadly force against abortion providers.

Rescue, Troy Newman, McCoy and Cheryl Sullenger.

Scott Roeder overlaps with all of them (see chart on facing page).

Police, prosecutors and the military define a cell as a circle of individuals— usually three to 10 people—who are joined in common unlawful purpose. A Military Guide to Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, a U.S. Army training manual, describes a cell as the
“foundation” of most terrorist organizations. Most often, and most effectively, these cells are networked, “depend[ing] and even thriving on loose affiliation with groups or individuals from a variety of locations.”

In international terrorism cases, in organized crime cases, even in drugtrafficking cases, conspiracy charges can be filed when two or more people enter into an agreement to commit an unlawful act. In fact, of the 159 people convicted of international terrorism by
the U.S. since 9/11, more than 70 percent were sentenced for conspiracy (or for “harboring” terrorists). Once a person becomes a member of the conspiracy, she or he is held legally responsible for the acts of other members done in furtherance of the conspiracy, even if she or he is not present or aware that the acts are being committed.

The government does not have to prove that conspirators have entered into any formal agreement. Because they are trying to hide what they are doing, criminal conspirators rarely do such things as draw up contracts. Nor does the government have to show
that the members of the conspiracy state between themselves what their object or purpose or methods are. Because they are clandestine, criminal conspirators rarely discuss their plans in a straightforward way. The government only has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the members of a conspiracy, in some implied way, came to mutually understand they would attempt to accomplish a common and unlawful plan.

Given the broad latitude in proving conspiracy, you’d think the same legal theory could have been used in prosecuting slayings of abortion doctors. Yet to date, only the individual murderers of abortion providers have been charged and prosecuted. No charges have been brought against any individuals for conspiracy to commit those murders.

Shortly after Roeder’s trial—when I met Michael Bray and he told me he had only met Scott Roeder after he killed Dr. Tiller—Scott Roeder stopped communicating with me. But during one of our last phone calls, I was able to ask Roeder a critical question:

Robb: Wait, just tell me how it works…when the use of force comes up in conversation, it has to come up sometimes.
Roeder: I’ve always said [it] over the years, and I would see what level of comfort they were willing to talk about it. …Michael Bray, he would talk about it forever. He went on 60 Minutes for Pete’s sake. Other people, they might say, “Well, you know, I just don’t think it’s right.” Then I’d explain to them why, and if they’re still not comfortable with it, I would drop it. I wouldn’t keep pushing it. Regina [Dinwiddie] obviously agrees with the use of force, and Gene Frye, I believe, does.

Roeder, his associates and “The Army of God Manual” could not be more plain. The manual ends, “‘Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed [Gen: 9-6]… we are forced to take up arms against you.”

Taking up arms. Shedding man’s blood. Bloodguilt.Circles that overlap. In other words, wolves run in packs.

Investigative support and research for this article were provided by the Feminist Majority Foundation’s National Clinic Access Project. Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

AMANDA ROBB is a writer based in New York. She has been a contributing writer for O (Oprah) magazine, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, New York, George, Marie Claire, More, Harper’s Bazaar (UK) and other periodicals.

Article reprinted from the Spring 2010 issue of Ms. To have this issue delivered straight to your door, join the Ms. community.

Comments on this piece? We want to hear them! Send to letterstotheeditor@msmagazine.com. To have your letter considered for publication, please include your city and state.

5/6/10

The Last Clinic Standing By Amanda Robb

The Last Clinic Standing

On most Monday mornings, Dr. Miriam McCreary wakes up before her pet parrot at 5 a.m. and dresses in the dark in order to make a 7:20 flight from her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to her office in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

On most Monday mornings, Dr. Miriam McCreary wakes up before her  pet parrot at 5 a.m. and dresses in the dark in order to make a 7:20  flight from her home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to her office in Sioux  Falls, South Dakota.

The Planned Parenthood where she works looks like a typical 21st-century American abortion clinic. The bulky brick exterior defends the edifice against bombs. Deliberately high windows protect those inside from snipers. A rear parking lot hides patients from protestors who might hurl slogans, spit, or Molotov cocktails. On Monday mornings, the patients-many of whom wear hats and all of whom study the ground-enter the locked, bulletproof doors pregnant. Since no South Dakota doctor will work at the clinic, 71-year-old gynecologist McCreary, grandmother of 10 and daughter of Lutheran missionaries, hops her early flight to Sioux Falls, population 141,000. Her husband, a retired businessman, kisses her good-bye, then tries to get through the day and get past his worries-foreign terrorists who hijack airplanes, domestic terrorists who murder doctors-with military-history magazines. The Minneapolis flight is often delayed; Midwest weather is iffy. So a Planned Parenthood staff member regularly watches the sun rise over a tall-grass field from the curb in front of the regional airport, where she waits for the doctor to arrive. Week after week, she comes to understand how frontier women periodically went crazy from the prairie wind's whisper-whistle, while back in the clinic's waiting room, a more complex tension thickens despite the generous supply of People magazines.

To begin a surgical abortion, Dr. McCreary injects a patient's cervix with an anesthetic. She'd like to offer general anesthesia, but there aren't enough nurses at the clinic to watch IV lines. So Dr. McCreary gives the women what she calls "verbal anesthesia." "I talk to them," she says. "Most have the same favorite topic: their kids." Sixty percent of abortion patients in the U.S. are already mothers. Next, Dr. McCreary dilates her patient's cervix to about the width of a pen. Then, taking something that looks like a mini vacuum-cleaner hose, she sucks out the contents of the uterus. Sixty days after conception, a fetus is about the size of a kidney bean. It has a head, a rump, and tiny webbed fingers, but limited brain function. Along with the placenta, Dr. McCreary pulls the fetus, in pieces, into a glass jar. Like amputated limbs, abortion material is considered regulated medical waste and is cremated or incinerated. About three hours after entering the clinic, most patients leave with their wombs empty- though about twice a month, a woman is so distraught that Dr. McCreary sends her home still pregnant to reconsider her options. "I tell her, 'Think about what you really want to do,'" says Dr. McCreary. "I say, 'We'll be here if you need us.'"

On the sidewalk in front of the brick fortress, two other grandmas, from Brookings County, SD, recite the rosary. Each carries a poster of a baby that reads, "Look it in the face." "This clinic protects rapists," one informs me. "If a woman has been raped by a family member, the law says you're supposed to report it. But if you come here and get an abortion, it doesn't get reported. The man gets a free ride." Then she confides, "And the clinic sells baby parts to manufacture cosmetics." It would be an abortion clinic like any other, except that the Sioux Falls is the last facility in all of South Dakota, a state of 775,000 people scattered across some 77,000 square miles. It is also the most imperiled clinic in the country-endangered not from the kaboom of violence, but from a silent smash of law.

Last winter, the state legislature passed House Bill 1215, The Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act, which bans virtually all abortions, even in cases of rape, incest, and threat to a woman's health. "If you have high blood pressure or heart disease and a pregnancy will make the condition much worse, too bad," says Sarah Stoesz, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. "Even if you already have small children. Same if you're carrying a severely damaged fetus." For now though, the Act cannot be enforced. The South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families gathered enough signatures to put it to a statewide vote on November 7. On that day, if South Dakotans choose to rescind the Act, pro-life advocates will likely introduce a slightly less-stringent ban in the State Legislature. If South Dakotans vote to uphold the Act, Planned Parenthood will file a federal lawsuit against the state. Either way, both sides agree, the battle will rise up through appeals courts, and sooner rather than later, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide-based on HB 1215 or similar measures introduced in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, and Tennessee-whether abortion remains legal in America.

Politics normally don't interest Nancy, 26, a cherubic-looking hairstylist from Aberdeen, SD. But when she discovered she was pregnant in late May 2006, Nancy (not her real name) wound up thinking a lot about the political intricacies of the controversial procedure, especially how much "people hate abortion in South Dakota." She finds the hostility toward abortion confusing. "I already have a 6-year-old," she says, looking around the Sioux Falls clinic waiting room. "I know what parenting is like." Her boyfriend of two-and-a-half-years, Jim, 24, a Spartacus-looking construction foreman, seems more understanding of the pro-life position. He's clearly conflicted about Nancy's decision. "It's hard not having a say in the matter," he says. "This week hasn't been easy."

Like many unintended pregnancies, Nancy's is not the result of carelessness but of statistical odds. "She was using birth control," Jim tells me. "Really. She was on the Pill." Regardless, the South Dakota Task Force on Abortion finds that the procedure Nancy wants to get "exploits the mother . . . damages her health . . . and portrays [her] as valueless." Nancy searches the corners of the clinic room for a way to defend herself against the notion she's doing anything but what's best for herself and the child she already has. Finding no answers in the drywall, she gestures toward her boyfriend. He's younger than me," she says. "Only 24. Just starting his life. I'm trying to hold mine together. Really, people should mind their own business." She gets up to go have her abortion. That Nancy and Jim were having sex is undeniably what caused her unintended pregnancy. Leslee Unruh, founder of the abstinence clearinghouse, thinks sex creates many other ills, too-cervical cancer, bad grades, and poor female self-esteem. That's why she was one of the main lobbying forces last year behind both South Dakota's abortion ban and a law to teach school children "that it is the expected standard to abstain from sexual activity until they are married." The abstinence law passed in the South Dakota house of representatives but was never voted on in the state senate. Since 2003, Unruh's organization has received grants from the Bush administration's $113 million budget for community-based abstinence programs.

Unruh, 51, a descendent of Laura Ingalls Wilder, describes herself as "an all-natural type" who raised goats in order to give her five children organic milk. In her youth, Unruh was pro-choice. At age 19, she met her husband, who was pro-life. The couple had many "hot" discussions about the issues, but Unruh didn't change her position until, between her third and fourth child, she had an abortion because her doctor said her life was jeopardized by the pregnancy. "I was given information, but not all the information," Unruh says. "I made a choice-the wrong choice. I'm into taking personal responsibility." The procedure left Unruh deeply bereaved. She turned her regret into action and in 1984 opened the Alpha Center, a pregnancy "counseling" service. Three years later, the center paid a $500 fine after Unruh was accused of offering pregnant women money in exchange for not aborting.

Working with so many pregnant women led Unruh to see what she calls "feminism's new lie"-the myth that women can be as sexually rapacious as men, and as happily promiscuous as Sex and the City's Samantha."When a man has sex, it's just physical," she says. "It's scientifically proven that women get attached. And he who cares the least has the most power." Ergo, virginity, in Unruth's view, is the key to feminine clout.
"I slept around," I tell Unruh. "I don't feel any worse for the wear." (For the record, I'm now a faithfully married 40-year-old with a 6-year-old daughter.)

"You're rare," she says. "Most women who use their bodies have damage, emotionally and physically. But I don't want you to think I think badly of you."

Unruh doesn't think badly of Planned Parenthood, either. She "likes" the Sioux Falls clinic director, Kate Looby, but feels that Planned Parenthood deceives its patients by giving them birth control and abortions. An unintentionally pregnant woman, especially, "needs the truth," says Unruh.

"What's the truth?" I ask.

"That there's a little life there from the moment of conception. But the abortion industry is big business, so they won't tell you that."

I disagree, my uncle Bart Slepian, was an OB/GYN who also performed abortions in Buffalo, NY. I used to write the rare speech he gave. In his last one, he said, "abortion is undeniably the taking of potential life. It is not pretty. It is not easy. And in a perfect world, it would not be necessary."

It's true he made a lot of money doing abortions. Though a relatively cheap surgery (between $275 and $700), abortions don't generate heavy billing costs because they're not covered by some insurance plans. Also, the procedure often takes less than five minutes; in an eight-hour day, a doctor can perform dozens of them. Still, the majority of my uncle's income came from routine gynecology and obstetrics.

On October 23, 1998, my uncle and his wife returned home from Friday-night synagogue services. They were in their kitchen, chatting with three of their four children (ages 7 to 15), when an anti-abortion activist hiding in the woods behind their house fired a rifle into the domestic scene. The bullet hit Bart in the back, shattered his spine, and tore through his aorta before exiting his body through his left armpit-barely missing his 15-year-old son's head. My aunt began CPR, and one of my cousins ran for paper towels to stanch his father's wounds. But Bart was already dead.

A few years before he was killed, my uncle opened his front door and invited the people singing "Jesus loves the little children" on his stoop inside for breakfast. He said if they would stop harassing him and his family (he particularly didn't like them following his kids to school and asking them not to grow up to be "killers like daddy"), they could set up a table inside the clinic where he worked two days a week and pass out pro-life information. He suggested that the real way to stop abortion-which he was all for; no one was more critical of repeat abortion customers than Bart-was to make birth control free and easy to get.

The minister in charge of the "Jesus Loves" choir didn't want to discuss birth control. "They're not interested in solutions," Looby, the Sioux Falls clinic director, tells me. "They only want to talk about abstinence."

Looby, a mother of four, thought she'd seen the anti-abortion movement's most virulent moment when she worked at a clinic during operation Rescue's 1991 "Summer of Mercy." That August, in Wichita, KS, whole families crawled across parking lots, winding up as heaps of "babies" at clinic doors. Children laid down in front of doctors' cars to stop them from driving to work. Protestors closed down every clinic in town. In Omaha, NE, other protestors showed up at a shower Looby's clinic staff threw for her shortly before she gave birth to her first child. "My husband and I decided we had to get out of there," Looby says. She laughs, briefly. "We came here."

I can't even smile with her. After Operation Rescue's "Summer of Mercy" success, anti-abortion leaders began planning a "Spring of Life" in Buffalo. "They'll never drive me out," my uncle Bart told his local paper when he learned of the upcoming event. "I'm not sure what they can do to me that hasn't been done-short of physical violence."

A year later, abortion doctors started getting shot. During the five years between the first murder and my uncle's, I became increasingly aware of the tension surrounding the issue. But for whatever reason, not once did I say to my uncle, who was becoming so depressed he began planning his own funeral, "Gee, Bart, doing abortions seems to be getting to you, and it's definitely getting very dangerous, so why not just quit?" Or just, "Bart, love you." Instead, assiduously marched in pro-choice rallies and considered anyone who opposed abortion a backward woman-hater-not that ever spoke to anyone who was pro-life.Since my uncle died, I've gotten to know a lot of people who are pro-life. Some are decent; others are backward. But, as Yitshak Rabin said, you make peace with enemies, not friends.

Now, in search of some peacemaking, I climb into my rented Pontiac and take off for South Dakota's capital, Pierre-which locals pronounce "peer"-the epicenter of the abortion debate. At 70 miles an hour on surgical-scar-straight roads, it's a nearly four-hour drive populated with more cows and buffalo than people. Over and over, wavy grassland turns into neat rows of corn and back again. The scene's serenity is marred only by billboards: among the most common are those for a place called wall drug, a pharmacy that sells things like mounted jackalopes (a dead rabbit with deer antlers); and those that herald the evils of abortion ("The gift of life, God's special gift!"), often accompanied by a portrait of what appears to be a smiling fetus, not a born baby, but I'm never sure.

Upon arriving in Pierre, I'm surprised to find state Rep. Roger Hunt, 68, prime sponsor of the abortion-ban bill, in a capitol room chock-full of massage therapists. It seems the state legislature recently passed a law requiring insurance for masseurs, and many don't think that's fair. Hunt gently admonishes them not to cast aspersions so wantonly.

By trade, Hunt is a business and contracts lawyer; serving in South Dakota's legislature is a part-time gig and only pays $6000 a year. He entered politics after retiring from the Navy with no agenda beyond "doing a little good." He got involved in fighting abortion when "some ladies" came to talk to him about abstinence in the early 1990s. Over the past 16 years, Hunt has introduced and supported legislation that, as he puts it, "chips away at Roe v. Wade"-with waiting periods and parental/spousal notification-and launched full-frontal assaults on the right to choose.

Because it's true, tell him that I understand his pro-life position. But I can't fathom why anyone-even people who think virginity until marriage is a worthwhile goal-would support a law that says sex education "may not [discuss] contraceptive drugs or methods" and requires telling students that "engaging in unlawful sexual activity may be a crime punishable by law." In a country where about 80 percent of people have sex before age 20-while the average marital age is 26-such legislation seems downright idiotic. But Hunt thinks teaching teens about birth control is society's way of saying "yes" to fornication, and that if we just stopped talking about sex to kids, a lot of them would quit having it. "When I was a teen," I tell Hunt, "I remember thinking, if I could just stop daydreaming about sex, I'd get so much done. Don't you remember that feeling? "No," he says. Hunt also believes the self-discipline of not having sex translates into the self-discipline of not doing drugs, not becoming involved in crime, and not dropping out of school. He is not alone.

Between 1994 and 2001, the federally funded National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health tracked over 14,000 American teens. The survey found that 21 percent of sexually active teens dropped out of high school, compared to just 8 percent of virgins. Outside America, however, these stats don't hold up: As many teenage Danes have intercourse as teenage Americans, yet their high-school graduation rate is 13 percent higher. And since 1975, Denmark has reduced its abortion rate by 40 percent; ours has increased more than 20 percent. What's the difference? Mainly, that sex education has been compulsory in Danish schools for 36 years, and birth control and emergency contraception (EC) are cheap and easy to get without a prescription: You walk into a drugstore, pay a nominal fee, and don't become pregnant.

It makes me wonder: does accessible contraception function like a seat belt, which protects me but doesn't make me drive crazily - or is it more like the overdraft protection on my checking account, which also protects me while occasionally enticing me to spend recklessly? What i decide is that something is seriously messed up about a country in which sex is as much a predictor of life derailment as drug use or poverty.

Hunt believes one of the reasons his abortion ban finally became law is due to the "scientific findings" from a state-funded task force that studied the issue. the science in the 71-page report, needless to say, is not universally accepted-particularly its controversial argument against abortion in the case of familial rape because incest may create "the brightest person in the family . . . sometimes in the genius range of intellect."

Whether a child comes out smart or stupid, tell hunt, it seems outrageously cruel to make a girl sexually abused by a family member have the baby. The practical issues alone are overwhelming: can she sue him for child support? he stop her from putting the child up for adoption? Hunt is silent for a minute. "From where I stand, there should be no exception. Because what is the greater offense? Taking a life is worse than rape."

Of course, most unintended pregnancies are not caused by vicious attacks. They're the result of kisses that get carried away-and, as Nancy and Jim found out, birth control that breaks.

By the time Nancy returns to Jim in the waiting room later that day, Dr. McCreary has performed 15 other abortions. Kristen Peterson, 28, a South Dakota native and teacher at a local middle school, cleans up after her. Married and super-careful with birth control, Peterson has never had an abortion and probably will never need one. But she's still willing to spend her summer vacation holding the hands of women in the clinic in an effort to stop her state from morphing into a place where she no longer feels at home. A few weeks back, Peterson attended a Planned Parenthood rally. The next day, her photo wound up in the local paper. "That wasn't smart," a school colleague told her.

Why? She wondered. Because I'm pro-choice? Because I'm any kind of political? Because I don't think women should be punished for being sexual beings? "Gosh," Peterson says, "it's getting bad here in South Dakota."

Outside, the late afternoon sun is painfully bright. In the clinic, Nancy looks pale but relieved. Jim just looks pale. They don't seem to notice the protesting grandmas, and the grandmas don't look up from their rosary beads to consider them.

I try to imagine if the world were just a little different-say, one U.S. Supreme Court justice different. What would Nancy and Jim be doing instead of leaving an abortion clinic? .Would they be preparing to give the baby up for adoption? Or would they, like the one time I thought I was unintentionally pregnant, find the notion of someone else raising their child less bearable than aborting it? Would Nancy be on the Internet figuring out how to end the pregnancy herself? Would she and Jim already be arguing over child support and custody? Or would they be down the street, at the state's only Wal-Mart, buying a crib? The last scenario is the one Leslee Unruh and Roger Hunt imagine, and it's one, I suspect, Jim sorely wanted to create. But it wasn't for Nancy. The clinic staff doesn't allow me to probe the depths of why, but I'm guessing Nancy already found out the hard way that a gurgling baby won't fix a troubled relationship, turn a hot-headed boy into a responsible man, or transform a woman into a joyful mother. "I just want to get on with my life," Nancy tells me. And that, for now, is her choice.

Find this article at: http://www.marieclaire.com/world-reports/news/latest/last-clinic

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