Racketeer for Life

Fighting the Culture of Death From the Sidewalk to the Supreme Court

Joseph M. Scheidler

• Publisher: TAN Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781618908513
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Joseph M. Scheidler has fought for the unborn since the Supreme Court allowed abortion on demand with its 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton rulings. He was the target of a lawsuit brought by the National Organization for Women under federal racketeering laws. Found guilty in 1998, Scheidler triumphed twice in appeals before the Supreme Court in 2003 and again in 2006.Racketeer for Life explains how a former Benedictine monk and journalism professor was drawn into pro-life activism and describes his part in the history of the pro-life movement in the United States. Conversations, protests, and battles with clinic directors, doctors, politicians, judges, media personalities, and even other pro-lifers are woven together in this engaging account of the efforts of Scheidler and other activists to publicize the horrors of abortion, influence legislation, and, ultimately, to save lives.

CHAPTER 1

Sorry I Missed You

In the spring of 1987, I was in northern California to meet with local and national pro-life leaders and to speak at a rally. Early one morning, before the meetings began, I visited the newest branch of the Feminist Women’s Health Centers, a clinic in Redding. I hoped to talk with the new administrator there, but the clinic was closed, its windows dark and the door locked. I flipped over one of my Pro-Life Action League business cards and wrote, “Sorry I missed you.” I signed my initials—JMS—and wedged it in the door.

I met with the leaders and spoke at the rally, but I wasn’t able to stop back at the clinic before I left town. But I did see that business card again—eleven years later in federal court. It was March 1998, and I was on trial in downtown Chicago for violating federal racketeering laws. In the first week of a seven-week trial, that card was displayed for jurors on a screen as big as a billboard, while Dido Hasper, founder of the Feminist Women’s Health Center, testified to being scared when she arrived at her Redding clinic and found my card. The plaintiffs alleged that my card constituted a death threat, part of a pattern of conspiracy and extortion against the nation’s abortion providers and their clients.

Early in my activist career, I regularly visited abortion clinics, asking to speak with the physician or the administrator, hoping to learn why they got into the business and to try to talk them out of it. Over time, I realized that many are not happy—abortion is a grisly line of work. Some abortion providers responded to an outsider’s concern. I tried to persuade them to use their talents to build up society, not add to its many miseries. Strange as it seems, I’ve seen people quit the business after a compassionate encounter with a pro-lifer, some even right on the spot.

As I sat in that courtroom, seeing my card on that screen and trying to puzzle out how my message could be read as a death threat, I found myself wondering how I wound up there. How did a guy from Hartford City, Indiana, population seven thousand, end up a defendant in a federal racketeering trial? Chicago has a long history of mob bosses. But me? I didn’t know the first thing about running a national crime syndicate. But here I was, sitting in the Dirksen Federal Building at the defendant’s table, watching a jury study my handwriting, and hearing my life’s work described as a wild, decades-long crime spree.

This is how it happened. In 1973, when the Supreme Court’s abortion rulings were announced, I was working as an account executive with a public relations firm in Chicago. Within a few months, I’d left that job to work full time on the pro-life cause, some on my own and some part-time with the Illinois Right to Life Committee (IRLC). By January 1974, I was working as the director of the IRLC.

In those early days, most pro-lifers thought lobbying and debating were the best place for the movement’s energies. I believed in direct action, and I eventually had to found my own group, the Pro-Life Action League, for like-minded activists. There was no manual for how to be a pro-life activist. We tried a variety of tactics to save lives and to keep the issue before the American public.

After more than a decade of trying different approaches, learning what worked and what didn’t, adjusting our strategies against stifling pro-abortion campaigns, other pro-life groups started asking how to implement some of our tactics. So in 1985, I published CLOSED: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion. Most of the 99 Ways were techniques I’d tried myself. Some I’d only heard of, and a few were ideas that nobody had tried yet. The title font looked like stencils, the sort of thing you might see spray painted on a shuttered storefront. The idea was to expose the macabre realities of the abortion industry, to educate readers about the lives of the unborn, and to offer tangible, practical alternatives for unplanned and unwanted children. If we could take away clinics’ customers, we would drive clinics out of business.

When CLOSED was published, my father-in-law, an attorney, recommended I place my home in a land trust in case I was sued. I took his advice. A year later, when I was picketing the National Abortion Federation (NAF) convention in Kansas City, a man emerged from the hotel, picked me out of the small crowd, and handed me an envelope. It was a notice that I’d been named in a lawsuit brought by the National Organization for Women (NOW).

I didn’t think much of it. NOW had filed the suit in Delaware under federal antitrust charges. Legal injunctions and even false charges were nothing new, and they hadn’t deterred us before. This new gimmick of calling the pro-life movement an anticompetitive conspiracy to restrain trade seemed like quite a stretch. But regardless of how baseless their case was, we had to answer the charges.

My wife Ann’s brother-in-law, Ken Theisen, was a lawyer, and she asked him if he ever worked in antitrust law. He hadn’t, but he had a friend, Tom Brejcha, who had just briefed an antitrust case before the Supreme Court. So we set up a meeting.

My first impression of Tom was not good. He was too quiet. I thought we needed an aggressive attorney, and Tom just didn’t seem forceful enough. But when Tom said, almost inaudibly, “I win cases,” I heard a confidence in his voice that impressed me. Tom set to work on the case, along with young lawyers from Americans United for Life (AUL) Defense Fund. We applied for and were granted a change of venue from Delaware to Chicago. Soon after, Tom’s law firm dissolved. They wrote off the charges incurred for his services, which by then were about one hundred thousand dollars. Tom moved to the firm of Abramson & Fox and continued representing me in the case.

NOW evidently recognized the weakness in their antitrust case, and in 1989, they added charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, alleging that I was masterminding the movement of civil disobedience against abortion clinics that was sweeping the nation, and Tom Brejcha became an expert in racketeering law.

That same year, Planned Parenthood took out a full-page ad in newspapers and magazines across the country, including Time and Newsweek. It was a picture of me at a rally in Atlanta, bearded and wearing my fedora, with the caption, “Should a woman’s private medical decisions be made by a man with a bullhorn?”

The picture came from a picket outside a clinic in an old mansion set back from a sidewalk in downtown Atlanta. I asked if anyone there would be willing to march with me past the front of the clinic. The first volunteer was a boy about ten years old, and that encouraged others to follow. The police were called, but they allowed us to continue our march across the property, and nobody was arrested. As we marched past the clinic door, someone on the other side snapped the picture.

I never set out to craft a signature look, but that’s what happened. The beard started as a joke—I had a boss in the 1960s who told the staff she could do anything a man could do, so all the men grew beards. I wasn’t a hat-wearer either, until my dad, Matthias Herman Scheidler, died in December 1974 and I returned to Hartford City for his funeral. I went into his room and found his Alpaca coat and felt hat at the foot of his bed. It was a brutally cold day, so I put on the coat and picked up the hat—an exact fit. I wasn’t nearly as good-looking as Dad, but people said I looked like him, and that was a compliment.

I wore his hat back to Chicago, and I’ve worn one like it ever since. People recognize me by my hat and beard at pickets and rallies, and pro-life groups have raised funds by auctioning off my hat several times. After seeing the ad, a supporter wrote to me, “If Planned Parenthood will spend thousands of dollars to print your picture in Time, you know you’ve made it.”

The RICO case went on for two more years. Finally, in May 1991, Federal Judge James Holderman dismissed the racketeering allegations as “nonsense.” As for the antitrust allegations, Judge Holderman cited numerous interviews in which abortion industry spokespeople bragged that pro-life activism hadn’t made a dent in their business.

Not discouraged by Holderman’s handing us a victory, NOW turned to the Appellate Court. But in June 1992, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit unanimously upheld Judge Holderman’s ruling.

The very next day NOW filed their appeal to the Supreme Court. President Clinton’s Justice Department submitted briefs supporting NOW’s case. The court rejected their antitrust allegation but agreed to hear arguments on the RICO charge. So in December 1993, I found myself at the Supreme Court for the oral arguments in NOW v. Scheidler.

Tom Brejcha and staff attorneys at the AUL recruited the author of the RICO statute, Notre Dame law professor Robert Blakey, to affirm that the district court had rightly dismissed the RICO charges. But we were asking Blakey to argue against his own law. If he made too forceful a case, there was a chance that RICO itself could be found unconstitutional. He failed to convince the court, which ruled unanimously to let the case proceed.

The following summer, Tom’s boss, Jim Fox, invited Ann and me to lunch at the Wrigley Building on Michigan Avenue. I assumed we’d talk about the case and I’d have a chance to thank him for letting Tom spend so much time on it.

Jim knew Tom Crowley, Ann’s father, who had passed away a few years earlier, so we reminisced about him for a while, but Fox soon got down to business. He quoted a line from St. Paul’s letter to Timothy: “A laborer is worthy of his hire.” I thought he was talking about the League and saying that our cause was so important that he was glad to support us.

But that is not what he meant. Tom was the laborer, and we were there to talk about money. The AUL wasn’t paying for Tom’s work, he said, and Abramson & Fox was not interested in offering its services pro bono. Jim told us we owed his firm $240,738, and he expected a first installment of $40,000 by August 1.

Jim seemed uncomfortable as he told us this, and I suspected that his partner, Floyd Abramson, was behind the firm’s decision. Jim did offer to contact the Knights of Columbus (K of C) on our behalf, thinking they could be a source of funding, but he soon learned that the K of C wasn’t interested in getting involved with our court battle.

So we had five weeks to raise forty thousand dollars or NOW would succeed in driving us into bankruptcy. We worked frantically, sending out letters and making phone calls, trying to raise the money to make this first installment. We came up short, but we scrambled together enough to keep Abramson & Fox at bay for a while.

The following spring, Clarke Forsythe visited our office to tell me that the AUL didn’t have the resources to handle trial expenses and was pulling out entirely. They pledged a final amount of fifty thousand dollars to help with what we owed. Tom stayed on the case, but the bills continued to mount.

Finally, late in 1997, just months before the trial was set to begin, Abramson & Fox gave Tom an ultimatum: quit the case or quit the firm. Soon afterward Tom went home and told his wife, Debbie, that he’d resigned from the firm.

“Well, go back and unresign!” she urged. But the resignation was deemed final, and fortunately Tom stuck with us. Debbie unretired from her teaching career, and against so many odds, I managed to have Tom Brejcha with me when the trial finally started early in 1998. We got to work establishing a pro-life law firm in Chicago, but the timing was so tight that for the first days of the trial, Tom was listed as a member of Ken Theisen’s law firm. Then the state approved the charter for our new firm—The Thomas More Society—and by the time I was being reintroduced to that business card from the late ’80s, I was officially represented by the Thomas More Society and have been ever since.

“Sorry I missed you.” The irony of the message really struck home as I sat at the defendant’s table in the Dirksen Federal Building that March day. Not only had I missed talking with any of the staff at the Feminist Women’s Health Center, but my intended message—a compassionate connection—missed its mark. It meant what it said. If I could have talked with Dido Hasper, we could perhaps have shared a human moment. Perhaps I could have even helped her get out of the lethal business.

“Sorry I missed you” speaks to our whole society. Those of us who got involved in the pro-life movement in the early days thought it would take just a few years to reverse course and bring Americans to their senses. We were convinced that, with the right tools and the right people, we could remind the nation that self-determination should never come at the cost of killing another innocent, sovereign self.

Newcomers to the pro-life movement can only experience much of what we did in those early days, when you could walk into a clinic and leave your card, through stories like the ones in this book. I’ve been at this work for nearly half a century, and I’ll be at it as long as God continues to grant me life. But there are activists to come I’ll never meet, more women and men who will carry the work forward. I’m sorry I missed you. I hope you enjoy reading these tales of activism from before your time. I hope you find inspiration in them.

To those who champion abortion as a right, I’m sorry we missed you. We were on the same street, and we didn’t connect. Our literature never found its way into your hands. We were on the same corner, and perhaps our pictures were too graphic, and perhaps I didn’t reach out. We missed each other in medical schools, outside voting centers, and at the clinics.

There are millions of unborn children who have never been read to, will never learn to read, and will never see this or any other book. Over the years, we’ve saved many, but not enough. To the victims we couldn’t save, I also say, “Sorry I missed you.”

CHAPTER 2

A Calling

It was a beautiful afternoon in the fall of 1972, and I was looking forward to watching the Notre Dame football game on television. But my wife, Ann, had other plans. She’d promised a friend that she would join her at a rally at the Civic Center in downtown Chicago. So I reluctantly gave up on my plans to watch the Fighting Irish. We loaded our three sons into the car and headed downtown.

This was a few months before the Supreme Court would hand down its abortion ruling. Abortion had been legalized in a few states but was still illegal in Illinois. In the late 1960s, there were efforts to change state prohibitions on abortion and introduce new statutes that allowed it for the “hard cases,” such as rape or incest, or when the mother’s health was at risk. A small but growing branch of this movement wanted a total repeal of abortion laws: abortion on demand, for any reason. As this call for after-the-fact birth control grew, some state right-to-life organizations were founded to oppose it. The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) was established in 1968, and in response, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) was founded the following year. Their intention was “repeal,” not reform: Their goal was to make abortion a right. After Roe, rather than disband, this group simply changed the words behind their acronym and became the National Abortion Rights Action League.

But that was still to come. An abortion “reform” law had been proposed in the Illinois legislature. At the time, Illinois was a strongly pro-life state, and a repeal effort wasn’t making any headway in the General Assembly. But the IRLC organized a rally to galvanize opposition to the effort. This was the event Ann and the boys and I were going to that fall afternoon.

As we entered the plaza, a young lady handed me a pamphlet titled Life or Death. On the back was a small picture of a black garbage bag full of babies aborted in a Toronto hospital. One face in the picture stopped me dead in my tracks—the baby in a corner of the plastic bag looked like my son Eric’s baby picture. The shock of recognition made abortion suddenly personal. Here was a bag full o...