Report Ties Anti-Abortion Violence, Militias Planned Parenthood Researchers Find Two Movements Converging

The extreme segment of the anti-abortion movement has hung nooses at Planned Parenthood abortion clinics and threatened doctors with death.

Its members call Attorney General Janet Reno “Abort ‘em or Burn ‘em Janet.”

They may have been involved in the bombing of a Planned Parenthood clinic in the Spokane Valley on July 12.

They are an increasingly violent sector of the anti-abortion movement with links to militia-type groups in at least 15 states, according to a new report by Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

“There is increasing evidence of a convergence between anti-abortion militancy and militia activity,” says the report by the agency’s Clinic Defense and Research program. An advance copy of the report, scheduled to be released later this week, was obtained Wednesday by The Spokesman-Review.

The arrests of three armed men Tuesday near Yakima may link Spokane to this trend by tying the bombing of the Planned Parenthood of Spokane and Whitman County clinic to men tied to the militia and anti-government movement.

FBI agents arrested Charles Barbee, Robert Berry and Jay Merrill in a Yakima suburb. Barbee, of Sagle, Idaho, was featured last year in a Spokesman-Review series on growing anti-government activity in the Inland Northwest.

In the series, Barbee said he’d converted to the Christian Identity religion, an ideology that opposes abortion and feminism and says northern Europeans are the true Israelites.

The new Planned Parenthood report prominently features the pipe bombing of the Spokane Valley clinic and the robbery minutes later of the nearby U.S. Bank by a group of heavily armed men in camouflage fatigues.

Planned Parenthood researchers picked up their first clues of a militia connection to the anti-abortion movement at a 1994 Wisconsin convention of the U.S. Taxpayers’ Party, where an anti-abortion minister called for the formation of armed militias. At the same meeting, the researchers found a 100-page militia manual listing “legalized abortion” as one of the main reasons why one should “spring immediately and effectively to arms.”

“It was the first time that paramilitary training was unveiled in the anti-abortion movement,” the report notes.

More recent activities linking the two movements include bomb plots, anti-abortion paramilitary training and placing liens against judges in reproductive rights cases, the report says.

Placing liens is a tactic used by “Christian Patriots” against “those they consider political enemies,” the report says.

Two pivotal events for the anti-government movement - the bloody 1992 North Idaho standoff between federal agents and Randy Weaver, and the 1993 FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas - also are rallying points for anti-abortion extremists, the researchers say.

Paul de Parrie of Oregon, editor of Life Advocate magazine, has repeatedly attacked Attorney General Reno, the report notes.

Reno not only OK’d the storming of the Waco compound, but she “authorizes the storming of the womb compound,” de Parrie wrote in his magazine in June 1993.

In May, an Oregon judge declared de Parie a stalker and ordered him to stay away from an abortion clinic director he had threatened.

Ann Glazier, assistant director of the clinic defense program, will be in Spokane to speak at an Oct. 18 conference on hate groups at Gonzaga University sponsored by the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment.

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