Blockading Logging Companies and Abortion Clinics:
What Shelley Shannon and I Have in Common

by Kelpie Wilson

The Portland Alliance
May 1994

Even though I am a a pro-choice environmentalist, I have a few things in common with Shelley Shannon. She’s the woman accused of shooting abortion doctor George Tiller in Kansas last August. Only a few things—still more that I would expect to share with someone whose values are 180 degrees apart from mine.

Shannon and I are the same age and we have homes about 35 miles apart in southern Oregon We both have brown hair and wear glasses. She has been sued for Operation Rescue protests while I have been sued for an Earth First! protest. The abortion clinic suing Shannon filed an amicus brief on behalf of the logging company suing me because they wanted to apply the precedent set by my case.

My case was decided last summer when the Oregon Supreme Court determined that to allow a logging company to sue me and five others for hanging a banner on their equipment would not violate the First Amendment. Both my lawyer and Shannon’s have argued that allowing punitive damage in cases of civil disobedience would let a jury determine the degree of punishment based on the content of protester’s beliefs—an infringement of First Amendment rights.

The result for me and my co-defendants is that we must now pay $30,000 to Huffman & Wright Logging, Inc. for stopping their old growth logging in the Siskiyou National Forest for one day back in 1987. The way I see it, we are being punished for alerting the public to a problem that is now being seriously addressed. In 1991, a federal judge stopped all new logging of Northwest ancient forests in an injunction that still stands, and the present administration is at least attempting to solve the problem of disappearing forests.

We used the last resort tactic of civil disobedience to save the ancient forests because we didn’t want to leave a denuded, drought-ridden, salmon-barren land to the next generation. But if human population and consumption keep expanding exponentially as they are now, all we will have done is the shift the destruction to other forests that are less well protected.

Here is where my views are completely opposed to Shannon’s: to me, abortion means a gift to the future and a personal tragedy averted—the last thing our overburdened earth and dysfunctional society need is another unwanted child. To Shannon, abortion seems to mean simply the deletion of a soul belonging to God, with no difference between the soul of a three-week-old embryo and that of a middle-aged man.

Shannon wanted to force women into bearing unwanted children so much that she tried to kill a doctor. This crime is now being dealt with in the criminal justice system. The question is, should an abortion clinic have the right to sue her to keep her from nonviolently blockading its entrance?

Clinic blockades do prevent women from having abortions. Women who travel long distances to find a clinic temporarily closed by a blockade are denied their reproductive rights. The atmosphere of intimidation created by Operation Rescue has closed clinics permanently: 83% of counties in the US now have no abortion services.

With few legal tools to stop the harassment, pro-choice supporters turned to RICO (the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act). The Supreme Court decided RICO could be broadly interpreted to cover Operation Rescue’s criminal activity, even if monetary gain was not the motivation. But the American Civil Liberties Union is concerned that RICO may now be used against all political protesters, threatening First Amendment rights.

Far better than broad defensive swipes like lawsuits and RICO would be to establish within the law that impeding a woman’s legal right to an abortion is a serious criminal offense. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act now in a House-Senate conference committee does just that. The ACLU is satisfied that the bill would not limit freedom of speech.

Civil disobedience is always a questionable tactic, but ever since the Boston Tea Party, our society has valued the deep probing of values and recommitment to freedom that it can lead to.

When we tested society’s values as Earth First!, we found that people did want to save the last of the ancient forests for their children.

When Operation Rescue tested society’s values, they found Roe v. Wade not so easy to strangle. Hopefully they will soon find a new federal law that prevents them from interfering with a woman’s right to choose.