Abortion Clinics

WASHINGTON -- The 16-month-old federal law that has led to a wide-ranging government crackdown on threats and violence against abortion clinics withstood a major challenge in the Supreme Court yesterday.The justices made no comment as they turned aside an anti-abortion group's broad constitutional complaint against a law that Congress passed to provide a national solution to escalating blockades, shootings and firebombings of clinics.The challenge proved to be an unsuccessful attempt to extend a Supreme Court ruling in June that raised questions about Congress' power to federalize local problems.

DEDHAM, Mass. - John C. Salvi III was convicted yesterday of murdering two receptionists at abortion clinics and sentenced to two terms of life in prison without parole, as a jury rejected his lawyers' claim that Salvi had acted under delusions brought on by paranoid schizophrenia.Judge Barbara Dortch- Okara ordered that Salvi serve the two life terms consecutively, and she also sentenced him to five additional terms that would mean 18 to 20 years in prison after the life terms for attempted murder in the wounding of five other people.

WASHINGTON -- Federal authorities have uncovered physical evidence that for the first time links the fatal bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 with bomb attacks at Atlanta-area abortion clinics in January 1997 and in Birmingham, Ala. last month, law enforcement officials said yesterday.The evidence connecting the bombings includes new forensic information emerging from the inquiry. Investigators have concluded that small steel plates built into the Olympic bomb -- apparently designed to force the blast in one direction -- matched the metal plates in two bombs planted at an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, the federal officials said.

Two doctors who Maryland authorities say botched an abortion last year in Elkton have been indicted on murder charges - in what appears to be the first use of the state's fetal homicide law involving a medical professional performing surgery. "We're in uncharted territory," Cecil County State's Attorney Edward D.E. Rollins said Friday. He declined to comment further because the indictment remains sealed until the suspects are arraigned in Maryland. They were arrested Wednesday in New Jersey and in Utah.

Denise Crowe dropped her toddler off with a sitter in February 2006 and drove with a friend to an Anne Arundel County clinic to get an abortion. It cost about $800. "She thought that she'd just have it done and nobody would know," said Stephanie White, her mother. White told lawmakers Wednesday that her daughter walked into a clinic run by a man who had been the subject of complaints. The day of the procedure, White said, an unqualified staff member pumped her daughter full of drugs.

Maryland health officials may ask state lawmakers for permission to oversee plastic surgery centers, a move inspired in part by the death of a Lochearn woman after liposuction. The state health department had already been considering whether to ask for a change to the legal definition of free-standing surgery centers to align regulations with medical risk instead of insurance billing practices, Secretary Joshua Sharfstein said. Surgical centers currently are subject to state inspection only if they meet certain criteria in how they bill insurance companies, he said.

CHICAGO -- A federal class-action lawsuit filed 12 years ago charging anti-abortion protesters with a conspiracy of extortion and violence to close abortion clinics finally begins today in Chicago, and its resolution could have national reverberations.In the suit, the National Organization for Women accuses the Pro-Life Action League and Operation Rescue of managing a nationwide campaign to shut down abortion clinics through acts or threats of physical violence and arson, among other things.

A group of students at the Johns Hopkins University is reviving a campus anti-abortion group that members say will perform "sidewalk counseling" - attempting to discourage pregnant women entering clinics from going through with the procedure. But critics worry that the tactics of Voice for Life will harm the vulnerable women the group says it is trying to help. On Tuesday, a panel of undergraduates will review a decision by the Hopkins Student Government Association to deny recognition to the group.

Opponents of abortion are at a crossroads. The overwhelming majority are what they say they are: pro-life. They abhor killing of any kind. They don't condone, and most of them condemn, the murders of abortion workers and other acts of violence against clinics and their staffs. However, the two murders in Brookline, Mass., last Friday and the related shooting incident in Norfolk, Va., the next day have drastically altered the dispute over abortion in this country.Two trends have become evident in the anti-abortion movement during the two years since Dr. David Gunn was slain outside his Pensacola, Fla., clinic during a demonstration.

ANOTHER point of view, this one from the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times:"It seems no small coincidence that a trial involving the murder of an abortion doctor is in the news at the same time that clinical tests of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill, are getting under way."The national controversy over abortion is now in a new stage; clearly the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans on this question has shifted its ground. The constitutional arguments that once preoccupied courts have receded, and the major political parties are largely sidestepping the issue.