Guadalajara, Mexico
1979
Bart Slepian neared completion of his medical degree from Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara. He still had little cons on the go, even after ending his career as an arm-wrestling hustler. Maybe it was because, during his early life, Bart saw his dad scrape for every penny he made. Maybe it was a matter of necessity, given his own financial needs and those of his sister, Serena, in Nevada. Or maybe Bart Slepian simply liked the game, liked to challenge authority and figured there’s no harm being done. Whatever it was, Bart took to smuggling goods back and forth across the border. He drove what the guys had dubbed “the family car,” a boat of a Chevy, navy blue, his pride and joy, put a huge sound system in it. He’d buy items cheap in Mexico, lamps, home fixtures, sell them out of the trunk when he got to Reno.
Bart’s instinct to never back down got him in trouble. One night he got into it with a group of teens. He came home from school and found a group of them in front of his driveway. He asked them to move, an argument started, one of the teens threw a rock through Bart’s window. The police got involved and Bart spent the night at the police station—along with buddy Rick Schwarz, who had been dragged into it since Rick spoke Spanish.
Rick always said that Bart never started anything, but he would not walk away when he felt somebody was being unreasonable. Typically he would confront situations on his own, for better or worse. In that respect he admired the Israelis tremendously. Bart Slepian, like Rick, held great respect for the Jewish culture, but rarely set foot inside a synagogue. Bart admired the way the Israelis got things done in the face of the terrorist threat, speaking softly and carrying a very big stick.
Rick, an unabashed liberal, disagreed with him on the Middle East, but Bart would never soften his view. “Israel,” he told Rick, “doesn’t sit around wringing its hands.
They take care of things.”
“Bart—”
“You might not like how they take care of it, but they take care of it, end of story.”
“But—”
“No sitting around, ‘woe is us.’ They do something.” Bart voted Republican, while Rick, a proud liberal, voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976.
“That’s not principled, Rick,” Bart cracked, “that’s plain stupid voting for that dopey peanut farmer.”
In 1979, Bart left Mexico and returned to New York State to complete his fifth year of meds. It was called the Fifth Pathway system to becoming a doctor. It was for Americans who had completed medical school abroad. They had to spend a year working in the States under supervision, something between a fourth-year medical student and intern. If you did OK, you could take the licensing exam, which Bart did, and passed, qualifying him for a normal internship and residency. He applied to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology. During his residency in 1979, he met a nurse at Buffalo General Hospital named Lynne Breitbart. At the time, he was doing what he could to get by, did physicals at the hospital for five dollars an hour. She was 23 years old, ten years Bart’s junior. They soon got married.
Bart Slepian had no burning desire to deliver babies or help women. But he had solid technical skills, was good with his hands. He wanted to get a mix of surgery and general medicine. With the 1980s dawning, a conservative Republican and staunch ally of Israel, Ronald Reagan, soundly beat the liberal peanut farmer for the presidency. And Bart Slepian was, finally, a doctor. He was 34 years old and an OB, never mind the setbacks and the people who said he couldn’t do it.
For the pro-life movement, the 1980s promised an era of revolutionary change. Ronald Reagan was a hero to conservatives who opposed abortion. “Regrettably,” Reagan said, “we live at a time when some persons do not value all human life. They want to pick and choose which individuals have value. We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life—the unborn—without diminishing the value of all human life.”
At the same time, the pro-life rescue movement interfering with abortion services at women’s health clinics grew. The rescues had several elements to them: picket signs and chanting, but also “sidewalk counseling.” That meant cornering a patient outside the clinic, lobbying the woman to reconsider her choice. Activists felt that one in five prospective patients would not make it to a subsequent appointment if deterred from attending her first appointment to abort. Other times, pro-lifers blockaded the entrance. Police got involved.
Others took the violence up several notches. On August 12, 1982, an Illinois doctor and his wife were kidnapped by three pro-life radicals and held at gunpoint for eight days. The trio, headed by Don Benny Anderson, claimed to be with a group called The Army of God. In 1984, clinics were being targeted more frequently for firebombs, arson, vandalism. There were 18 incidents in all, a couple of dozen death threats called in. Three men went to jail: Thomas Spinks, Kenneth Shields, and Michael Bray—the man who had met Jim Kopp in Switzerland. The bombings illustrated the double-edged sword of abortion procedures being confined to clinics instead of hospitals. Clinics offered women preferred service, argued pro-choice advocates, but also, in contrast to hospitals, they became visible symbols in the war—“abortuaries” and “mills” where the babies were slaughtered, in the minds of radical pro-lifers. That same year, 1984, Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun, who had written the opinion on Roe v. Wade, received a death threat in the mail. It was signed The Army of God.
Daly City, California
Spring 1984
He drove to south San Francisco, towards the airport. Daly City was in the industrial end of the city, an entirely different world from Jim Kopp’s old Marin County neighborhood, far from the beauty of the waterfront, the Golden Gate Bridge, the sea lions in the harbor. Daly City sat in a valley, populated mostly by workingclass people, many of them immigrants. On April 3, 1984, Jim was arrested at a protest at a clinic there, charged with trespassing, and also battery.
Battery?
In California battery is a misdemeanor, like assault, petty theft, and public drunkenness, and therefore less serious than a felony crime, like sexual offenses and drug and property violations. But battery is a violent offense: deliberately causing physical harm to another person through physical acts.
Peaceful, prayerful Jim Kopp?
Perhaps he was merely sitting there cross-legged, reciting verse, and, when he was carried away, he resisted. Or maybe he felt a current running through him, physical, angry, one that inspired more potent action than peaceful resistance. Most everyone who met Jim was struck by what they considered his soulful, gentle nature: the boyish grin, the soft voice. Jim knew his friends felt he was incapable of violence. He also knew they were mistaken. Those who caught him in moments of candor, who looked square into his eyes, waited long enough for his self-effacing “who me?” routine to pass, could see flashes of the intensity and seriousness of purpose that went well beyond that of a conscientious objector.
Jim continued to read voraciously, and fell in love with a book called Story of a Soul, the autobiography of Saint Thérèse d’Lisieux, a woman who entered a convent at the age of 15 and died in obscurity at age 24. “At last I have found my calling,” she wrote in her journals. “My calling is love.” The core of her spiritual message was the “little way,” that any act, no matter how trivial, is infinitely valuable if done out of love. He studied the history of birth control, sterilization law. He started drawing connections between the Holocaust and abortion. It was all becoming so clear to him. Everything happens for a reason, and every event influences another.
Through the fall of 1984 he attended protests outside abortion clinics in the Bay Area. In September Jim was arrested for trespassing and battery. A month later, the same thing. Early December, assault with a deadly weapon. He relished the courtroom atmosphere. The strategy, the use of language, nuance. He knew how to play the game. Down the road, he would offer advice to other pro-lifers on how to navigate the judicial system. He was, he frequently reminded others, a lawyer’s son. In the fall of 1984, he formally received his master’s degree from Cal State Fullerton. He founded a group in San Francisco called the Lourdes Foundation, which opened a “Free Pregnancy Center,” and named himself its president. Jim billed it as a birth control referral and information center. The center gave pregnancy tests, educated women on the dangers of abortion and assisted pregnant women. It also showed graphic photos of aborted fetuses to patients, who were then also referred to doctors who opposed abortion.
On Good Friday, 1985, he marched in a pro-life procession that went nine miles from St. Martin Church in San Jose to Our Lady of Peace in Santa Clara. Then he drove to south San Francisco to Juvenile Hall detention center. Officials only knew that this pleasant, bookish man was president of the Lourdes Foundation. They learned later, to their horror, that he was an anti-abortion radical—but not before he had an opportunity to take the stage before a group of female inmates and present his pro-life stump speech. Here was Jim, the missionary bestowing wisdom, saving women from so much pain that they did not understand—they had been brainwashed by the media, the liberal culture, the feminists. The young women were, he said, mostly young prostitutes, and three of them were pregnant. You do not have to get an abortion, he told them. You do not. God bless.
For some time, Jim had considered converting to Catholicism, perhaps even pursuing the priesthood. One day he hopped in his car and drove south down the coast, Highway 1, past windswept beaches, Monterey, Carmel. Four hours later he was negotiating cliffs along the coastline known as Big Sur. He gained elevation, where the water is metallic against the sun, its texture dimpled by the wind. Then off the highway along a dirt road, steeper still, straight up, a harrowing ride, he had never experienced anything like it. Finally, at the top, he found the humble monastery called New Camaldoli Hermitage.
The hermitage was a place where aspiring monks came to study and learn. You could smell the flowers and pine in the air, hear nothing but silence. He met Father Isaiah Teichert, talked for many hours with the priest. Father Isaiah, Jim reflected, came to know him better than anyone in the Bay Area. That included, sadly, he thought, his family, who had never really known him. His fellow pro-lifers never quite figured him out either.
What, exactly, did Father Isaiah advise? Years later, his relationship with Jim Kopp was not something the priest was willing to discuss. Whatever Father Isaiah’s advice, Jim now wondered if his mission might be to embrace the world of the Benedictine monk. He had been called to pray but action was necessary, too. So much violence, so much blood shed by innocent babies. Jim knew what his mission could ultimately mean—that he was destined to die a drawn-out, painful death. So be it.
The notion of the “victim soul” came from Jesus, who redeemed mankind by dying for their sins. It also derived from the Old Testament and the ancient Jewish custom of letting a goat loose in the wilderness on Yom Kippur, after the high priest had symbolically laid upon the goat all the sins of the people. The unborn babies were victim souls. Jim decided he would be one as well.
Later that year he went east, to New York, joining the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, housed in a convent in the Bronx not far from Yankee Stadium. He was there several months, rising before dawn each day to feed the homeless and drug addicts who came to the order’s soup kitchen. He prayed, meditated and studied. He had few possessions and didn’t talk much to others. He owned three sets of clothes, washed them in a bucket.
Mother Teresa had said that “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, murder by the mother herself.” Jim would tell friends for years that he had once met Mother Teresa face-to-face, he told her about his calling from God, and she suggested he become a priest. Jim then told her that he was conflicted on the priesthood, because he felt a separate calling from Jesus to devote his life to stopping abortion.
About six months after joining the Bronx mission, he left, returning to California. He never stayed in one place for long. On May 21, 1986, in Redwood City, south of San Francisco, he was arrested at a protest outside a clinic and charged with obstruction and resisting arrest. On July 19 he was arrested in San Francisco for using force. He headed east.
On August 5, 1986 he was in Pensacola, Florida. He was anxious to show his support for the woman whose reputation within the anti-abortion movement was reaching heroic proportions. Her name was Joan Andrews. It was back in March 1986, in Pensacola, that Andrews cemented her status as “patron saint of the rescue movement” at the Pensacola Ladies Center. Along with another protester, Reverend John Burt, and his two daughters, Andrews walked inside the clinic and, with police in pursuit, tried to unplug a suction abortion machine. Police cuffed her, then arrested the others. Andrews grabbed the edge of the machine behind her cuffed hands, yanked and toppled it over, disabling it. There were no abortions that day. The trial made her a star within the movement, she was sentenced to five years at the Broward Correctional Institute, Florida’s toughest maximum-security prison for women.
Jim Kopp and 300 others from far and wide made the trip to Pensacola, stood outside the clinic to protest the outrageous injustice done to Joan Andrews. It was heavenly for Jim to be among so many like-minded souls. He decided that, from that moment on, he would no longer go to jail angry, but with a cheerful heart. Among the group in Pensacola was a 58-year-old professor of philosophy from Fordham University in New York. His name was William Marra.
“We’re not eccentric, or extremist, but we’re here to see Joan Andrews free,” Marra told a reporter.
William Marra had a daughter named Loretta. She had just turned 23, studied philosophy at Fordham, and had, like her father, embraced the pro-life cause. Jim Kopp instantly felt great respect for William Marra, who had, like Jim’s father, served in the military. As for Loretta, Jim would, in time, make a connection with her that would grow stronger and stronger and ultimately, change his life.
Kopp headed back to California, and more protests and charges. September 6, in Richmond, trespassing. October 25, in San Jose, he invaded a clinic with another man and chained themselves to an examination table as 15 others protested outside. November 22 in Alameda, trespassing, causing injury, damaging property. He again headed for Florida. On Friday, November 28, the day after Thanksgiving, he was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest at the same Pensacola clinic where Joan Andrews had been arrested. Jim and others blocked the clinic doors with a truck. That same weekend a meeting was held at the Western Sizzlin’ steakhouse in town. One of the organizers was a man named Randall Terry. Terry unveiled his vision for a new, national, direct action campaign inspired by the impromptu assaults on clinics that had taken place. Terry called it “Operation Rescue.”
Among pro-lifers there were differences of opinion on tactics, on means and ends. Save the preborn, but how? What was the time frame for political change? What kind of action? Jim Kopp was part of the movement, had found a group to connect with—but how long could it conceivably last? He joined Randall Terry’s staff, but he would last only six months. His thinking was evolving on the utility of violence in the cause, and the distinction between man’s law and God’s law. Was history not replete with examples where man’s law required trumping by those willing to carry the torch, and weapons, for God’s law? Slavery was one example that pro-lifers most frequently cited. Jim listened to mainstream pro-life leaders take great pains to denounce violence in the cause. He felt they were not practicing Gandhi’s true satyagraha—civil resistance —which Jim thought should be active, outcome based, and sacrificial. He had a name for people who abused the concept: cowards.