Science did much to fuel the growing pro-life movement in the 1970s. The field of fetology was a new frontier, unveiling some of the mystery of what was developing inside a woman’s uterus, using new technologies like electronic fetal heart monitoring, hysteroscopy, radio-immuno chemistry, and, most of all, ultrasound, in 1976.
The visual, and emotional, impact of ultrasound was enormous. Not only was it a revolutionary technology for monitoring the fetus from a medical standpoint, it was also a new weapon for the pro-life side of the debate. The ultrasound used sound waves to outline and project the image of the fetus. Now doctors and patients could watch the movements of the fetus, consider its shape, size, gender, watch it swallow, urinate. The ultrasound humanized the fetus. In 1984, a movie called The Silent Scream radicalized some who watched the grainy images of a fetus being terminated.
“The child is extremely agitated,” intoned the narrator. “Even though the suction tip has not touched it. We see the child’s mouth open in a silent scream, a child threatened with extinction. The heart rate has sped up, it does sense aggression in its sanctuary. It is moving away, in a pathetic attempt to escape. The body is now being torn, systematically, from the head.”
The figurative slap in the face for Jim Kopp on abortion came in 1980. As part of his research at Cal State Fullerton, he worked on a project at Stanford Hospital involving nerve reconnection for Vietnam veterans with spinal-cord injuries. He would one day tell a court of law how the incident had been the turning point for him. He said he knew a doctor:
She takes him down to visit the morgue, in the bowels of the hospital. Jim stands by a long metal table with a paper bucket at one end. He looks inside the bucket at the aborted fetus. Birth defects, six fingers on one hand, genitalia not properly developed. Sees the doctor, instrument in hand, flipping this fetus—this baby—back and forth. She’s doing it so casually, like a rag doll. This nice, intelligent woman probably feels she’s doing nothing wrong, seems proud, because she has detected some of these defects. Recommended the abortion.
“Glad we found the defects in time, in-utero,” the doctor observes. “When you see stuff like this it reminds you why you believe in abortion.”
His gray-blue eyes focus, Jim’s face freezes in an intense stare, taking it all in, processing the information.
The scientist in him—and that’s how he thought of himself, as a scientist—could look at it dispassionately, perhaps, but something else was speaking to him. He had never seen a baby that had been—killed—before. His mind spun. He was stunned. At conception, 23 chromosomes from the sperm meet 23 chromosomes from the egg. A blueprint of a unique individual is formed, right there. And, now, destroyed. It was coming together for him, had been for some time. His research on embryos helped support what he was feeling in his heart, that abortion killed an innocent human life. And if this is so, what is the abortionist engaged in? Murder? How could it be otherwise?
“Show me a counterargument, based on science, or faith, or something, anything,” he thought. “I’m from Missouri, so show me!”
He had seen the mind of God in his research, felt a love and compassion he had never felt before for anyone or anything. He was connecting with the unborn child.
In 1981 Jim’s sister Marty died of cancer at just 32 years old. Marty, attractive, rebellious against her father’s discipline had gone north to Oregon, “the commune scene,” as Jim called it, and never returned. First Mary, now Marty, had died from the disease. Jim felt powerless to stop the death of his sisters, just as he felt powerless facing another painful development in his family. His father had begun an affair with another woman.
Jim completed his thesis in embryology and had an article published in the International Journal of Invertebrate Reproduction and Development. It was titled, “A Preliminary Ultrastructural Study of Phragmatopoma Gametes.” (“The mature sperm morphology most strongly resembles that of certain mussel sperm, with weaker resemblance to other polychaete and mollusk sperms…”) He had enveloped himself in a microscopic world, a separate dimension, studying the science of conception itself.
In 1983, he graduated with his master’s degree in biology from Cal State Fullerton, with a 3.84 on a 4.0 scale—an “A” average. Biology backed up his conviction about the illegitimacy of abortion, from a clinical scientific perspective. But what to do about that? What action does one take, in a tangible way, but also spiritually?
He traveled to L’Abri, Switzerland, lived at a study center founded by Protestant theologian Francis Schaeffer. He heard about the center from a friend who had spent time with Schaeffer and returned transformed by the experience. Schaeffer was an influential man leading something of a Christian revival movement. He was pro-life and encouraged activism, even civil disobedience, to oppose abortion. “At a certain point it is the duty of the Christian to disobey the government,” he had said in a speech in Fort Lauderdale in 1982.
Jim took to quoting Schaeffer to others. “If you are a Christian,” Schaeffer had said, “then act like it.” Jim phoned his mother from Switzerland. He had an announcement to make. He had converted to Presbyterianism.
A man named Michael Bray was also at L’Abri. Bray was the 30-year-old son of an American naval officer. He was a former Maryland state wrestling champ, champion diver and football player. Mike Bray had followed his father’s path, becoming a midshipman. But he dropped out of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, hit the road, traveled. Bray met and spoke with Jim in Switzerland. Years later, Bray declined to get too specific about how well they knew each other. Jim Kopp, he said, was simply a young man searching for truth and trying to walk in it.
Bray had led a charmed life, but he felt a yearning to pursue something more enduring. He would become an American Lutheran lay minister, and later co-pastor of the independent Reformation Lutheran Church in Bowie, Maryland. He had long been pro-life. His search for spiritual fulfillment ultimately put dynamite in his hands.
In 1985 Bray and two other men were charged with eight abortion clinic bombings in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. At the time of his arrest, Bray had publicly argued against violence. He even belonged to a chapter of the Pro-Life Non-Violent Action League.
But Bray’s thinking, or at least the public expression of his thought, was changing, particularly regarding “use of force” in the abortion war. Thomas Aquinas set it out in his Summa Theologiae in the 14th century, defending violence for a defensive purpose: stopping an act of aggression in defense of oneself or another must be done with the moral certitude that great harm will be inflicted upon that individual if force is not used, and that the force will indeed stop it. And there was, in modern American law, something called “justifiable homicide,” or defensive killing. The state of Colorado even put a name to the type of vigilante-justice made famous in Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies. Colorado’s law of self-defense for victims of violent crime is called the “Make My Day” defense. That law means, for example, that an occupant of a dwelling is justified in using any degree of physical force against a person who has unlawfully entered the dwelling, “if the occupant reasonably believes that the intruder has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime in addition to the unlawful entry and also reasonably believes that the intruder might use any physical force against any occupant.”
The logic, for some in the pro-life movement, was inescapable. If one starts from the notion that the unborn child is a life in bloom, then what of the attack by the doctor? What is the proper defensive response, given that the unborn baby is unable to respond? Bray was a dynamic speaker and became an influential voice for those gravitating to the fringe of the movement. Those who called themselves pro-life, but opposed “defensive action”— violence—in the abortion war, were, in Bray’s view, simply fearful of the truth, that there was no contradiction between a pro-life ethic and “supporting force.” He began working on a book that would outline his beliefs more completely. He called it A Time To Kill.
Jim Kopp worked in a mission in South America with the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and also in Africa. Back in California, he went to hear firsthand accounts from mothers who had fled from China, and who spoke of forced abortions in that country. It made perfect sense, a logical progression: free states sanction abortion, encourage it, then a totalitarian state forces it on its population. Jim was convinced he was the first westerner to hear from these women who were driven into hiding to have their babies, he was getting a unique perspective on all of it.
He returned to the house on Via Lerida for dinners with his family, from whom he increasingly felt estranged. Chuck Kopp didn’t understand why his youngest son wasn’t using his masters’ degree to build a career in biology. Bible translation? Where was Jim going with that? On occasions when the family was together the conversation would sometimes venture into abortion. Arguing against abortion were Nancy, Jim and Anne, who were devout Christians. Chuck and Walt were in favor of a woman’s right to choose. Jim expected nothing less from Walt, certainly. As someone in the hospital administration business, he was by definition, to Jim, a member of the Abortion Industry. Eventually the issue was kept off the table. Abortion was, thought Jim with a grin, rather like the
