Avenging the Unborn

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

For what it may be worth, Dr. John Bayard Britton's killer did not penetrate his homemade bulletproof vest.

"Doc" Britton, 69, was a man of modest means. When he replaced the murdered Dr. David Gunn as a circuit-riding doctor for several abortion clinics in northern Florida, he realized he needed a vest. But instead of buying, he wore one constructed of manufacturer's scraps. Sometimes he worried that it was too short. "If they get me in the liver, that's pretty tough to patch," he told a reporter last February. Apparently he assumed that his assailant, aiming from a prudent distance in hopes of a clean getaway, would go for the largest target, the torso.

Britton died last Friday with his liver whole. Moments after he and the elderly couple acting as his volunteer guards arrived in the parking lot of the Ladies Clinic of Pensacola, a gunman ran up to the driver's side of their blue pickup truck. The killer was no prudent sharpshooter: he got quite close with a 12-gauge shotgun and blasted the faces of the two men with round after round of buckshot.

Britton and escort James Barrett, 74, died instantly. Barrett's 68-year-old wife June suffered an arm wound. Minutes later, police arrested Paul Hill, a local antiabortion extremist who had long called for the blood of clinic personnel.

President Clinton was on television by the end of the day, calling Britton's death a case of "domestic terrorism" and promising federal aid to the local police. Women's groups were angrily demanding greater protection for clinic workers and full-scale investigations into other extremists. Behind the public rage was a great deal of frustration and perhaps even some despair. Pro- choicers began to wonder: What good is constructing an indestructible garment of laws to protect a constitutional right if some extremist simply ignores them all and blows someone's head off?

Many abortion-rights supporters had hoped that the 1993 murder of Gunn by antiabortionist Michael Griffin would be unique -- and not only that but a turning point. As the apparent climax to a period of growing violence and obstructionism by hard-core clinic protesters, it became a catalyst for public disgust and government action. Within the next 15 months, two Supreme Court rulings, an act of Congress and dozens of state and local ordinances contributed to the impression that few places on earth could be much safer than an abortion clinic.

None of which convinced Britton to remove his vest. But then he was never an easygoing sort. According to a profile in the February issue of GQ magazine, he facilitated abortions as early as the late 1960s, on principle. But by the 1980s, he was also doing them for the money: as many as 32 a day at $50 each. He had lost a hospital job in 1978 after clashing with his colleagues, and his professional reputation suffered three years later when he was put on two years' probation for improper prescription of narcotics. He could be compassionate and conscientious with his regular patients. Marjorie Mason, a patient who lives in his hometown of Fernandina Beach, Florida, praises him for seeing her through a difficult pregnancy: "He held my hand through the whole thing." Yet Britton could be brusque and abrasive with clients he inherited from Gunn. Nor did he believe in turning the other cheek: he packed a .357 Magnum and talked freely about his willingness to shoot abortion protesters if they trespassed on his property with intent to harm him.

He meant people like Hill. A native Mississippian with three children, the clean-cut, ever smiling 40-year-old was an ordained minister and regarded as an ideal neighbor. Yet his father had signed a warrant against him for assault when he was 17, and an ex-pastor confides that two churches had expelled him in 1992 for preaching the idea that came to consume him: that to kill an abortion provider was justifiable homicide. With Gunn's death, however, Hill found a more receptive audience: talk- and news-show hosts. Appearing first on Donahue, then on Nightline and Sonya Live, the formerly obscure car-cleaning entrepreneur gained instant recognition in the protest community saying what several believed but few admitted: "If we can use ((deadly)) force to defend our born children, why shouldn't we do so for our unborn children?" He started a single-issue group called Defensive Action and circulated a petition defending the "justice of taking all godly action necessary to defend innocent human life, including the use of force."

He also became a regular protester outside the Pensacola clinic; with eerie prescience, GQ writer Tom Junod portrayed him as the most likely threat to Britton's life. Others too saw him as an explosion waiting to happen. Ron Fitzsimmons, director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, who | first met him on Donahue, recalls having an edgy dialogue with Hill while in Pensacola to mark the anniversary of Gunn's death. "I remember I said, 'Paul, you're not going to kill me, are you?' I asked him why he hadn't killed any doctors. He said, 'Well, Ron, that's a very good question, and I've really struggled with it. But I feel I can make more of a contribution as a leader than a doer.'

And then, apparently, he changed his mind. Around 7 a.m. on Friday, the Pensacola police caught him planting a row of little crosses on the grounds of the Ladies Clinic and demanded that he remove them; he complied. At 7:30, after receiving a distress call about the shooting, they encountered him walking down a highway away from the clinic. He had more than a dozen shotgun shells strapped to his leg, ankle and pocket. He refused to tell them where the gun was, police said. (They found one on the clinic lawn.) But he did say, "I know one thing: there won't be any more babies killed today."

In the murder's immediate aftermath, most of the major pro-life organizations scrambled, convincingly, to dissociate themselves from Hill. Echoing more mainline groups, Operation Rescue director Flip Benham trumpeted, "We condemn it as murder, a sin. If I'd been with Paul Hill this morning, I would've stepped between him ((and Britton))." Expressing the fears of more temperate antiabortionists, Benham added, "This will have devastating effects on the number of picketers. There's a good number of folks who don't want to be associated with this."

Revulsion at Hill's act may indeed turn many Americans away from pro-life activism. But it may also encourage a tiny, violent minority, much as the Gunn murder appeared to activate Hill. David Trosch, a Roman Catholic priest who signed Hill's petition, has publicly recommended "massive killings of abortionists and their staffs." He said of last week's crime, "I see the action as a good action." There were more than 20 other signatories.

Patricia Coleman, one of Doc Britton's five children, says, "My father was an independent thinker who absolutely refused to be swayed by politics or what other people thought. He refused to be bullied." Yet some of his surviving colleagues are feeling vulnerable. "This has taken its toll," says Ashley Phillips, director of the WomanCare clinic in San Diego. "I don't know how much more of this we're supposed to take." Following the killing, several members of Congress demanded that the FBI begin infiltrating radical antiabortionist groups as it has the Ku Klux Klan in the past. Harsh as that sounds, if Britton's death causes Phillips or other abortion providers to step down in fear, Griffin, Hill and others like them will have achieved the goal of all terrorism: to thwart the established policy of a nation through the pinpoint application of brutal violence.

With reporting by Cathy Booth and Scott Norvell/Pensacola, Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Bonnie Rochman/Atlanta, Sarah Tippit/Orlando and Lisa Towle/Fernandina Beach