The Anti-Abortion Campaign Against Dr. George Tiller

Before long, protesters from Operation Rescue showed up at her house. They parked a tractor-trailer across the street, plastered with twenty-foot-long images of dismembered fetuses. From its speakers came the kind of sweet, tinkling music that lures children from their back yards in pursuit of Dreamsicles. One protester, a somber man in a tan windbreaker with a three-foot crucifix thrust before him, performed an exorcism on Phares' front lawn, sprinkling holy water on the grass to cast demons from the property.

Phares, a small-boned woman with an irreverent sense of humor, joked about the exorcism. "Wish he'd held off on that holy water till after we'd put the fertilizer down," she said. But her husband wasn't amused. Since 1994, there have been five assassination attempts on abortion providers at their homes. A few days after the protest, Phares' husband got out his revolver, loaded it and taught Sara how to use it.

Operation Rescue's smear campaign against Phares is part of a new strategy to shut down abortion clinics by systematically harassing their employees into quitting. Banned by law from blockading clinics as it did in its early days, Operation Rescue has taken its offensive to the front lawns and mailboxes of clinic workers. In Wichita, members of the group rummage through employees' garbage in search of incriminating information. They tail them around town as they run errands. They picket clinic staffers at restaurants while they're inside having dinner and castigate them while they're standing in line at Starbucks. Operation Rescue is also visiting companies that do business with the clinic and threatening them with a boycott if they don't sever their ties with the facility. This is America's new abortion war, and the objective, in military terms, is to cut off the supply lines to abortion clinics and demoralize their troops.

Troy Newman, the head of Operation Rescue, calls it the Year of Rebuke — and if it works in Wichita, he plans to unleash the campaign of intimidation on abortion clinics all across the country. "I want these employees to realize that their lives have changed," he says. "As long as they're embedded in the abortion industry receiving blood money, they can't live a normal life. They just can't."

Newman seems more like a breezy Southern California surfer than one of the nation's most prominent anti-abortion activists. The day I meet him, he's dressed in jeans, a bomber jacket and a pair of python-skin boots. He's a youthful thirty-eight, with a gray-flecked goatee and a quick, disarming smile that could sell you something you didn't think you needed. He tries to be a good guy — he feeds the homeless and opens doors for women. He buys boots made of farm-raised python, to ensure that no one raped the jungle to boost his fashion cred. He's not a loose cannon like Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry: You won't catch him ranting about how hatred and intolerance are good. Newman knows that kind of rhetoric cost the pro-life movement a lot of allies in the 1990s. He'd rather not be called a conservative — he hates labels. Never mind the autographed photo of Charlton Heston in his office, or the fact that he home-schools his four kids to protect them from sex-ed and evolutionism. He's rethinking his support for the war in Iraq. He loves his gay brother. If he weren't pro-life, he might even be a Democrat. Or a libertarian.

Even Newman's opponents find him tough to resist. When a group of pro-choice provocateurs who call themselves the Maggot Punks showed up at the Wichita clinic to give Operation Rescue protesters a hard time, Newman bought them ice cream, invited them to his church and took one of them out to lunch. "There've been a couple of times where Troy has been talking to me and I've thought, 'Could this guy maybe have a point?'" says a Maggot Punk named Steven Pottorff. "He's that convincing."