A Clinic Built Like a Fortress

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/RENO

After a busy day at the clinic, Dr. Damon Stutes, 43, changes out of his surgical scrubs and climbs into his four-wheel-drive truck, custom built for high-speed chases. He slides open his Berretta pistol to make sure it is loaded. Pointing a remote control toward a video screen on the garage wall, he flips through eight channels, each offering a different camera view of the outside grounds. As the garage's metal door slides open, he tucks a bulletproof vest between his body and the truck window and steps on the gas. "Once I start moving, a sniper can't get a good shot at me," he says with a defiant grin. "It would take a cruise missile."

That, perhaps, is one of the few eventualities for which the owner of northern Nevada's only abortion clinic remains unprotected. After his former clinic in downtown Reno was fire-bombed four times, Stutes acknowledges, "I was mad as hell -- and afraid." Today, he is still angry, but has less cause for fear: his new $1 million West End Women's Medical Group clinic, which opened in November, is a high-tech fortress with solid steel doors and magnetic locks, bullet-resistant windows, infrared motion detectors, panic buttons to summon police and a 70-ft. setback planted with thorn trees. Contractors experienced in prison and casino security designed the system, while some local SWAT-team police offered advice. "It's a bunker," Stutes says. "Flash Gordon couldn't get in here without being seen."

The shootings in Brookline, Massachusetts, last week were only the most recent reminder that no abortion clinic can afford to ignore the danger. Stutes has tried to ensure his patients' safety -- as well as his own -- by setting the clinic parking lot well back from the street, where it is surrounded by buildings. Video cameras monitor the perimeter of the property, and "if anyone crosses it, I consider them an assassin and I get the police in here in one hot second," he says.

Patricia Glenn, head of Nevada Right to Life, condemns attacks on physicians: "We don't believe in killing babies or abortionists," she says. Although the former nurse and mother of 10 demonstrated at Stutes' old clinic, she says she has no plans to do so at the new site. "With the video cameras, they see you coming," she says. "It's like Hitler's fortresses. People couldn't get in there to protest the killing of the Jews."

Stutes, a 6-ft. 10-in., 300-lb. redhead who collects guns and pays dues to the N.R.A., tends to match the inflammatory rhetoric of right-to-lifers with his own brand of aggressive, bawdy behavior. Once, when protesters came to sprinkle holy water around his former clinic, he charged out with a foot-long, penis-shaped water pistol and squirted back. The only abortion provider for an area of 200,000 sq. mi., he charges $260 each for the roughly 3,000 procedures he performs each year. His wife Lynne helps run the clinic, and Stutes says they saved for several years to make a down payment on the new facility.

His determination to continue providing abortions, Stutes explains, dates back to his memory of two 12-year-olds in his hometown of Lansing, Michigan, who died after illegal abortions. "With me, it is primal," he says. "Abortion is a lifesaving operation. The pro-life movement is 100% responsible for these shootings. They are the ones killing people."