GQ

THE ABORTIONIST
Saint and Satan, the doctor who replaced David Gunn lives on the front lines of
the war over a woman s right to her own body
February 1994
By Torn Junod
PHOTOG NAME
219Y-041-007
The abortionist makes house calls. The abortionist's patient, Mr. Beazley, is dy
ing, and the abortionist has made a habit of visiting his house after work, to s
teer him to his end. Mr. Beazley is an old man, dying in his bed. He is beyond s
peech, beyond seeing and hearing. His lips are blue, and his gray tongue hangs o
ut of his mouth. His wife and daughters stroke his arm, his leg. A drip bag, sus
pended over his bed, feeds him. The abortionist adjusts the rate of the drip. Th
ere is nothing else he can do. He cannot save Mr. Beazley. He cannot do anything
but deaden his pain and console his family, and for this the Beazleys love him.
"Oh, Doc, I can't tell you how much we brag on you," Mrs. Beazley says to him i
n her weary smoker's voice, and every few minutes a little blonde girl in an ora
nge skirt -Mr. Beazley's granddaughter-hands him, with a curtsy, a fresh drawing
of the sun. The abortionist puts the drawings in his pocket and bows. The abort
ionist has a weakness for children. Some years ago, he delivered babies. The abo
rtionist is a family doctor, and he understands that what he is doing -drawing o
ut Mr. Beazley's death- is simply a gesture for the family's sake: an exercise t
hat enables the Beazleys to believe they have done all they can, and to get a he
ad start on their grief. The abortionist would rather let Mr. Beazley go. He is
not, as he says, "sentimental," and he is ready to withhold the medicines that a
llow Mr. Beazley his scant purchase on existence. As a physician, he has decided
that Mr. Beazley is already gone, and it is this-his willingness to make decisi
ons, to answer questions of life and death-that permits Dr. John Bayard Britton
to believe that one day, should his enemies come to kill him, he will find the c
ourage to kill them first.
His enemies-they make house calls, too. If you are an abortionist, they find you
. They snap your picture, and they tail your car, and they copy the letters and
numerals of your license plate, and they find you. Last September, they traveled
across the state of Florida-from Pensacola, in the far corner of the Panhandle,
to Fernandina Beach, a small town outside of Jacksonville-to find Dr. Britton.
They went to his house, while he was not at home, and took a picture of his fron
t door. The house is isolated, at the end of an unpaved road, next to a swamp. T
he loneliness gave rise to a hope: that a man who lives in such a house-far from
help-might be easily frightened. They left a message of Christian forgiveness o
n his doorstep and then went to his office in Fernandina. The next morning, Dr.
Britton's nurse and housemate, Vanita McKinney, opened the door of the office an
d found a message that caused her to call the police. She had been wondering how
long it would take for them to find him, and now she knew.
Dr. Britton has been traveling to Pensacola since the end of March 1993. He has
been traveling there to do abortions, because David Gunn, the doctor who had don
e abortions before him, had been murdered -murdered; martyred; transformed, by t
he agency of three bullets in his back, from an abortionist into a kind of secul
ar saint. Dr. Britton abstains from sainthood and contemplates martyrdom with gr
eat reluctance, and yet now here he is, walking Gunn's path and sharing Gunn's s
hadows. His enemies found him, and to demonstrate their concern for his soul, th
ey left him an incentive for Christian conversion, a message in the door of his
office that asked "WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU HAD FIVE MINUTES LEFT TO LIVE?"

219Y-008-001
In the airport men s room, John Bayard Britton dons the accessory that has become
standard issue for those who ply his trade.
We like our abortionists pure. We like our abortionists consumed by their cause.
If we are among those who oppose what they do, we like them pure in their apost
asy; pure in what we imagine to be their greed, their rapacity; pure in their ev
il. If we are among those who champion them -perhaps not what they do but, rathe
r, their freedom to do it- we like them pure in their devotion to the cause of w
omen; selfless and burnished to high ideological sheen. We like them, in other w
ords, like David Gunn.
You've heard of Dr. Gunn, of course. You've heard of him because he was, in the
words of virtually all who knew him, "special." The Christians described him -as
they describe Bayard Britton- as a "circuit-riding abortionist," and, in a sens
e, they were absolutely correct. To provide the option of abortion to the women
of southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, Gunn drove, each week, every week
, from Montgomery to Mobile to Pensacola to Fort Walton Beach, sleeping in hotel
s, at his girlfriend's place in Pensacola and sometimes in his car. He was small
and tireless, his body flawed, his spirit impeccable. He weighed about 130 poun
ds and, with one of his legs twisted by polio, he had to walk with a cane. His b
ack ached, and at clinics with two floors, he had trouble climbing the stairs. H
e insisted on educating the women he treated. In the election year of 1992, he w
ould ask, in his soft voice, if they were registered to vote and the candidate t
hey intended to vote for. If they answered "George Bush," he would interrupt the
procedure. "Why should I do this for you," he would say, "if you're going to vo
te for someone who wants to make it illegal?" On the twentieth anniversary of Ro
e v. Wade, he sang "Happy Birthday" to the Christians outside a clinic and, in a
gesture that became his iconographic epitaph, danced to Tom Petty's "I Won't Ba
ck Down." He did not wear a bulletproof vest. He kept a gun in his car but not o
n his person. He never saw the man who killed him. He never had the opportunity
for fear, or repentance, and so he remains, in death, defiant, incorruptible, pu
rified in the crucible of his cause.
John Bayard Britton -who answers to "Bayard" and "J.B." and, most often, "Doc"is not pure. He is 68 years old, and his aspect can be wolfish. He is tall and g
aunt, with the air of a dissipated blue blood. He has stained teeth and a long,
bent nose, broken more times than he can remember. His hair is gray and lank, an
d when he pushes it off his forehead with his fingers, he captures the posture o
f a rebellious adolescent. His clothes are shabby and his offices, in Jacksonvil
le and Fernandina, are seedy. He likes working on cars and machines, and there i
s usually a residue of grime under his fingernails. He prefers the company of me
chanics, mill hands, plumbers and prisoners to the company of doctors and intell
ectuals. His politics are often reactionary and intentionally provocative. He ha
s a small, shy smile, and when he talks about public issues, he appears to recov
er a lost innocence, like a child amused by his own capacity for mischief. There
is an NRA sticker on his briefcase, and a .357 magnum in a box on the seat of h
is truck. Since the murder of David Gunn, he views all the Christian protesters
as potential assailants and believes that if they come on his property with the
intention of doing him harm, he should have the right to shoot them. At the clin
ic in Pensacola, the protesters congregate behind a tall wooden fence, and Doc B
ritton sometimes speaks, with a smile, of taking target practice through the kno
tholes. He believes, deeply, in the prerogative of capital punishment. If he wer
e God, or king, he says, he would have executed Gunn's murderer two weeks after
the arrest. If, by chance, he executed the wrong man, his remorse would have bee
n tempered by the simple fact that we are all frail, we are all sinners, and the
accused, in the course of his life, had probably done something worthy of death
.
What? You don't like him? He offends you? You don't find his provocations endear

ing? Well, you're stuck with him. Who else is going to walk where the guns have
been drawn? How many other doctors will make themselves targets? David Gunn is g
one, departed, like a spirit, like smoke. The others, more and more of them, are
reluctant. They don't show up. They quit, they get tired, they grow old. Doc is
your new hero. He is old, yes... he is tired, yes... he just doesn't quit. He c
an't quit. His resistance, his defiance -they are not based in ideology, or caus
e, but in himself, his character, his troubled and troubling history. He is, if
nothing else, a brave and contrary man. All his life, he has gotten into scrapes
-with hospitals, with other doctors, with medical boards- until he has become,
in some quarters, an outcast who can walk only where no one else will.
"Abortionist": The Christians commandeered the word long ago and employ it, in t
he words of David Gunn Jr., to "make the doctors seem less than human." Abortion
, though, is a uniquely human activity, a measure of our estrangement from natur
e and our distance from God, and it is his very humanity that forces Doc to stay
on the road... to keep riding out, to the west, to Pensacola, where the war ove
r the soul of the fetus and the freedom of women is being fought by men who beli
eve in guns, where Christians scream behind fences and measure the abortionist t
hrough the knotholes.
The call comes in the night, to the house Doc shares with Vanita, a dog, several
cats and the detritus of his past. Doc built the house himself, years ago, and
although he raised five children in it, he never really managed to finish it. It
is built on a swamp that was once a clearwater bay. Indians lived by the bay an
d buried their dead in the ridge next to the house, and it seems appropriate tha
t they bequeathed Doc a yardful of relics. Doc is obsessively frugal-"tight as a
drum," Vanita says-and his property has been overtaken by the objects he has be
en unable to discard: stoves, refrigerators, trailers, boats, bikes, pipes, fans
, cinder blocks, tangles of cable, propane tanks, a ship's wheel and nine cannib
alized cars and trucks, overgrown with weeds. A neighbor recently accused him of
creating a junkyard, and Doc had to tow away six scrapped Volkswagens. In his g
arage, he has been repairing two large vacuum consoles-the machines that provide
the suction for a first-trimester abortion-from the Pensacola clinic. They are
clean and cared for; everything else molders and rusts under huge magnolia trees
, and the yard's atmosphere of profuse desolation is gothic and surreal.
The call comes at midnight, just as Doc is going to bed. It is Mrs. Beazley, sur
e that her husband is about to die. "Well, I guess I better come over," Doc says
. He kisses Vanita good-night and gets in his truck, with a stethoscope slung ov
er his shoulder and a cowboy kerchief around his neck. His soiled shirt is the c
olor of mustard, and his black belt is cinched so tightly around his thin waist
that his pants wrinkle and pleat. On the way to the Beazleys', he almost falls a
sleep, and, to stay awake, he starts brushing his teeth. It has always been this
way. He has never been able to turn away a patient. His daughter Louise remembe
rs people coming to their house at all hours, asking for help. Doc treated them,
often in return for nothing more than a five-dollar bill or vegetables from the
ir garden or fish they'd pulled out of the bay. He has always preferred to treat
poor people, who tend to be grateful for his services. He describes himself as
a "therapeutic nihilist" and has often prescribed, for illnesses he regards as l
ess than serious, "tincture of time." He is suspicious of patients who file clai
ms for workmen's compensation, and once, when he worked at a mill, he told emplo
yees that if they were worried about their fingers they should work in an office
. He distrusts other doctors. Other doctors, in turn, distrust him.
219Y-088-002
Innocuous to the point of invisibility among the protesters outside the clinic,
Paul Hill is nonetheless the one who frightens the employees of Pensacola's Ladi
es Center.

Doc has suffered for his unconventional approach to medicine. He has been fired
from many jobs. He came to Fernandina in the late Fifties, with his wife, Faith,
an artist who painted in gloomy tones of green and blue and was the daughter of
one of Fernandina's founding families. He worked at the general hospital as a f
amily practitioner, and from the start he argued with his colleagues, over what
he regarded as their penchant for unnecessary tonsillectomies, over emergency-ro
om procedures, over his right to deliver babies and over an abortion he arranged
, in the late 1960s, for a woman who threatened to commit suicide if she was for
ced to take her pregnancy to term. He never did any illegal abortions, he says;
no, what he did was set up a little room in the hospital for "pelvic exams," and
if a woman came in bleeding, with a nub of fetal tissue showing through her cer
vix-in the throes of miscarriage, in other words, or of her own botched abortion
-he would complete, with a loop of steel, what nature, or the woman, had started
.
It is strange, what finally undid him. Doc had always prided himself on his "obj
ectivity" in the face of death, his lack of "sentimentality" in his contemplatio
n of the void. When his father died, though, in the mid-Seventies, he fell into
a depression and, in its grip, "probably said some things I shouldn't have said"
to his antagonists at the hospital. His antagonists, in response, contended tha
t his depression rendered him unstable -unable to care properly for his patients
- and, on April 11, 1978, succeeded in voting him out of the hospital.
They had him now, the doctors he once delighted in calling dishonest, the obstet
ricians appalled that a family practitioner of his stripe wished to deliver babi
es. He put his money, what was left of it, into a business that encouraged home
births and the use of midwives-but that, too, was doomed, especially after the s
tate medical board charged him, in 1981, with prescribing 1,900 Percodan and Per
cocet tablets to a drug addict. He disputed the charges, but accepted-"on the ad
vice of an expensive lawyer"-two years of probation, and that, he says, was the
end of him: "I was a pariah as far as any salaried job was concerned." After Fai
th died of cancer in 1983, all that was left were the two offices he kept in Fer
nandina and Jacksonville with their clientele of poor people and workmen's comp
cases -and then, yes, the clinics that would welcome a pariah, so long as he cou
ld deliver a safe abortion.
"I made a living doing abortions," Doc says. "I did them because I thought they
should have been done; I wouldn't have done them otherwise. But I will say I had
no money to feed my family..."
A clinic in Orlando, a clinic in Daytona, a clinic in Melbourne, a clinic in Tal
lahassee-Doc was on the road now in earnest, on the circuit, in exile. An exile
from his home, from his profession and from the great joy in his life-the delive
ry room and the squeal of newborn children. You see, "he really loves children"that's what his daughter Louise says. "It's sort of sad, that society has forced
him into this. He seems like a sadder person now than when his practice was del
ivering a lot of babies."
She does not know what keeps her father going, on the road, driving himself beyo
nd the point of exhaustion. Neither does anyone else. Even the Christians look a
t him and wonder why such an old man doesn't just go home instead of enduring th
eir wrath and daring their judgment. Is it the money? To some degree, yes -sever
al years ago, Doc lost a lot investing in a chain of pet stores. He needs the mo
ney. There is something else, though. Long ago, the state medical board charged
him "with being unable to practice medicine with reasonable skill and safety"; a
nd now, here he is, going where no other physician dares go, risking his life to
fulfill the contract between doctor and patient. He is the pariah as hero, the
hero as pariah, returned to the halo of principle by the threat of the gun. Wome
n want abortions? Women need abortions? He is a doctor; he will give them their
abortions. That is his ideology, just as the house call is his ideology. He will

give them their abortions, if it kills him.

Doc makes it to the Beazleys' in the steamy, violet dark. He sits with Mrs. Beaz
ley until three o'clock in the morning, watching her husband breathe. Mr. Beazle
y does not die. He keeps breathing, long, rattling gasps. Doc does not go home.
He walks out to the Beazleys' driveway and sleeps on a pallet in their small tra
iler. Before sunrise, a nightmare shakes him awake. It's a dream he has had befo
re, a dream in which Vanita's grandson, Michael-a bright, energetic 4-year-old b
oy whom Doc, with his love of children, with his need for children, has taken as
his own-disappears beneath the wheels of a car. Doc lies in the trailer, sweati
ng, unable to catch his breath, as he waits for the dream to change, somehow wil
ls the dream to change, and Michael pops up, miraculously alive, on top of the c
ar, his blond hair aglow.
The following morning, Doc flies to Pensacola.
219Y-059-009
Three residents of Our Father's House, a home for unwed mothers, which activist
John Burt runs like a hoot camp for antiabortion protesters.
When will it happen, if it happens? Will it happen when he steps off the plane a
t the gate, or when he walks through the soft hush of the terminal? Will it happ
en when he steps into the bathroom to splash water on his face, or when the car
from the clinic comes to pick him up at the curb, or when the car parks at the c
linic and Doc has to open the door and walk, for a few seconds, in front of the
knotholes?
Doc never sees the man shadowing him. His plane lands in Pensacola at seven o'cl
ock in the morning, when the airport is empty and drained of all sound but the w
hoosh of air-conditioning. No one meets him at the gate, and he walks through th
e terminal with a smile on his face, a leather bag hanging off his shoulder. He
is wearing a windbreaker, blue pants, brown shoes, maroon socks, a stringy orang
e tie and a white shirt the shade of a dim lightbulb. He walks leaning slightly
forward and, after nodding a familiar hello to an airport guard, heads directly
to the men s room. It's spotless and smells of disinfectant. Doc moves quickly. He
takes off his windbreaker, tosses his leather bag on the counter and unzips it.
He pulls out a slate-blue polyester vest, V-necked, with six buttons. He raises
his arms and jumps into it and then says, with an air of deep satisfaction, "Aa
h." Doc is proud of his bulletproof vest. Too cheap to buy one, he went through
the Dumpster of a manufacturer and collected enough scraps to construct his own.
"I tested it in my backyard with my .357, until my neighbor complained," he say
s. He splashes water on his face and combs back his hair with a wet hand. When h
e reemerges in the terminal, wearing the vest under his windbreaker, his upper b
ody appears bulky and squared-off. He walks outside, in the billowing sunlight o
f morning, to look for his ride, which has been arranged by the local chapter of
NOW. No one is there. He comes back inside and waits, nervously. He will hear l
ater that a sheriffs deputy, off-duty and out of uniform, followed him through t
he airport but, somewhat ominously, never showed himself.
After fifteen minutes, a minivan pulls up to the curb, bedecked with a bumper st
icker urging "CHOICE." "That's it," Doc says. The van is occupied by June Barret
t, a silverhaired woman with a red AIDS ribbon on her T-shirt, and driven by her
husband, Jim, a small, ruddy-faced retiree wearing a Baltimore Orioles cap. On
the seat between them is a wooden box containing Jim's handgun. June gets into t
he backseat, and Doc sits in the front, complaining that his vest is too short.
"I'd like it longer so they can't get me in the gut," he says. "If they get me i
n the liver, that's pretty tough to patch. The spleen? The spleen you can take o
ut."

It is a five-minute drive to the Ladies Center, one of the two Pensacola clinics
that, until March 10, 1993, employed David Gunn. Gunn did not die at the Ladies
Center; he died at the back door of Pensacola Women's Medical Services, and the
Ladies Center likes to think that it is the safer of the two. It is a brown two
-story wooden building, with a cinder parking lot shaded by oak trees and surrou
nded by a fence eight feet tall. Jim parks his van right next to the side entran
ce and says in an official tone "Now Doc, I'll get your bag-when you get out, go
right through the door, please." Doc moves slowly, and his ease is disconcertin
g. Jim looks at Doc for a moment, steps out of the van and says "Get in there no
w, please." But Doc stands outside the clinic door, blinking, smiling in the mor
ning air, as though listening for the singing of birds. He yawns and stretches a
nd then, whistling "Ode to joy," from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, disappears thr
ough the door.
Jim takes out his gun box and places it on the deck outside the clinic's entranc
e. He looks at the fence, where the Christians usually come. "I like to keep an
eye on those peckerheads," he says. "I didn't go to Korea and serve my country f
or twenty-five years in the service so that these peckerheads can shoot doctors.
It won't happen as long as I'm around. I do not miss. These hands are small but
I know where to put them. I have survived this long because I shoot first. I wa
s sent home from Korea because I taught that to the 357 men I brought over there
. [My superiors] thought my hyperaggressiveness was not in keeping with the mili
tary effort. But of the 357 I brought to Korea, 356 came home.
"I have gotten threats. These men have threatened to drive me out of town. They
don't like what I do here. I told them to get their friends together and ask the
mselves: Is their dislike of what I'm doing here worth dying for?"
At 8:30, the first Christian, fat and bearded, sticks his head over the fence, t
o bellow and holler.
219Y-111-008
On Fridays-abortion day at the Pensacola Ladies Center-the Christians arrive wit
h the sun, to pray or scream.
Pensacola is low and hot, a modestly sized southern port city with an influx of
retirees, a profusion of churches and a stone monument to the Confederate dead i
n the heart of its downtown. Its economy has been dependent on the military, and
an enormous percentage of its population has known the authoritarianism of arme
d service. It is sandy, scrubby, weedy and piney, and its peculiarly American de
solation breeds fundamentalists and terrorists as efficiently as does the desert
.
Pensacola has been called "the Selma of the abortion-rights movement" by an acti
vist in the Christian Right, and indeed the city's history has been notable for
Christian violence. On June 25, 1984, the Ladies Center was bombed and then, six
months later, on Christmas Day, was bombed again-along with the offices of two
Pensacola doctors who performed abortions-in an action the bombers described as
"a gift to Jesus on his birthday." In 1986, a man named John Burt led his own ch
arge against the Ladies Center, pushing open the side door, slamming the directo
r, Linda Taggart, against a wall and joining three accomplices in the trashing o
f the clinic. In 1988, John Brockhoeft, who three years earlier had torched a cl
inic in Columbus, Ohio, parked with Burt in the lot across the street from the L
adies Center and, a few hours later, was apprehended with a trunkful of steel pi
pes, explosives and detonators. The murder of David Gunn, during a protest that
Burt had organized, was the fulfillment of a decade of promises.
The sin of abortion has provided a world of opportunity for Christians such as J
ohn Burt, It is Burt, the ex-marine and former Klansman, whose figure looms in e

very cloud of smoke that has risen from the clinics in Pensacola, whether from b
omb or gun; Burt, with his gray beard and black teeth, who came to prominence du
ring the trial of the Christmas bombers, brandishing a pickled fetus he called "
Baby Charlie" and giving his blessing to the bombing; Burt who has turned his ho
me for unwed mothers, Our Father's House, into a boot camp for antiabortion prot
esters on the public dole; Burt who put David Gunn's face on a wanted poster; Bu
rt who prayed with Michael Griffin for the salvation of Gunn's soul three days b
efore Gunn fell dead and Griffin confessed to killing him. And it is Burt, of co
urse, who trespassed on Doc Britton's property, left his message of love at Doc'
s office and accused him of "crimes against humanity" on a new poster, one that
says "UNWANTED: JOHN BAYARD BRITTON."
Would he do it? Would Burt kill a man to save what science regards as a potentia
lity-a genetic blossom, unfolding-and he regards as a child? Would he countenanc
e the murder of a doctor, of an abortionist, of a "bottom-feeder," of John Bayar
d Britton? No, he says: "I don't have any problem taking out a clinic as long as
nobody's in the clinic. I draw the line at the taking of human life." Oh, he kn
ows why somebody might be moved to kill a doctor, and he sees how tempting an op
tion murder may be, given that we have an ungodly president, that the federal go
vernment is moving to limit peaceful protest, that Christians are growing frustr
ated with the rule of unjust laws. He just doesn't care for that particular form
of expression. He knows that he is old-fashioned that way. He knows that "they'
re out there now," the Christians who will take recourse to the gun, because, we
ll, it just makes sense."Anyone can shoot a doctor." He knows that in the future
, when the real work of his movement is being done by those who have decided tha
t the only course of action is to "take out ten or fifteen doctors," people "wil
l look at us the way we look at National Right to Life"-that is, as "wimps." He
can even see himself running a kind of Underground Railroad, offering safe haven
to those who do the killing. He just doesn't want to become involved in the kil
ling itself. That is the future, and Burt has not claimed it. The future has bee
n claimed by someone else, a man named Paul Hill.
219Y-125-008
The procedure, performed by Britton as many as thirty-five times in a day, is ov
er in minutes.
The bearded man, preaching the Gospel over the fence until his face turns red an
d spittle cakes in the corners of his mouth-he has outlived his usefulness. The
clinic workers and the NOW escorts sit under the trees and applaud his sermons.
Although he is one of Burt's men, they laugh at him and call him "Old Lard-Ass."
He is not Paul Hill.
The monk, in his brown robes, carrying a blood-spattered crucifix over his shoul
der-he is sort of archaic, too. He comes to the clinic from a monastery in Alaba
ma every Friday -the day the clinic does abortions-and leads a circle of Catholi
cs in the Rosary. The clinic workers call them "our little Catholics." They are
gentle; the prayers escape their lips in a soft murmur, and the monk is their le
ader. He is not Paul Hill, either.
The man who is almost ostentatiously clean-cut, with the straw-blond hair and th
e orangy tan and the chapped lips; the man who looks like a Peace Corps worker c
irca 1963, in his shortsleeved sky-blue shirt and blue slacks and aviator-style
glasses; the man who is painfully polite and often speaks with a little smile, a
s the banality of his presentation clashes with the enormity of his message-the
clinic workers have no name for him yet. They just say that he is "scary" and th
at he'd better stay away from them and their children. Some say that should he e
ver threaten them, they would shoot him -which he must find somehow pleasing, be
cause he is Paul Hill, and Paul Hill believes in the potentialities of murder.

He has come to the Ladies Center today, as he does every Friday, to walk up and
down North 9th Avenue and hold up a sign emblazoned with the words "PROTECT INNO
CENT CHILDREN NOT GUILTY DOCTORS" or "HOW OLD DOES A CHILD HAVE TO BE BEFORE YOU
DEFEND HER WITH FORCE?" Hill has great faith in what he calls "force." That's w
hat he is doing, has been called upon to do-"proclaiming the justice of the use
of force." He showed up at the Ladies Center with the timing of a prophet, six w
eeks before Gunn's murder; no one knew him, no one had heard of him, but two day
s after Gunn died, Hill called The Phil Donahue Show and told a producer what he
had to say. He flew up to New York City, and, sitting on the same stage as Gunn
's son, he told the world that the Bible is clear in its justification of deadly
forcehell, Hill construes the Golden Rule as a call to arms-and that Gunn deser
ved to die. Oh, sure, the crowd howled; it hurled its imprecations and insults.
But as Hill later told the pastor of his church, he liked it, he felt very much
in his element-for this is what he had been chosen to do, to be the "herald" of
a new belief.
His church "excommunicated" him. Hill is not without a congregation, though; the
re are others who believe as he does that Christians have to live above the laws
of man, answering only to the laws of God; who believe that the Bible not only
allows them but asks them, commands them, to kill in the cause of Christ. There
is David Trosch, the Catholic priest in nearby Magnolia Springs, Alabama, who tr
ied to put an advertisement in a Mobile newspaper, calling the killing of aborti
onists "justifiable homicide." There are the editors of a "rescue" magazine in O
regon, Life Advocate, who publish Hill's writings. There is a convicted clinic-b
omber, Michael Bray, in Washington, D.C., with whom Hill trades ideas. There is
a movement, by God, and Hill, by virtue of his residence in Pensacola, is at its
center. He is in the vanguard of a historical inevitability, yes, and now, with
the trial of Michael Griffin about to begin, they will gather together, all the
Christians who envision the gun as the tool necessary to reconfigure our societ
y in accordance with God's laws, and they will announce themselves,
"Coming out here in front of the clinic used to be considered outrageous," Hill
says as the cars go in and out of the clinic's parking lot. "Now it's old hat. R
escue used to be outrageous. Now it's old. The next thing will be the use of for
ce. Right now it's the focus of a lot of attention, but pretty soon it will be o
ld hat and we'll wonder why we didn't think of it sooner."
He would not kill anyone, he says; that's not his calling. He is simply an advoc
ate, someone who "advocates the advocacy of force." Why wouldn't Hill kill, if h
e thinks killing is just? "You don't put Robert E. Lee on the front lines," he t
old his former pastor. Killing doctors, he says, is "an individual thing. If an
individual feels called to do something like that, it is entirely up to the indi
vidual. We're just saying that force is just. It's up to each individual to make
his own contribution."
Doc pushes his hand into a rubber glove. He holds out his thumb, and a nurse squ
eezes a blob of lubricating jelly on his thumbnail. On an examining table is a w
oman, young, with frosted-blonde hair, a round Kewpie-doll face and eyelashes li
ke spokes. She is resting under a white flannel sheet that is bedecked with a pa
stel design; her feet, in white socks, are braced by stirrups.
Doc puts his hand on her belly and says, "It's about as big as a softball, a nic
e, soft softball." He is smiling, somewhat rakishly; his voice is soft and furre
d, almost a caricature of an old doctor's voice. With his thumb, he examines the
woman's cervix. "Tell me if you feel anything," he says, but she just looks at
the nurse with her wide eyes and nods her head, and says not a word. "Well," Doc
says, "then tell me if you faint or if you die." Then he gives her a painkiller
, "a paracervical block," with a long needle, and she says "I can feel it; I jus
t don't want to look."

"Why-because if you don't look you won't know how dreadful it is?" he asks, and,
with the injection completed, he leaves the room.
The patient looks at the nurse. "Are you sure he's...?
"Well, he's old," the nurse says, "but he knows what he's doing."
In truth, Doc scares them, the young women who come to the Ladies Center. He has
been doing abortions for more than twenty years. As soon as the Supreme Court w
rote Roe v. Wade into law, he applied some heat to the shaft of a ballpoint pen,
fashioned it into a cannula (the stiff tube that's inserted through the cervix
during an abortion), attached the cannula to a hose and the hose to a small vacu
um and went into business. In the Ladies Center, although the cannula is a long
plastic tube, rather than the body of a ballpoint pen, and the vacuum is a large
beige box fitted with hoses and gauges, rather than a small gray cylinder, ther
e is still something ramshackle about Doc, something improvisatory and unsettled
... and when he returns to the room, he looks at the patient and says "Okay, are
you ready? You haven't changed your mind, have you?"
The woman glances at the nurse and rolls her eyes. The nurse shakes her head and
then, with Doc sitting on a stool between the stirrups, presses a black switch
on the vacuum console. The machine rumbles and shudders, working itself into a p
ulsing hum, and almost instantly the clear hose that runs from the cannula to th
e console turns red, so red it is almost purple, the red of raw meat, and there
is a sucking sound, the sound of a straw scouring a nearly empty glass. The pati
ent's face instantly turns pale, her eyes shocked wide open. As the hose fills w
ith a