Apologists For

In early May, Joe Scheidler, head of the Pro-Life Action League and hardly a moderate in antiabortion circles, sat down at Sauganash Pancake House in Chicago to reason with some colleagues. Over mushroom omelets and buttermilk pancakes, the little group revisited a topic that had split a larger meeting of antiabortion protest leaders the day before at a nearby hotel: Is the killing of abortion doctors "justifiable homicide"? Scheidler says he argued that it wasn't. What if a doctor was killed, he asked, just as he was on his way to tender his resignation -- to quit and sin no more? Well, answered one of his breakfast partners earnestly, if that happened, "God would understand."

Scheidler refuses to identify the man other than to say he was not Paul Hill, who also attended the Chicago conference and who now stands accused of murdering Pensacola, Florida, doctor John Bayard Britton and his unarmed escort, James Barrett. But future inquisitors may not let it rest at that. Last week the FBI initiated a 90-day preliminary investigation into a suspected violent conspiracy among pro-life activists. If the investigation discovers additional evidence of criminal activity, a full-fledged inquiry could follow.

The Chicago meeting will undoubtedly be near the top of the bureau's investigative priorities. Though the 60-person conference did not include leaders of the mainstream pro-life groups, with their millions of sympathizers, it did attract the movement's radical wing, whose adherents make up the majority of clinic protesters. Scheidler and other attendees report that after nearly two days of debate, barely half those present specifically repudiated Hill's extremist views. Adds Scheidler: "It wasn't just justifiable homicide; it was ((support for)) violence, bombing and arson . . . I thought, 'Wow! The movement has gone through some kind of transition.' "

The larger groups represented at the meeting -- notably Operation Rescue and its more sizable spin-offs -- seemed at least superficially resistant to that transition; they require that members sign a pledge of nonviolence. Yet Fred Hobbs, a special agent with the Florida department of law enforcement who has been investigating antiabortion violence for over a year, notes, "We feel that sometimes these pledges are ((merely)) a means to avoid prosecution under criminal and civil RICO ((federal racketeering)) statutes." In addition, during the meeting more militant pro-lifers founded a new group, the American Coalition of Life Activists, at least partly out of frustration with their colleagues' perceived timidity.

Defenders of justifiable homicide make a simple, if scary, argument: if abortion is murder, then any means to prevent it -- even murder -- is morally justified. Says Roman Catholic priest David Trosch, perhaps the most vocal proponent of this view: "If a person with a shotgun happened upon the scene of massive butchering of innocent children, and failed to act with deadly force, as quickly as possible, he would be committing a grave offense against God." Trosch's public eagerness for the death of abortion doctors, as well as their staffs and officials of Planned Parenthood, has caused the Archbishop of his Mobile, Alabama, parish to relieve him of his pastoral duties.