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The RU-486 Registry |
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By Bill Berkowitz
Twenty-eight years after the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, and after an extended legal and political battle, the abortion pill RU-486 is now being distributed to women in clinics and doctor's offices across the country. However, instead of the pill tempering the climate of the abortion debate as was widely predicted the availability of RU-486 has opened a new front in the battle over reproductive rights. The Carrollton, Georgia.-based Neal Horsley is a computer programmer who originated the now infamous, way-over-the-top antiabortion Nuremberg Files web site. Nuremberg Files led with pictures of bloody and mangled fetuses, and made its reputation by providing names, and whenever possible home addresses, telephone numbers, license-plate numbers, and Social Security numbers of physicians and health care workers involved in abortions.
"We have a crisis of antiabortion violence in this country," said Katherine Spillar, national coordinator of the Feminist Majority. "Who can guarantee that this registry wouldn't get into the wrong hands?" (She might have been referring to the fact that the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list currently features two of America's homegrown antiabortion terrorists, Eric Robert Rudolph and James Charles Kopp). In early October, some in Congress led by Representative Tom Coburn (R-OK), introduced the RU-486 Patient Health and Safety Protection Act, that, according to an "Associated Press" report, would have "pass[ed] into law many of the health and safety guidelines that the FDA had considered," but rejected. Although Representative Coburn, a supporter of a national registry, dropped it from the final version of the bill, he left the door open suggesting that a registry should be left to the discretion of the Department of Health and Human Services. Wisconsin's former Governor Tommy Thompson, who is also strongly opposed to abortion, has taken over the reins at HHS. (Representative Coburn, defeated in his reelection bid, has had his name circulated by many on the Right for consideration as the next Surgeon General). Horsley's new web site, the RU 486 Registry www.ru486registry.com, is now online. Unhindered and unshackled, it represents the latest incarnation of antiabortion politics, intimidation style. It's a heady time for antiabortion advocates. Horsley's new site symbiotically coexists with the nomination by President George W. Bush of former Sen. John Ashcroft, a virulent opponent of abortion rights, as Attorney General. (In November 1998, in response to the murder of Dr. Barnett A. Slepian, the Justice Department appointed a panel to investigate nationwide antiabortion violence. According to the Bergen Record, among the panel's first priorities was to take a close look at Horsley's Nuremberg Files web site.) Horsley promises that the registry will be a "database of those baby butchering 'doctors' and their closest blood cohorts in hopes that the American people will overcome the demonic forces presently enslaving this nation and will finally prosecute the purveyors of death listed herein." And while Horsley's enterprises always reek of the weird, and therefore might be easily dismissed, there have been too many incidents of antiabortion violence not to take his efforts seriously. It clearly represents a major threat to anyone who has anything to do with providing reproductive services, from the doctors and nurses to the security guards and clinic escorts. Horsley encourages his followers to call their local doctors, ask the receptionists if they prescribe RU-486, and then email him the information for verification. At its core, it's an open invitation to terrorism. According to the Feminist Majority Foundation's National Clinic Access Project, one-in-five clinics experienced severe anti-abortion attacks in 1999. These attacks included death threats, stalkings, bomb threats, bombings, arson, blockades, invasions and chemical attacks. Horsley promises other web innovations including the introduction of the street corner live web cam that will be located directly outside of health care clinics. Horsley claims the "Live Web Cam Project will make things get very interesting very fast. People will locate themselves outside baby butcher businesses across the nation and film people coming and going…. We want to…catalog the people who go out to kill God's little babies." Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland, California-based free-lance writer covering the Religious Right and related conservative movements. Contact him at wkbbronx@aol.com. |
Anti-abortion activist 
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