The leading figure of the decade’s militant antiabortion crusade, Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, was likewise careful to skirt the issue of women’s equality in his many public speeches. Restricting women’s freedom wasn’t part of his agenda, he assured the press; he was only trying “to save the mothers and their unborn babies.” But the story of Terry’s political evolution suggests a more complex and personal set of motives—in which the campaign for women’s rights figured prominently.
RANDALL TERRY: WHO WAS HE RESCUING?
“I was conceived out of wedlock. I could’ve been aborted. I hope and think that my parents wouldn’t have, but I’m just real glad they didn’t even have the choice.”
RANDALL TERRY
Randall Terry was raised in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, birthplace of Susan B. Anthony and launching pad for the nation’s first wave of feminism 150 years ago. But his relationship to feminist activism would involve more than the coincidence of geography and history. Terry was the eldest son in a family that, on his mother’s side, had produced politically vocal and self-determined women for three generations. From the start of the century, when his maternal great-grandmother disobeyed a parish priest and quit the Catholic church, the DiPasquale women had been outspoken, progressive, and feminist. “Randy Terry’s backlash against women’s rights may be more intimate than people realize,” says Dawn Marvin, former communications director of the Rochester chapter of Planned Parenthood—and Randall Terry’s aunt. “He was raised at the knee of feminists.”
Terry’s three aunts, Diane, Dawn, and Dale, agitated for civil rights, peace and, especially, women’s equality. During the ’70s, the sisters on the close-knit maternal side of the family launched a women’s welfare-rights program, the first women’s studies program at Buffalo State University, a women’s arts collective, a women’s talk show, a women’s consciousness-raising group, and a women’s health clinic. But more than any feminist issue, their cause was reproductive freedom. Diane wrote and spoke on campuses in favor of legal and safe abortions. Dawn stood in the rain for hours seeking signatures for a petition to legalize abortion in New York State. Dale put her picture on a citywide bus ad campaign for birth-control education.
The sisters’ activism was grounded in painful personal experience. Each of the four sisters had an unplanned pregnancy as an unwed teenager before abortion was legal; Randy, in fact, was the product of one of them. In one case, a condom failed. In another, a boyfriend said he’d pull out and didn’t. Whatever the “mistake,” the women paid. Dawn gave up a college scholarship and an arts career to marry a man she did not love, a man who smashed her jaw with his fists during her pregnancy. Diane gave up plans for an Ivy League education and spent the final months of her senior year in high school searching for an illegal abortion; she was five months pregnant by the time she found a willing “doctor” who took her $500, injected her with saline, and abandoned her in a stranger’s house. She nearly bled to death.
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“OUR DIEHARD enemies are almost totally feminist,” Terry says. A young man of twenty-nine with a baby face and gangly limbs, he is hunched on the curb outside Operation Rescue’s Binghamton, New York, headquarters. Behind him is “command-central,” a musty three-room suite with walls covered with water stains and photos of bloody fetuses. Inside one office cabinet, “Baby Choice” floats in a jar. This embalmed fetus often accompanies Terry to press conferences, dressed in swaddling clothes and laid out in a tiny shoe-box “coffin.”
“Radical feminism gave birth to child killing,” he says. “They were the ones out in the streets demanding their rights—NARAL, NOW, with their lies and their false propaganda that the media lapped up obediently and spewed back out to the American people. Lies.” But then, most reporters are “tools of NOW,” too, he says. “Radical feminism, of course, has vowed to destroy the traditional family unit, hates motherhood, hates children for the most part, promotes lesbian activity.” He offers an example: Margaret Sanger, birth control pioneer and founder of Planned Parenthood. She was a “whore,” he says. “She was an adulteress, and slept all over the place, all over the world, with all kinds of people.” It’s not just abortion he opposes; Terry says he would like to ban all contraception—and, of course, call a halt to all premarital sex. He says he intends to deliver his own daughter to the wedding altar with her virginity intact.
A few hours later, Terry heads home. His wife, Cindy, a thin woman with almost translucent skin, meets him at the door, their three-year-old daughter, Faith, clinging to her side. “I told her you don’t talk,” Terry tells his wife, jerking his thumb at me. She reports that the lawn mower won’t start. He gives the ignition cord a few yanks and, when the motor kicks in, turns the job over to her. He retires to the living room couch and, propping up his feet, recalls with a nostalgic sigh that it was this very day a year ago that he reached his media zenith: “I would have been in a hotel resting, getting ready for the limo to pick us up and take us to the ‘Morton Downey, Jr.’ show.”
His rise to “national media star,” as he puts it, was meteoric; a few years before the Downey limo arrived, he was selling jalopies in an upstate used-car lot. As the lawn mower bellows outside, Terry recounts the critical events in his young life that led to sudden fame.
At sixteen, he lit out for California to “find” himself and become “a rock and roll star.” A talented pianist and guitarist, an accelerated honors student just four months from graduation, he dropped out in the winter of 1976 and hitchhiked west. “I was a young rebel,” he recalls. “I was born out of time, almost,” a “holdout” of the ’60s.
He was also fleeing a tension-filled home. His father, Michael Terry, was an unhappy schoolteacher, a gifted classical vocalist whose singing career had evaporated after he dropped out of music college and then entered a shotgun wedding at twenty. The marriage was a difficult one and Michael Terry often turned his violent temper on his eldest son. The night before Randy left home, his father beat him up.
Terry never reached California and the trip was a disappointment; 1976 turned out to be a little late for the quintessential “on-the-road” experience. “I wanted to know answers,” he says. But “in the ’70s, people just wanted to get high.” He got as far as Galveston, Texas, where he camped out on the beach, smoking dope and playing air guitar, until a vagrant stole his backpack and all his possessions. He returned home, clutching a Gideon Bible he had acquired on the way.
Back in a suburb of Rochester, he took the only job he could find, scooping ice cream at the Three Sisters, a local snack stand. From time to time, a lay minister from the nearby Elim Bible Institute would stop in to testify about Christ. Finally one night, Terry was converted. Vowing to become a religious leader, he quit the ice-cream stand and enrolled at Elim to train for the ministry.
But his diploma from Elim, an unaccredited school, didn’t help him in his search for even a decent job. He sold tires and flipped burgers at McDonald’s. During the recession, he was laid off twice. Married by then, he couldn’t afford a home—he and Cindy had to live, like charity cases, in a vacant church trailer. When he needed to pay medical and sometimes even grocery bills, he had to borrow money from Cindy’s mother. While Terry would later blame working women for “the destruction of the traditional family unit,” it was his wife’s job at a florist shop that helped the young Terry family through this lean period. It was not until Terry started Operation Rescue, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations started rolling in, that he was able to make a living wage—and send his wife home.
The “vision” for Operation Rescue, he recalls, came to him in a prayer meeting in the fall of 1983. It was a “three-point plan”: blockade clinics, counsel women against abortion, and provide homes for unwed mothers. He led several clinic raids, but his campaign didn’t register on the media monitors until July 1988, when he descended on Atlanta and a captive national press corps, which was in town for the Democratic National Convention. In t
he week-long siege that followed, 134 protesters were arrested, Terry “made the networks,” and his star status was all but guaranteed.
As Terry arrives at the apex of his story, Cindy returns to the house, her mowing finished, to prepare the family supper. After a while, she wanders into the living room. “I told her you don’t like media people, so she shouldn’t expect to get any comment from you,” Terry tells his wife. But Cindy seems willing enough to talk. She tells how she met Randy at Elim, where she was “just studying to be a better Christian.” She wasn’t attracted to him at first, she says, but she had learned in her Christian Womanhood class that “blind love” can lead to “bad marriages.” Randy, on the other hand, says he was drawn to Cindy at once—he liked that “she was quiet.”
Cindy Dean grew up in Manchester, a small town in upstate New York. She worked as a waitress and barmaid at the local Sheraton Hotel, but she yearned for more. “I didn’t want my life to be a total failure,” she says. So at twenty-three, she enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, “one of the best cooking schools in the United States,” she points out. She was one of a few female students in training to be chefs; she was breaking into “a male-dominated profession,” she says proudly. “I was really into it. I had real excellent grades because, you know, I wanted to make something of my life.” She began working at a French restaurant in Rochester, creating fancy pastries and soon managing the entire kitchen staff. Then she met a group of born-again Christians. They eventually converted her—and convinced her she should quit school.
“We need to wrap it up,” Randy says, interrupting her story. “I want to eat.” They move to the dining room, where he sits at the head of the table and Cindy serves. He lectures her for having “burned the beans.” After supper, he retires to the living room with a video of the TV movie about Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Guts and Glory. As Cindy clears the dishes, she confides that it was she who first had the idea to picket in front of the clinics. She had great difficulty getting pregnant—it took five years—and she came to resent women who so effortlessly conceived yet aborted. By herself, she took to marching in front of the Southern Tier Women’s Services, the local family-planning clinic in Binghamton. With a handmade placard in her hands, she called out to women, “Don’t kill your baby. I’ll take it. I can’t have a baby.” Alex Aitken, a clinic employee at the time, recalls of Cindy, “In the beginning, she was a fairly strong personality. She would approach anyone.”
One day, though, Randy appeared at her side. Soon, Aitken recalls, Cindy “just disappeared from the scene.” In her place, Terry patrolled the parking lot, literally throwing his weight against car doors to stop women from entering the clinic. Once he found out the identity of a patient and burst into the waiting room, screaming her name over and over like the hero in The Graduate. Another time, clinic workers recall, he posed as a clinic “counselor” and led a sixteen-year-old girl to what he claimed was “our other office,” actually his own office suite. There, he showed the teenager gory films about the supposed aftermath of abortion—infertility, madness, and death—until the frightened girl led.
By 1985, Terry had organized a group of church supporters, and they were making daily visits to the clinic. They sprayed the door locks with Krazy Glue and followed the employees to and from work. One day, they stormed the clinic, smashed the furniture, ripped out the phones, and locked themselves in the counseling room. The police had to break the door down with a crowbar. During still another protest, one of the Operation Rescue activists, a young man, leaped in a window and punched a five-months-pregnant woman in the stomach. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance—and miscarried three weeks later.
Terry never got very far with the other two points in his “three-point plan.” By 1989, Operation Rescue had set up only one counseling service for young and needy pregnant women, the Crisis Pregnancy Center. It showed intimidating antiabortion films to the teenagers it lured with a Yellow Pages ad promising free pregnancy tests. The day I visited, the only real service it offered needy mothers was a few packets of infant formula and two hand-me-down cots. As for the homes for unwed mothers, Terry set up only one, the House of Life in Pennsylvania. It took in only four pregnant girls before shutting down. The reason? The couple operating the home announced that they were too busy preparing for their own baby’s birth.
THE LEGACY OF THE ANTIABORTION MOVEMENT
The antiabortion warriors were the backlash’s most blatant and violent agents. At their instigation, between 1977 and 1989, seventy-seven family-planning clinics were torched or bombed (in at least seven instances, during working hours, with employees and patients inside), 117 were targets of arson, 250 received bomb threats, 231 were invaded, and 224 vandalized. With time, the attacks only accelerated. In April 1991, the numbers of bombings and arson attacks had already exceeded the figure for the full year of 1990. Clinic patients were harassed and even kidnapped; staff members received death threats at sixty-seven family-planning centers and endured assault and battery attacks at forty-seven centers. Antiabortion arsonists blinded a clinic technician with chemicals before setting fire to the Concerned Women’s Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. A staff doctor at another clinic was maimed when her morning newspaper was booby-trapped. The executive director of Planned Parenthood in Minnesota was struck repeatedly and choked. At a Youngstown, Ohio, clinic, a worker suffered a concussion when twenty-five antiabortion picketers stampeded the building. The employees of still other clinics were beaten, taken hostage, hit by protesters’ cars, and, in one case, even the clinic director’s dog was poisoned.
The story of the campaign against abortion in the years since Roe is a well-known one: the more than fifty bills proposed to restrict Roe the very first year of its existence; the 1974 effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning it; the successful 1976 Hyde Amendment blocking federal funding for abortions; the increasingly active role played by the Republican presidents of the ’80s; the subsequent hundreds of legislative maneuvers that led to prohibitive rules and consent and notification regulations in more than thirty states; the countless legal challenges to Roe, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 Webster decision—ironically, on the eve of Independence Day—that upheld state restrictions on abortion. And finally, the 1991 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed the government to prohibit federally funded clinics from even speaking about abortion when counseling pregnant women.
But, in spite of its high profile, the campaign never became a mass movement. One national poll after another clearly demonstrated that the majority of Americans supported Roe v. Wade. In fact, the Webster ruling only served to increase the pro-choice margin. A majority now favored Roe in every region of the country, in every age group, in both political parties, and in the Catholic church. Only one group of Americans claimed a majority that wanted to see that court decision overturned: white followers of TV evangelists.
The unwavering public support for Roe only makes sense in the wider context of American history; the landmark ruling is simply a return to status quo. The right to an abortion—practiced in one form or another since colonial times—had never been restricted until the last half of the late 19th century. And not until then did aborting a pregnancy before “quickening” (several months after conception) even assume a moral taint. As birth control historian Kristin Luker observes, “Ironically, then, the much maligned 1973 Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, which divided the legal regulation of abortion by trimesters, was much more in line with the traditional treatment of abortion than most Americans appreciate.”
In 1800, abortion was legal in every state and popular opinion on it largely neutral. It was only after the midcentury rise of the women’s rights movement that abortion became a battleground. As women pressed for such simple family-planning reliefs as “voluntary mother-hood”—which proposed that wives be free to refuse sex occasionally for health reasons—doctors, legislators, journalists, and clergymen countered with a far
more extreme campaign against all forms of birth control. Suddenly, the New York Times was crammed with stories deploring abortion as “the evil of the age.” Suddenly, the American Medical Association (then a fledgling organization that was trying to establish its credentials by putting midwives and other female abortion providers out of business) was launching a massive public relations campaign against this “criminal” and “irresponsible” practice, even offering an annual prize for the best antiabortion book. Suddenly, clergymen were declaring abortion a grave sin. Suddenly, “purity” crusaders were storming abortion clinics and dragging their mostly female operators to court. By the end of the 19th century, this backlash against reproductive rights would result in a federal ban on all birth control distribution (upheld until well into this century) and the outlawing of abortion (except to save a woman’s life) in every state.
Perhaps it is inevitable that even the most modest efforts by women to control their fertility spark a firestorm of opposition. All of women’s aspirations—whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination—ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas—and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash. During the feminist revival of the early 20th century, the birth control movement that Margaret Sanger launched enjoyed far broader appeal than any other plank of the women’s rights campaign, cutting across class and race lines. As women’s rights and peace activist Crystal Eastman wrote in 1918 of her feminist contemporaries, “Whether we are the special followers of Alice Paul, or Ruth Law, or Ellen Key, or Olive Schreiner, we must all be followers of Margaret Sanger.”