Anti-abortion groups are aggressively taking their war on abortion to the Internet in an attempt to scare clinics out of business.
Their latest offensive, Clinicworker.com, urges employees at clinics that perform abortions to denounce illegal activities that are allegedly rampant in their line of work or risk facing prosecution themselves.
While some extremists resort to physically assaulting employees at facilities that provide abortion, Clinicworker.com takes a different approach by suggesting that workers have been "lured" into participating in crimes ranging from sexual assault to money laundering.
The site is the brainchild of Life Dynamics, a Texas-based organization known for its attempts to litigate abortion providers out of business by encouraging patients to file malpractice lawsuits.
"Could your job land you in jail?" the homepage asks. The site contains a list of red flags of possible illegal activities that clinic workers should look for, such as financial records written in pencil (a potential sign of tax evasion) or patients who exhibit a "dramatically different attitude" after an abortion (which could signal sexual assault).
The site entices whistle-blowers by alluding to financial rewards paid by the government for damning information and includes a phone number to Life Dynamics' offices for workers seeking legal advice.
"We're trying to get the clinic workers to come forward," said Life Dynamics founder Mark Crutcher. "The website lets workers know there is a network out there for them where they can reveal this information and find out what kind of exposure they have to legal prosecution."
Crutcher has said he has thousands of "spies for life" working as moles in abortion clinics, who tell him illegal activities plague the field, but refused to divulge particulars.
"We don't talk about our intelligence gathering," he said.
ClinicWorker.com is just Crutcher's latest attempt to harass abortion providers out of business, said Vicki Saporta, the executive director of the National Abortion Federation.
"His attempts at these methods have not been successful in the past, and we're not concerned about his success in the future," she said.
ClinicWorker.com is part of a grander scheme by Life Dynamics to "dry up the supply of people getting into the abortion clinics," he said. To publicize the site, he's selling posters emblazoned with the website's URL, which can be used by protesters at abortion clinics.
The "pro-aborts," as he called them, have tried -- unsuccessfully -- to hack into his site thousands of times since it was launched about a month ago.
In the past, Life Dynamics has used direct mail campaigns to dissuade medical students from practicing abortion by ridiculing or advocating physical violence against doctors who do. A group of students from Berkeley reacted by starting Medical Students For Choice; today the group has members in more than 100 med schools across the United States and Canada.
Some of Life Dynamics' tactics have backfired. Last year, a man hired by Life Dynamics to testify before Congress about purported illegal fetal tissue sales retracted many of his allegations when he was on the stand.
Abortion clinics are more worried about the Internet tactics of Neal Horsley, whose Nuremberg Files website includes personal information about abortion providers, including their home addresses and children's names.
Besides publishing gory pictures of bloody fetuses, the site refers to clinic workers as "baby butchers" and features "abortioncams" -- photographs of people entering and leaving family planning clinics.
A Planned Parenthood lawsuit to shut down the site failed on free speech grounds earlier this year, but was appealed and is pending judicial review in December.
Nevertheless, the Nuremberg Files website has struck fear into the dwindling supply of abortion providers, many of whom now wear bullet-proof vests to work, said the legal director of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), Elizabeth Cavendish.
In the past month, over 200 abortion clinics have received letters containing white powder as part of an anthrax threat, she said. So far, all the laboratory tests on the letters -- which had return addresses making them look as if they'd been sent from law enforcement agencies such as the Secret Service -- have come back negative, she said.
"It's all part of the same campaign," said Cavendish. "They're trying to scare clinic workers into quitting their jobs.
