Sniper: The True Story of Anti-Abortion Killer James Kopp by Jon Wells Read Free Book Online Page B

sometimes that requires force. Gandhi was a pacifist, the kids were told, but far worse than engaging in violence when faced with a moral crisis is to do nothing at all.
    Picture Joan Andrews one afternoon around Christmastime 1958. She is all of nine years old, holding the lifeless body of the newborn baby boy:
    The baby limp, a pale, broken doll. The pain in Joan’s small face, the tears, as she cuts off a piece of her hair to bury with little Joel. Mom had delivered the baby at home. Joel had lived, but briefly. Mom had phoned dad at the school where he was principal, and Joan came right home. They immerse the baby in baptismal water. The family speaks in whispers. He was perfect, so perfect. They put him in a small box, then each of them cuts a lock from their hair to make a bed for him inside. The vigil complete, they bury him in the backyard. Stillborn? Fetus? No. Joel is a baby. A child of God. Joan’s brother.
    Fast-forward to 1973, and a 24-year-old woman from Tennessee stands on a sidewalk outside a women’s health clinic in Chicago. Joan Andrews is at the abortion clinic—the mill, the death camp itself. That’s where they were killing the babies, she thought. She could all but feel the devil’s presence. She was a meek-looking woman, her eyes didn’t look directly at you when she spoke, but angled away, as though avoiding any hint of confrontation, as if she were staring at images that only she could see. What should she do? She wasn’t exactly sure. Disarm them? In 1973 there was no active anti-abortion counterrevolution to speak of. She felt alone. Joan turned and walked away from the clinic. She would start with some little things, small protests, until she heard a louder calling from God.
    *** Science did much to fuel the growing pro-life movement in the 1970s. The field of fetology was a new frontier, unveiling some of the mystery of what was developing inside a woman’s uterus, using new technologies like electronic fetal heart monitoring, hysteroscopy, radio-immuno chemistry, and, most of all, ultrasound, in 1976.
    The visual, and emotional, impact of ultrasound was enormous. Not only was it a revolutionary technology for monitoring the fetus from a medical standpoint, it was also a new weapon for the pro-life side of the debate. The ultrasound used sound waves to outline and project the image of the fetus. Now doctors and patients could watch the movements of the fetus, consider its shape, size, gender, watch it swallow, urinate. The ultrasound humanized the fetus. In 1984, a movie called The Silent Scream radicalized some who watched the grainy images of a fetus being terminated.
    “The child is extremely agitated,” intoned the narrator. “Even though the suction tip has not touched it. We see the child’s mouth open in a silent scream, a child threatened with extinction. The heart rate has sped up, it does sense aggression in its sanctuary. It is moving away, in a pathetic attempt to escape. The body is now being torn, systematically, from the head.”
    The figurative slap in the face for Jim Kopp on abortion came in 1980. As part of his research at Cal State Fullerton, he worked on a project at Stanford Hospital involving nerve reconnection for Vietnam veterans with spinal-cord injuries. He would one day tell a court of law how the incident had been the turning point for him. He said he knew a doctor:
    She takes him down to visit the morgue, in the bowels of the hospital. Jim stands by a long metal table with a paper bucket at one end. He looks inside the bucket at the aborted fetus. Birth defects, six fingers on one hand, genitalia not properly developed. Sees the doctor, instrument in hand, flipping this fetus—this baby—back and forth. She’s doing it so casually, like a rag doll. This nice, intelligent woman probably feels she’s doing nothing wrong, seems proud, because she has detected some of these defects. Recommended the abortion.
“Glad we found the defects in time,