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History of Operation Rescue

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Based on Wikipedia: History of Operation Rescue

In the summer of 1991, a small city in Kansas became the unlikely epicenter of America's abortion wars. Over six weeks, more than 2,600 people were arrested in Wichita—not for violence, but for sitting down. They blocked clinic doors, filled adjacent streets, and ultimately packed a football stadium for a rally featuring the televangelist Pat Robertson. The "Summer of Mercy," as organizers called it, represented the peak of a movement that had perfected the art of civil disobedience—borrowing tactics directly from the playbook of Martin Luther King Jr., but deploying them for a cause that divided rather than united the nation.

This is the story of Operation Rescue, a movement that rose from obscurity to national prominence, fractured under legal and financial pressure, and ultimately split into competing organizations that continue operating today.

The Birth of Blockade Activism

Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue in 1986 with a slogan designed to provoke: "If You Believe Abortion is Murder, Act like it's Murder."

The logic was brutally simple. If abortion clinics were genuinely killing innocent people, then sitting politely at home wasn't a morally coherent response. Terry's movement demanded that believers match their rhetoric with action—specifically, with their bodies. Protesters would physically block clinic entrances, forcing police to arrest them one by one, creating spectacle and, they hoped, moral witness.

The tactics weren't original. Operation Rescue explicitly borrowed from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, adapting the sit-in demonstrations that had integrated lunch counters and challenged segregation. Where civil rights activists had blocked doorways to demand access, anti-abortion activists blocked doorways to prevent it. The symmetry was intentional. Terry and his followers saw themselves as the rightful heirs to King's legacy of nonviolent resistance against injustice.

Their first major targets were abortion clinics in Cherry Hill, New Jersey and the boroughs of New York City. But it was the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia that put Operation Rescue on the national map. Over July and August, more than 1,200 members and supporters were arrested, generating the kind of dramatic television footage that movement organizers craved.

The Movement Spreads

Success breeds imitation. Independent Operation Rescue-style groups began sprouting across the country in the late 1980s. The most effective was Operation Rescue West, founded in California by Jeff White, who had served as the national organization's tactical director.

The numbers from this period are striking. In 1988 alone, Operation Rescue West organized 182 blockades resulting in 11,732 arrests. The following year saw 201 blockades and 12,358 arrests. At its peak, the national organization employed a staff of 23 and received a million dollars in annual donations.

But growth brought problems. By 1990, Operation Rescue owed $400,000 in fines—the accumulated cost of all those arrests and court proceedings. The organization was hemorrhaging money faster than it could raise it.

That same year, Randall Terry stepped down as director, handing leadership to Keith Tucci. What had been a scrappy startup was becoming something more bureaucratic: Operation Rescue National, with all the organizational complexity that name implied.

Legal Counterattack

The National Organization for Women and various abortion clinics weren't content to simply call the police each time protesters appeared. Beginning in 1988, they filed lawsuits alleging that Operation Rescue's coordinated blockades constituted racketeering—violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, commonly known as RICO.

RICO was originally designed to prosecute organized crime. It allows plaintiffs to sue not just individual wrongdoers but entire organizations engaged in a "pattern of racketeering activity." The argument was that Operation Rescue functioned like a criminal enterprise, systematically interfering with lawful businesses through intimidation and obstruction.

These cases, consolidated as NOW v. Scheidler, wound through the courts for two decades. Twice they reached the Supreme Court. Twice the justices ruled against the abortion rights plaintiffs, holding that anti-abortion protests didn't constitute the kind of economic extortion that RICO was meant to address.

But the legal victories came too late to save the movement in its original form. The litigation itself was devastating—consuming resources, creating uncertainty, and forcing leaders to spend their energy in courtrooms rather than at clinic doors.

The Summer of Mercy

Keith Tucci's great achievement came in 1991, when he led thousands of protesters to Wichita, Kansas for what became the movement's defining moment.

Why Wichita? The city was home to George Tiller, one of the few doctors in America who performed late-term abortions. Tiller had become a particular focus of anti-abortion anger, and Wichita offered a concentrated target in a politically sympathetic environment.

The Summer of Mercy lasted six weeks. Protesters blockaded three different clinic locations, focusing especially on Tiller's facility. Over 1,600 people were arrested in just the first three weeks. By the end, the Wichita Police Department had made more than 2,600 arrests.

The event attracted not just protesters but clergy—dozens of religious leaders joined the demonstrations, lending moral authority and media appeal. The culminating rally filled Cessna Stadium, a venue that normally hosted Wichita State University football games.

Remarkably, even Operation Rescue's founder praised the police response. Randall Terry declared that "the Wichita Police handled the Operation Rescue event better than almost any police department in history." Police Chief Rick Stone received a federal award for his professionalism—recognition that mass arrests could be conducted with dignity on both sides.

But the Summer of Mercy's real legacy was political. The protests energized Kansas conservatives and helped reshape state politics for decades to come. The relationship between anti-abortion activism and Kansas government, forged in those six weeks, would persist long after the national movement fragmented.

The Buffalo Disaster

Emboldened by Wichita, Operation Rescue National attempted to replicate its success the following year in Buffalo, New York. The 1992 "Spring of Life" represented both the movement's ambition and its hubris.

Buffalo's mayor, Jimmy Griffin, had actually invited Operation Rescue to his city—an extraordinary gesture that immediately made the event a flashpoint. Thousands of out-of-area protesters descended on Buffalo and neighboring Amherst, but this time they were met by equally mobilized counter-protesters. The resulting chaos transformed what was meant to be a repeat of Wichita into something very different.

For Operation Rescue, Buffalo was a public relations victory—the kind of confrontation that generated national attention and reinforced the sense that their cause was worth fighting for. For Buffalo itself, the experience was traumatic. The financial and logistical burden of managing the crisis was widely believed to have contributed to Mayor Griffin's political downfall later that year.

Decline and Fragmentation

The movement that emerged from Buffalo was already weakening. By 1990, before Wichita or Buffalo, Operation Rescue had shrunk to what observers called "professional rescuers"—a core of dedicated activists who survived on free food and lodging provided by the broader anti-abortion community. The mass movement was becoming a specialized vocation.

The decisive blow came in 1994, when President Bill Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act into law. This legislation, known by its acronym FACE, made it a federal crime to use force, threat of force, or physical obstruction to interfere with anyone obtaining or providing reproductive health services.

FACE changed the calculus entirely. Blockading clinics was no longer just a matter of local trespassing charges and accumulated fines. It now meant potential federal prosecution. Civil suits could be filed against individual harassers. The tactics that had built Operation Rescue became prohibitively expensive and personally risky.

The Schism

In late 1993, Keith Tucci departed as director of Operation Rescue National. The organization split along geographic and personal lines.

Reverend Flip Benham took over the main national organization, relocating it to Dallas, Texas. He began using the unwieldy name "Operation Rescue/Operation Save America." Meanwhile, Pat McEwen inherited something called Operation Rescue International, based in Melbourne, Florida, which she eventually renamed Life Coalition International.

But the real power struggle came later. In 1999, Jeff White stepped down from Operation Rescue West, handing leadership to Troy Newman. Newman made a bold move: he relocated the organization from California to Kansas—returning to the site of the Summer of Mercy—and simply dropped "West" from the name, calling his group Operation Rescue.

This didn't sit well with Flip Benham, who considered himself the rightful keeper of the Operation Rescue brand. A dispute over naming rights ensued. Eventually, after Benham was named in a lawsuit, he relented. His North Carolina-based group became Operation Save America, while Newman's Kansas organization retained the Operation Rescue name. (Some still refer to Newman's group as Operation Rescue Kansas, or ORK, to distinguish it from its predecessors.)

Aftermath and Continuity

The Internal Revenue Service launched an investigation of Operation Rescue West in 2004, examining whether the nonprofit had illegally engaged in political campaigning. Two years later, the IRS revoked the organization's tax-exempt status. The group simply reopened under the name Operation Rescue—another chapter in the endless rebranding that characterized the movement's later years.

Both Life Coalition International and Operation Save America remain active today. The tactics have evolved—fewer blockades, more sidewalk counseling, more legislative lobbying—but the underlying mission persists.

What's remarkable, looking back, is how much the movement accomplished and how little it ultimately achieved through direct action. The blockades generated enormous attention. They mobilized thousands of passionate believers. They helped make abortion the defining issue of American politics for a generation.

But the clinics kept operating. The arrests kept accumulating. And eventually, the legal and financial pressures made the original model unsustainable. The movement that borrowed from civil rights discovered that civil disobedience only works when public opinion is prepared to shift—and on abortion, American opinion proved stubbornly, almost evenly, divided.

The irony is that Operation Rescue's greatest victory came not from blockades but from politics. The activists who cut their teeth in Wichita and Buffalo went on to reshape Republican politics at the state level, building the legal and political infrastructure that would eventually lead to the Supreme Court's 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The sit-ins had failed. The long march through institutions succeeded.