Word: buffalo
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...attention paid last week to the arguments before the Justices in Washington and the outcry of the demonstrators in Buffalo, that is not where the issue is really being decided. At this moment, abortion is not available in 83% of America's counties, home to nearly a third of American women of childbearing age. For reasons of professional pride, or fear, or economic pressure, doctors have backed away from the procedure even where it remains available...
...YORK GOVERNOR MARIO Cuomo called it "democracy at work," and to those who watched the street fight over abortion in Buffalo last week, it seemed a fresh expression of America's divided conscience. But on the ground, the confrontation had all the emotional subtlety of a tantrum and the animation of a trench-warfare standoff. It left Buffalo lost between two realities. On the television screen, the city served up all the passion and props that courtroom terms like "strict scrutiny" and "compelling interest" cannot deliver. In the Buffalo area, however, the clinics were not closed down, traffic was hardly...
Part of the reason for the discrepancy is that Operation Rescue was outmaneuvered from the start. Organizers last January promised their protests could rival those last summer in Wichita, which drew thousands of participants, lasted six weeks and produced more than 2,600 arrests. But the opening of the Buffalo campaign drew only 300 members to the area -- a battalion whose weakness led at least one leader to resort to sophistry. The women who kept their appointments at the clinics, said the Rev. Robert Schenck, were "no one of any consequence, I can assure you." By midweek, Buffalo's anti...
When the showdown began, Buffalo had studied Wichita and was prepared. A federal judge issued an injunction two months ago that threatened antiabortion protesters with $10,000-a-day fines for coming within 15 ft. of a clinic door. Police and sheriff's deputies in the past month were given everything from "sensitivity training" to drills in how to protect their back when bending over to pick up limp bodies. Barricades were erected around the clinics before dawn, so Wednesday's charge against one in the suburb of Amherst, which resulted in 194 undramatic arrests, was reduced to an exercise...
Part of Operation Rescue's failure comes from a misunderstanding of the area's political personality. "The assumption that Buffalo is an old-line, blue-collar sheet-metal town is absolutely archaic," says Gerald Goldhaber, who runs his own polling firm. "These days you tend to get a type of person who would not be receptive to Operation Rescue's message." For one thing, Buffalo is home to the largest school in New York State's massive university system. At the same time, two streams of financial fortune, one from an overheated economy in nearby Toronto and the other from...