FLORIDA TODAY, 1/15/96, Pro-lifers reflect on jail time

ABORTION INDUSTRY IN MELBOURNE, FLORIDA
LAWSUITS
RANEY V AWARE WOMAN
DOCKET / CHRONOLOGICAL FILE
FLORIDA TODAY, 1/15/96, Pro-lifers reflect on jail time

FLORIDA TODAY, Monday, January 15, 1996

Pro-lifers reflect on jail time
3 activists served 30 days for violating buffer zone

Picture Caption: PRO-LIFE ACTIVISTS gather recently to discuss their experiences as inmates at the Brevard County Detention Center in December. They are, from left, Patricia McEwen, Meredith Raney, and Ray Unterberger.

By Maurice Tamman, FLORIDA TODAY

Patricia McEwen spent most of December in the Brevard County jail, including Christmas Day.

"It was culture shock," the pro-life activist recalled at a recent gathering of fellow jailed pro-life activists Ray Unterberger and Meredith Raney, after their release from jail.

Each served a 30-day sentence in December for violating a court-ordered 36-foot buffer zone around Melbourne's Aware Woman Center for Choice in 1993. They were among five activists convicted in July 1993. Their sentences were not imposed until Dec. 6, after they had exhausted their appeals.

Keith Tucci, a former Melbourne resident and national pro-life movement leader, also served his 30 day sentence in December. Tucci now lives in Pittsburgh. Eric Olson served his 30-day sentence and remains in the area, but he declined to talk about his experience in the Brevard County Detention Center in Sharpes.

Although each of the pro-life activists made a similar sacrifice for the movement, each has assumed very different roles in the cause.

McEwen has been held at jails before but never mixed with a jail's typical population.

She is a former college professor, has a doctorate in media communications and works as a secretary for the Christian Life Church in Palm Bay.

"I'm a woman who has spent most of my life in the professional world," she said. When she arrived at the Brevard County Detention Center, she was housed with prostitutes and drug addicts.

McEwen said for the first few days, she felt sorry for herself and pleaded and prayed for a bed in one of the jail's so-called honor cells.

One of the guards even said, "I like you 2-7-9 (McEwen's inmate number), you understand respect," McEwen said. It didn't do her any good.

After a few days, she turned to the same faith that led to her arrest for violating the buffer zone. "I started to ask myself why I was there," she recalled.

McEwen said she spoke with the jail's chaplain and started ministering to the women around her, spiritually nursing them in a way.

"And I was told while I was in there, the pod was a much calmer place."

Reflecting on her time in jail, McEwen said she is not sorry she was caught. Her belief that secular laws permitting abortion contradict the 10 Commandments remains strong.

God "didn't give us the 10 suggestions, He gave us the 10 Commandments," she said.

Since her release in late December, McEwen said she has continued writing and talking to some of the women who were in jail with her, and plans to continue working with the inmates.

"Somebody loved me enough to say, 'You are on the wrong path.'" Still, she does not plan on violating the buffer zone again, although she regularly stands on the safe side of a blue line marking the buffer zone around the clinic.

But she also conceded if someone stops in the suffer zone and asks for some literature on services available as an alternative to abortion, she will do what it takes to reach that person even if it means stepping into the buffer zone to hand it to them.

Making sacrifices

If McEwen is a nurse in the pro-life movement, then Unterberger is an infantryman.

In addition to the time he spent in Brevard's jail, Unterberger served 101 days in federal custody for violating the Federal Freedom of access to Clinic Entrances law March 4 at the Aware Woman Medical Center in Palm Beach County.

Unterberger said he prepared five years for his jail sentence last year. It wasn't so much saving money to support his family while he served time behind bars, but "to get myself out of debt so my family didn't go hungry," he said of his December sentence.

Unterberger said the three activists made the type of sacrifices many civil rights activists made during the 1950s and 1960s. And he rejected any connection between his activities and the slaying of abortion clinic doctors and workers in Pensacola and Brookline, Mass.

He said all causes attract people who see violence as a means to reach a goal, even if the majority of people involved are nonviolent.

"Yet they're still valid causes," he said. "They said the same thing about Martin Luther King, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize."

All three activists agreed the perception of the movement's potential for violence is unfair, and they would be the first to call authorities if someone started urging violence against clinics or its workers.

Fighting buffer zone

Raney is the pragmatist among the three.

He is trying to stop the Melbourne Police Department from enforcing the buffer zone, claiming authorities are not prosecuting people recently arrested outside the clinic. The city therefore risks paying substantial civil judgments for wrongful arrest, Raney said.

"Without prosecution, it looks like harassment," Raney wrote in a recent letter to Melbourne City Manager Henry Hill.

The Melbourne City Council will decide whether to stop enforcing the buffer zone at a meeting Jan. 23.

Raney also contends clinic officials should pay for police presence if they want it, because they were the ones who requested the injunction that created the buffer zone, not the city or prosecutors.

A Melbourne police officer is stationed at the clinic all days that doctors are performing abortions there.

Yet arrests outside the clinic have dropped from a high of 147 in 1993, to 18 in 1994 and five in 1995, according to police records.

And since the three mass trials of almost 150 activists in July 1993, most cases have been dismissed or not pursued. Of the convicted activists, all but six received a probationary sentence plus fines, including the money to help the city cover costs of enforcing the buffer zone.

But Raney and McEwen warned pro-choice advocates not to interpret those numbers to mean the pro-life movement has weakened. In fact, they said, it's stronger than ever.

"We just don't have all the fanfare (of the 1993 protests)," McEwen said.

Raney thought the appeal courts would throw out his jail sentence for violating the buffer zone. It didn't, and he served his time.

"I believed in the system," he said.

Raney foresees a day soon when the Aware Woman clinic will be closed. But it will be the county's growth that forces it out, not the pro-life movement, he said.

There are plans to widen Harbor City Boulevard, which could force the clinic out of its current location.

"And I don't know if there is a place in Melbourne which would have them."