28 MAY 02: EVIL CHRISTIANS
Anti-abortionists try
new weapon
Pro-life protestors
use cameras, raise legal Issues, lawsuits
By Yochi J. Dreazen
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DENVER, May 28 As soon
as he saw the blue minivan turning into the parking lot
of Planned Parenthoods
small abortion clinic here, Kenneth Scott grabbed his
digital camera, clambered
up his rickety metal ladder and started snapping
pictures. Youll have nightmares
about this day the rest of your life, he
bellowed, photographing
the blond woman gingerly leaving the minivan. Then he
turned his camera to her
escort. Your sin wont be hidden or forgotten, he
screamed.
MR. SCOTT is doing his best to make sure of that. Within hours of his
photo expedition early this
month, he was home downloading the pictures onto his
computer so he could e-mail
them to Neal Horsley, a fellow activist in
Carrollton, Ga. Mr. Horsley
runs a Web site devoted to deterring homicidal
mothers from seeking abortions
by posting photos of women seen entering
abortion clinics. New pictures
he gets are often on the Web within days.
The site, Abortioncams.com, which Mr. Horsley claims gets almost two
million hits a month, marks
a tactical shift by the antiabortion movement.
Increasingly, protesters
are targeting women who seek abortions, not just
doctors who perform them.
The weapon of choice: the camera.
Shame enough women into realizing that eternal damnation awaits them if
they murder their baby and
the abortionists wont have any work to do, says Mr.
Scott, whose aging brown
van bears a small handwritten sign reading Smile!
Youre on Christiangallery.com!
(Its another Horsley Web site.)
Mr. Scott and his wife, Jo, are part of a loose-knit network of several
dozen activists from 24
states who send photos to Mr. Horsleys and a handful of
other Web sites. In Portland,
Ore., an affable man named Paul deParrie takes
photos of women entering
clinics for Mr. Horsley as well as for his own
antiabortion site, Portlandporcupine.com.
Mr. Horsley hopes to have contributing
photographers in every state
by the end of the year. He also says he hopes to
start adding the womens
names and addresses. Some postings already show
license-plate numbers.
The tactic poses difficult legal questions that courts are just beginning
to tackle. Last year, an
Illinois woman whose photo and medical records were
posted online sued the activists
who took the photo and the man who ran the Web
site, a friend of Mr. Horsleys.
Her pending damage suit says the posting
violated her privacy and
subjected her to humiliation and potential harm.
A right to privacy doesnt appear in the Constitution or the Bill of
Rights, but for the past
37 years, courts have increasingly held that Americans
have a right to keep many
details of their lives secret. Among issues the courts
could someday have to weigh
with regard to this tactic is whether women going in
for abortions lose any of
this protection because theyre in a public place-or,
to the contrary, whether
entering a clinic for a medical procedure affords
additional privacy protection.
Courts may have to consider whether the Web sites
implicitly threaten violence
against the women. And theyll certainly have to
weigh the claim of the activists
that they are journalists whose work is
protected by the First Amendment
right to free speech.
This is a new area for the law, and theres no easy answer based on past
cases that makes this a
slam dunk in either direction, says Jonathan Zittrain,
co-director of Harvard Law
Schools Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
In Denver, a Planned Parenthood clinic set in a low-slung gray building
in a poor residential area
is the site of a strange game of cat and mouse. When
protesters first began carrying
still and video cameras here last summer, clinic
employees strung tall gray
curtains alongside the parking lot to block the view
from the sidewalk. The protesters
brought in ladders. Then Planned Parenthoods
volunteer escorts began
carrying huge umbrellas to try to shield the womens
faces.
Stan Roebuck, Planned Parenthoods security director for the Colorado
region, says the presence
of the cameras ratchets up the tension for women who
are already under extreme
stress. To Kate Michelman, president of the National
Abortion and Reproductive
Rights Action League, This is like drawing a
bulls-eye on the backs
of these women and inviting those who are irrationally
zealous to take action.
The activists say theyre doing nothing to incite or
threaten violence.
One California mother of two says she was shocked when she was told by
a
friend that her photo was
on Mr. Horsleys site. Getting an abortion was the
most difficult and personal
decision Ive ever had to make, says the woman,
requesting anonymity because
she doesnt want friends and family to know she had
one. I couldnt believe
that some stranger had the nerve to share it with the
world.
FIGHTING BACK
One woman is fighting back in court. She suffered a cervical tear while
a
patient at the Hope Clinic
in Granite City, Ill., and needed to be rushed to a
hospital. As clinic staffers
wheeled her toward a waiting minivan, one of a
group of antiabortion protesters
outside, Daniel Michael of nearby Highland,
Ill., saw what was happening
and snapped a picture of her. Within days, her
picture as well as her medical
records-obtained through an unknown source-were
on a Web site called Missionaries
to the Unborn. It didnt name her but included
her age, the name of her
tiny hometown, the fact that she was married and the
age and sex of her only
child.
Identified as Jane Doe in court papers, the woman alleges the photo
and records revealed her
identity, violating her privacy and opening her to
potential public humiliation
and physical violence. She said in a deposition in
state court in Edwardsville.,
Ill., that she feared an extremist could try to
track her down and harm
her. She declined to comment for this article.
The defendants include Mr. Michael, his wife, Angela, and Stephen Wetzel,
who runs the Web site. The
suit also names the hospital, recently renamed
Gateway Medical Center,
for failing to make sure her records stayed
confidential. Mr. Michael
and Mr. Wetzel say the records came to them
anonymously.
The woman is seeking more than $400,000, mostly in punitive damages.
State court judge George
Moran issued a temporary restraining order last summer
ordering removal of her
photo and medical records from Missionaries to the
Unborn and another Web site.
The case is pending.
Mr. Wetzel says the woman has no reason to fear for her safety. Nobodys
going to go after a girl
for getting an abortion, he says. Theyre as much a
victim as the babies are.
Mr. Michael says the medical records shouldnt have
been put online. He says
the woman has a right to privacy but adds that it
wasnt violated because
the photos were blurry and the records were redacted to
exclude her name and address.
This wasnt meant to harm her it was just to
let the world know what
happens at that clinic, he says. The hospital didnt
return a call seeking comment.
One tough legal question likely to arise as these tactics continue is
whether posting womens
photos on a site such as Mr. Horsleys which likens
abortion to murder and speaks
of divine punishment for patients and their
doctors amounts to a threat
against their safety. A person making such a claim
could have a high bar to
clear. Courts have generally found that plaintiffs
alleging threats to their
safety must show the defendant directly threatened to
do violence against them.
In a 1982 Supreme Court case, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, black
activists working to enforce
a civil-rights boycott against several white-owned
businesses in Mississippi
stood outside and wrote down the names of blacks who
continued to shop there.
The names were read aloud at a public meeting and
published in a newspaper,
leading to several assaults and arsons. Later, an
organizer was quoted as
saying that if he caught anyone going in any of them
racist stores, were gonna
break your damn neck. The high court said the
statement was constitutionally
protected because there was no evidence the
organizer had authorized
a specific act of violence or threatened to commit one
himself.
Mr. Zittrain and other legal experts say that current privacy laws dont
appear to protect a person
from being photographed while in a public place, but
that women could potentially
sue the photographers or the sites for intentional
infliction of emotional
stress or illegal intimidation.
A SUIT IN OREGON
The women could benefit from a recent appellate-court decision that
touched on another Web site
Mr. Horsley runs, Nuremberg Files, which carries
abortion providers names,
addresses and photos and crosses out their names when
theyve been killed. It
was cited in a lawsuit against others-a group called the
American Coalition of Life
Activists-as evidence of intimidation.
Planned Parenthood, several doctors and a clinic in Portland, Ore., filed
the suit in federal court
in Portland. It alleged the Coalition had incited
violence and broken a 1994
federal law that allows doctors and clinic workers to
sue antiabortion protesters
they believe have tried to intimidate them into no
longer doing the procedure.
In 1999, a jury awarded the plaintiffs nearly $107 million, virtually all
punitive damages. Two years
later, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 9th Circuit
in San Francisco overturned the verdict, saying that
though the site and some
of the groups posters used inflammatory language and
imagery, they didnt contain
any explicit threats of physical harm to an
individual.
But this month the full 9th Circuit reversed that decision and said that
the activists had made
statements to intimidate the physicians, reasonably
foreseeing that physicians
would interpret the statements as a serious
expression of … intent
to harm them. The court said the doctors had begun
wearing bulletproof vests
as a direct result of the posters and Web site, and
concluded the protesters
activities amounted to a true threat and not
protected speech. The activists
promise to appeal, and many observers expect
the Supreme Court to take
the case because of the thorny questions of free
speech and abortion access
it raises.
Mr. Scott, the picture-taking end of the Scott-Horsley operation, says
he
had a personal experience
with abortion 23 ago, when he got a girlfriend
pregnant and paid for her
to have an abortion. Later he married, and he says
that after his second marriage
fell apart he became a born-again Christian. Now
he spends much of his free
time protesting at abortion clinics across the
country. He met his third
wife, Jo, at an antiabortion protest near the 1996
Republican convention in
San Diego.
The two, devout Grace Christians, play the part of bad cop and good cop;
Mr. Scott screams at the
women about hell and damnation, while Mrs. Scott
quietly approaches cars
pulling into the clinic to offer women ultrasound tests,
financial help or advice
about adoption.
One afternoon earlier this month in Denver, Mr. Scott yelled at a woman
in a green jacket hurriedly
walking toward the clinic doors with a tall man in a
red T-shirt. Dont kill
your baby, he said. Youll always wonder if it was a
boy or a girl.
His words had the desired effect: The man turned to swear at Mr. Scott
and raised his middle finger,
while the woman pivoted to see what the commotion
was. Mr. Scott, wearing
a placard around his neck reading Life begins at
conception and ends at Planned
Parenthood, quickly took several photos.
By the end of the day, he had snapped more than 90 pictures in all, the
scenes ranging from the
confrontational to the prosaic. In one photo, a woman in
a green jacket was running
toward the facility while her male companion, a tall
man with a pony tail and
goatee, raised his fist at the camera. In another, two
women stepped out of a parked
car. The womens faces were all clearly visible.
At home in a suburb of Boulder, Colo., Ms. Scott hooked the camera to a
desktop computer in her
basement and transferred the photos to an online
picture-sharing service
called Ofoto. Minutes later, they were on their way to
Mr. Horsley in Georgia.
There, in a home office cluttered with tripods, guitars,
an overflowing bookcase
and photos of his college-age children, Mr. Horsley soon
began downloading the photos
into a computer.
Getting them online takes time. The first step is choosing, sometimes
from as many as 500 pictures
sent him in a week, he says. Mr. Horsley says he is
a journalist trying to tell
a story, and wants to avoid using pictures with
poses or expressions too
similar to others he has posted on the site. He also
resizes the photos and edits
their color and lighting, though he says the
Scotts photos rarely need
much retouching. Theyre pros, he says.
From my point of view, Mr. Horsley says, this is a news report that
has the ability to send
a message. I want images that capture the look on a
womans face as she goes
to a place where babies are being killed.
After picking the photos, the final step is to make duplicate versions
of
each photo, including a
miniature that will appear on a Web page full of other
shots from each state and
a full-size image that viewers can access by clicking
on the small one. The whole
process takes about 15 minutes per picture.
Maintaining the site costs about $10,000 a year. Mr. Horsley pays for
much of it through his day
job as a computer and Internet consultant. He also
gets donations from other
antiabortion activists. He tries to update the site
every day, and says hes
always looking for new photographers. Get out there to
your local butchertorium
with your zoom lenses and get those cameras rolling,
he writes on his Web site.
Point and click.
Arthur Magazine 