What's the matter with Buffalo?

The son of an abortion doctor uses his dad's story -- he faced death threats -- to show how his hometown became ground zero for clinic violence.

By Lynn Harris

Read more: Abortion, Books, Reviews, Book reviews

March 9, 2006 | On Feb. 28, the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that federal extortion and racketeering laws cannot be used to stop antiabortion extremists from violent or intrusive clinic protests. While this ruling is a giant bummer for the National Organization for Women, which has devoted two decades and immeasurable resources to the case -- and while we do, of course, still have plenty of other reproductive rights matters to worry about -- it's not as if bombs and blockades (which have not disappeared) are now suddenly legal. Thanks to the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act -- which, every time I think about it, boggles my mind with the sheer necessity of its existence -- violence and vandalism against clinics and their patients and employees is not protected as "free speech."

There was no such thing as FACE, however, in 1992, when antiabortion activists invaded Buffalo, N.Y., for the "Spring of Life," a series of large-scale attempts to shut down the city's abortion clinics. (I was there, having schlepped from Boston as part of NOWs counter-presence.) Then again, even FACE couldn't have saved the life of Buffalo physician Barnett Slepian, who performed abortions as part of his OB-GYN practice. In 1999, abortion opponent James Kopp shot Slepian through the window of his kitchen while the doctor was heating up some split-pea soup.

There now remains only one Buffalo physician who performs abortions: the Israel-born Dr. Shalom Press. (A handful of others fly in from neighboring states.) Fortunately for those with an interest in the anatomy of the antiabortion movement, and in how "pro-life" came to mean murder, Dr. Press' son is a journalist -- one who has long been haunted by the too-close-to-home assassination of his father's colleague. In "Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict That Divided America," Eyal Press, a writer for the Nation, uses his family's story -- which includes death threats, perceived and actual, against his father -- to help illustrate Buffalo's transformation into a crucible of clinic violence. Buffalo also becomes a parable not only for the crystallization of large-scale, often violent antiabortion activism, but also for late 20th century America itself: "a place," Press writes, "where issues of morality and culture would come to supercede those of class."

"Absolute Convictions" is one part memoir (a genre that seems to have sparked its own opposition movement) to about four parts social history and reportage. The book opens with the murder of Dr. Slepian and ends with a rather chilling account of the apprehension, trial and sentencing of his killer. In between, Press weaves together the multinational history of his family, the urban history of Buffalo, the legal history of Roe v. Wade, and the cultural history of the American "morality" movement, with opposition to abortion as one of its cornerstones. Where these strands come together is in Press' account of how Buffalo, a prime candidate for populist power struggles, became instead a destination for conservative religious activism (not just the carpetbagging Spring of Lifers, but also local groups that led the daily harassment of Dr. Press and his colleagues -- including a series of circuslike protests six months after Slepian's murder).

What's the matter with Buffalo? There as elsewhere, union leaders -- thanks in part to McCarthyism -- lost their edge: The church came to replace the CIO. "Perhaps it's no surprise that, in a city where people had good reason to want to believe some higher force was looking after them, more and more would gravitate from the brotherhood of labor to another kind of fraternity: the fellowship of Christ," writes Press. At the end of the 20th century, this shift played nicely into the hands of conservative power: "As the chasm between rich and poor widened, conservative activists would hone a language that linked the insecurity many Americans felt to the depredations of an immoral elite: not the economic elite nineteenth-century populists had inveighed against but a cultural elite. Not to financiers and robber barons but liberals, homosexuals, and feminists. Not the people who had moved Buffalo's factories to the Sun Belt and decimated its unions, but the ones who supported abortion rights and could be blamed for the nation's moral and spiritual decline."

But there are people who oppose abortion, and there are people who blockade clinics -- and there are people who kill in the name of "life." (NARAL's tally: seven physician or clinic-staff murders since 1993, 17 attempted since 1991 -- never mind the arson, vandalism, blockades and trespassing.) Is there a difference among these groups? Yes and no, Press says. He argues that the perpetrators of violence, like Slepian's killer, are not just loony anomalies; that many antiabortion activists who claim to abhor all killing can distance themselves only so far from such murders. Press writes: "In these radical pockets of pure belief, the logic of violence flowed from a set of absolutes, a Manichean view of reality in which doubt was eliminated and militant action urged."

Home to so many narrative elements, "Absolute Convictions" is densely populated indeed. Yet sprawl is not a problem. Press' structure is clear, his narrative cogent. The one section that falls flat, curiously, is one that offers tremendous opportunity for pathos. This chapter begins with a mea culpa: Only when the doctor reminds his son "to speak to a group of people whose voices have been oddly absent from the debate about abortion" does it occur to the younger Press to interview women in his father's office who are awaiting abortions. For his own near-oversight, Press blames both the media -- which is often more comfortable with talking heads than real people -- and the "enduring veil of shame and secrecy" still surrounding abortion.

It's appropriate, in principle, to include these women in the book, but the way it's done -- herding them into a chapter of their own -- is awkward. One by one, Press either describes them lazily ("she looked like a typical suburban soccer mom") or overreaches: "the faintness of her voice and the meekness of her manner conveyed something rarely seen in women from more privileged backgrounds -- a sense of shame, a feeling that she'd screwed up and had only herself to blame. Perhaps Tracy understood how little sympathy a woman in her circumstances could expect about the predicament she faced. Perhaps..." Perhaps she's just shy! Or perhaps you should just ask her.

There's also this weird moment: "She told me she worked as a bartender, at a bar I later found out featured table dances." Maybe Press is just doing somersaults to be accurate; after all, the woman herself did not tell him the bar featured table dances. But Press' phrasing somehow makes him sound like a mustachioed detective recounting a crime, or at least a journalist drumming up sympathy for a barmaid with a heart of gold.

Next page: What about the women?