Working Paper 93-8, August 29, 1993(1)
By Linda Jourgensen
Former Boulder Mayor and County Commissioner
(1) This paper is an edited transcript of a talk given by Linda Jourgensen for the Intractable Conflict/Constructive Confrontation Project on April 10, 1993. Funding for this Project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the University of Colorado. All ideas presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Consortium, the University, or Hewlett Foundation. For more information, contact the Conflict Resolution Consortium, Campus Box 327, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0327. Phone: (303) 492-1635, e-mail: crc@cubldr.colorado.edu.
© 1993. Conflict Resolution Consortium. Do not reprint without permission.
The conflict over abortion is one which differs from almost any other confrontation, with the possible exception of homosexuality vs. heterosexuality. The abortion conflict has an enormous amount of religious fervor attached to it. The short tracts I have read written by anti-abortionists, such as Storming the Gates of Hell, by Paul Lindstrom are very, very strong religious statements. These statements really do categorize the other side as being morally corrupt and evil. One statement talks of abortion as murder and states that anti-abortionists have God's injunction which is above any court of law. These issues will never go away. There is no real accommodation possible with that point of view.
Those who are pro-choice look at things in a similar, intractable way. However, the pro-choice advocates seem to understand that we are a nation of laws, not a nation of individual points of view. It is that, they feel, which will make their cause a successful one, namely, that accessibility to abortion is the right of every woman. Their approach uses legal and political institutions and processes, namely, that accessibility to abortion is the right of every woman. Their approach uses legal and political institutions and processes. For example, the Boulder City Council passed an ordinance providing an eight-foot buffer zone around the entrance to any medical facility: it is both political and legal. The Colorado General Assembly during its 1993 session passed the same law.
My most significant contact with this particular conflict occurred when an Operation Rescue group came to demonstrate in Boulder on Saturday, April 29, 1989. I was then mayor of Boulder. Three days before the demonstration, the gag rule had been handed down by the Supreme Court, which gave the Bush Administration and it supporters reason to think that this was the beginning of the end of Roe vs. Wade. Because of this ruling, Operation Rescue was very energized, wanting to take advantage of this decision.
Early on, Jerry Hoover, the City Attorney, was masterful at meeting with the Operation Rescue leadership in Denver and finding out exactly what their parameters were to be. He asked such questions as: "What kind of people were they bringing?" "What were their expectations?" "Did they want to want to go to jail?" (They didn't.) "How did they feel about going to jail and having their children put in social services for four days?" (They didn't want this.) "What about handcuffs?" (No.) "What about batons?" (No!) When they arrived, the game plan was fairly well set. Hoover also did a lot of research into demonstrations against abortion clinics held in other places.
The City Council and I, as Mayor, did not have much to say about any of the above things. But, a community standard had already been set. Ever since the Vietnam War and later the CIA recruitment confrontations, we have really tried to have a low-key approach. The police are not too active, not too present, and certainly not violent in their confrontations with demonstrators.
The police chief's first thought on the Operation Rescue demonstration was to close the clinics so there would be no one to demonstrate against. Of course, the clinics' directors did not agree. For them that would have meant that Operation Rescue would win without having to do anything. So, from the very beginning it was understood that the clinics were not going to close down. The clinics' directors did agree to modify their procedures. The abortions would occur early in the day if any were scheduled. If that was not workable, depending upon which clinic was hit, patients would be transferred to the other clinic. So both sides negotiated their tactics to some extent, which I suspect, was useful.
While Operation Rescue was willing to discuss various methods of behavior, they were not willing to say which clinic they were going to target. They used a lot of deceptive tactics to obfuscate which clinic site they would target. But when the protestors arrived that morning, they went directly to the Boulder Valley Women's Clinic. The newspaper accounts of the day say there were about 500 demonstrators. Two hundred crossed the picket lines--the police ribbon and barricades--immediately. The other three hundred stayed behind with well-numbered hymn books, which had words written in them particularly for the occasion. These 300 demonstrators sang in the background.
I spent the entire day at the demonstration. Hoover saw the three leaders as soon as they crossed over the police barrier. They were arrested immediately and took away. This demoralized the remaining members of the group. Father Fisher was still there, as were a couple of other people who served as surrogate leaders. But they did not hold the same power as the original leadership.
As demonstrators started over the barrier, rather than confronting them with batons, (which is what it would have taken to stop them) the police helped them over. The demonstrators then went and sat in front of the clinic doors, blocking the entrance. After that, Father Fisher mingled with the group, as did the two new leaders. The three of them negotiated with the police about how the arrests were to take place.
Once the demonstrators sat down in front of the clinic doors, the police started to move wheel chairs forward. They used wheel chairs to move one demonstrator after another onto a bus. The bus then took the demonstrators to the Boulder County Justice Center. This action consumed the next three or four hours. Using Homer's terminology, no one got in anyone's face; it was a far cry from a "primal scream" confrontation.3 It was very methodical, boring, and certainly not confrontational.
The leadership who had been arrested and taken to the Justice Center, were charged and released. But they were told that if they went back to the demonstration, they would be put in jail. Other demonstrators were released after they had given their name and had their picture taken. If they refused to give their name or any one went back to the clinic to further demonstrate after having given their name, they were told that future bus loads of demonstrators would be taken off to who knows where and left.
This demonstration was very different from the one in Denver. There the police used horses and dogs to control the protestors, which precipitated a disaster. A 14 year-old young woman trying to enter the clinic was shoved down by a demonstrator. At that point, the police on horses started to move in to separate the crowd. After that it was pandemonium. All that was really accomplished by this use of force was that the demonstration ended an hour earlier than scheduled and four more people were arrested. It was sort of like driving 75 mph and getting some place 15 minutes earlier than driving the speed limit. This was similar to the effect of an even stronger use of force used in San Diego.
The demonstrations in Denver and San Diego did not have the same quality of tolerance that the Boulder demonstration had. In fact, from the beginning the city attorney, Hoover, and the police decided that the city's tactics would be tolerance and gentleness. The hard line would be used when the demonstrators were in court. Basically, the method worked as planned.
The agreements developed before the demonstration, facilitated by Hoover, helped to keep the demonstration from escalating into a more violent confrontation. Also, counterprotestors (such as the membership of NOW) had been discouraged from staging a counterdemonstration. As a result, there were only about 35-40 counterdemonstrators and there was no real confrontation between NOW activists, other counterdemonstrators and the Operation Rescue demonstrators.
Although this is almost impossible to believe, it appeared to me that there was actually respect for the individuals who were there as persons, though not for the ideas that they carried with them. That is essential to preserve dignity and to eliminate raw, escalating anger. There was no screaming of insults back and forth at all--not once--in the whole situation. After the demonstration, the police received letters from the Operation Rescue demonstrators saying how gently they had been treated by the police. There was a fair amount of chivalry that went on throughout the process, there was a kind of gentleness and tolerance--a recognition of the need for this to happen. The demonstrators, counterdemonstrators, police, and onlookers at times seemed to be part of a tableau which had a beginning and, mercifully, an end--an end, by the way, which was negotiated mostly on the premise that the protesters could claim that no abortions took place at least on their watch and that hunger and the need to use the bathroom were looming ever larger. It ended six hours after it began.
After the demonstration, the newspapers reported that both the clinic operator, Leslie Durgin, and the Operation Rescue leaders thought they had "won" in this confrontation. The Operation Rescue leaders said they had prevented abortions from being performed. Leslie Durgin said that no patient was denied her appointment. So both sides felt they had achieved what they needed to achieve.
The surprise in this situation came to the 124 Operation Rescue demonstrators who were arrested when they got to court. Many of them told the judge that they felt that they had been lied to by the leadership of Operation Rescue. The leadership had evidently convinced them that the fine would be only about $10, but it was much more than that. The fine was devised by a judge whose felt that these people believed that breaking the law was the right thing to do. Therefore, he felt that a costly fine was justified. The City Attorney and the City Council looked at it from the point of view of the expense of this demonstration to the City of Boulder. They did not expect the taxpayer to foot the bill.
I think the procedure--even the court procedure--was very humane. The Operation Rescue's object had been to clog the courts, but it really didn't work out that way. At first all the arrested demonstrators wanted to represent themselves individually in court, which would have given them the opportunity, if the case was tried, to make long arguments for themselves. But the judge consulted with the Operation Rescue leadership and got an agreement that if that happened and the arguments got to be very, very repetitive, he was prepared to simply cut them off. Then the judge put together a list of attorneys who were willing to do pro bono trial work and he hired other judges to help with the cases. There were a number of trials, but these were held at no cost to the city. The cost was kept down because there was an agreement that the trials could be held anywhere, not just in municipal court. So the trials were held in schools and other public buildings, enabling the city to hold 20 at one time. The fines averaged $375; although one judge fined the demonstrators much less. Still, it was a far cry from $10 and was especially shocking to the demonstrators since they did not expect to be held financially responsible.
Hoover feels that this kind of abortion demonstration is most likely a thing of the past. His feeling is that Operation Rescue has lost a great deal of their middle-ground protestors, and what is left is a fringe group. This fringe wants to create an understanding of their position, and they will do whatever it takes. They will get arrested. They will stay in jail as long as they need to, so long as someone will pay their fine and take care of their families. According to Time magazine, in Florida, where Dr. Gunn was killed, there is a training camp being set up by Operation Rescue to train a hard-core group in harassing and stalking techniques. This is far different from what we saw here.
We cannot really say the success of this demonstration was solely attributable to the process. The fact that the demonstration did not escalate into violence had a great deal to do with the quality of the demonstrators. There was also a sense that a real violent confrontation was not appropriate here. In this particular demonstration, Operation Rescue was able to operate basically within the law by using orderly citizens who were willing to rally for a day or two for a cause they believed in. The orderliness of this group, in fact, contributed greatly to the demonstration being a constructive rather than a destructive confrontation.
I read some interesting comments in articles, particularly after the death of Dr. Gunn. Ellen Goodman suggested that more doctors should follow their own conscience. Many ob-gyn doctors say that they are pro-choice, but they don't perform abortions. It is time, she said, that medical schools improve their training in the procedure, and more doctors perform it, thereby limiting the danger for any one doctor. An ethicist wrote that few would claim that abortion is a desirable outcome from any pregnancy. What is desirable is that there be fewer unwanted pregnancies, particularly among teenagers. Maybe, over time, the general population will see the wisdom of owning up to the reality that teenagers are sexual beings, that sensitive education is important, and that options for preventing pregnancy are available and all options are better than abortion. The 'morning after pill' once tested and available in this country also has the potential to limit or even end the existence of the easily attacked abortion clinic. Also, proposed anti-stalking laws that carry prison sentences and recognize extreme harassing tactics as unlawful will either limit protests to well-trained terrorist activities or uneventful get-togethers such as the 1989 event in Boulder and the media punch will evaporate.
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2 Lindstrom, Paul D. Storming the Gates of Hell (Arlington Heights, Illinois: Christian Liberty Press, 1988).
3 See Homer Page's CRC Working Paper, "Constructive Demonstration Strategies" (WP 93-10).