Word: brittons
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President Clinton was on television by the end of the day, calling Britton's death a case of "domestic terrorism" and promising federal aid to the local police. Women's groups were angrily demanding greater protection for clinic workers and full-scale investigations into other extremists. Behind the public rage was a great deal of frustration and perhaps even some despair. Pro- choicers began to wonder: What good is constructing an indestructible garment of laws to protect a constitutional right if some extremist simply ignores them all and blows someone's head...
None of which convinced Britton to remove his vest. But then he was never an easygoing sort. According to a profile in the February issue of GQ magazine, he facilitated abortions as early as the late 1960s, on principle. But by the 1980s, he was also doing them for the money: as many as 32 a day at $50 each. He had lost a hospital job in 1978 after clashing with his colleagues, and his professional reputation suffered three years later when he was put on two years' probation for improper prescription of narcotics. He could be compassionate and conscientious...
...also became a regular protester outside the Pensacola clinic; with eerie prescience, GQ writer Tom Junod portrayed him as the most likely threat to Britton's life. Others too saw him as an explosion waiting to happen. Ron Fitzsimmons, director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, who | first met him on Donahue, recalls having an edgy dialogue with Hill while in Pensacola to mark the anniversary of Gunn's death. "I remember I said, 'Paul, you're not going to kill me, are you?' I asked him why he hadn't killed any doctors. He said, 'Well, Ron, that...
...immediate aftermath, most of the major pro-life organizations scrambled, convincingly, to dissociate themselves from Hill. Echoing more mainline groups, Operation Rescue director Flip Benham trumpeted, "We condemn it as murder, a sin. If I'd been with Paul Hill this morning, I would've stepped between him ((and Britton))." Expressing the fears of more temperate antiabortionists, Benham added, "This will have devastating effects on the number of picketers. There's a good number of folks who don't want to be associated with this...
Patricia Coleman, one of Doc Britton's five children, says, "My father was an independent thinker who absolutely refused to be swayed by politics or what other people thought. He refused to be bullied." Yet some of his surviving colleagues are feeling vulnerable. "This has taken its toll," says Ashley Phillips, director of the WomanCare clinic in San Diego. "I don't know how much more of this we're supposed to take." Following the killing, several members of Congress demanded that the FBI begin infiltrating radical antiabortionist groups as it has the Ku Klux Klan in the past. Harsh...