Last I heard, women still had a constitutional right to decide for themselves whether to bear a child. Granted, that right has been watered down by the Supreme Court, especially for poor women and teen-agers. But even in its weakened state, the Constitution still protects a grown woman's right to go to a private doctor for an abortion--doesn't it?

Not if George Bush's Justice Department has anything to say about it. Having failed to persuade the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade, Bush's team is back, in Bray vs. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic, the only abortion-related case on the court's docket so far this fall.

Where a woman's right to choose is at stake, George Bush is willing to replace the law of the land with vigilante mob rule. Taking the side of violent mobs that block women's access to abortion clinics, the Bush Justice Department claims that federal judges are powerless to stop organizations like Operation Rescue.

In recent years, mobs organized and egged on by Operation Rescue and condoned by the Bush Administration have repeatedly blockaded abortion clinics, forcing them to close. In the process, hundreds of women--patients and staff--had to flee, often at risk to their lives.

The strategy in almost all these cases is the same: Cars carrying patients to clinics are surrounded and rocked while terrified women huddle inside them, tires are slashed and patients' and doctors' identities are traced through license plates to facilitate harassment. Local officials, including the police, have been unable or unwilling to stop these confrontations.

The spectacle of lawless mobs preventing women from exercising their constitutional rights has led numerous distinguished federal judges in courts across the country to invoke the Ku Klux Klan Act. They have held that this federal civil-rights statute, passed in 1871 to give federal judges power to prevent mob violence aimed at African-Americans, protects women as well.

The federal injunctions sought by the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and others are effective in blocking Operation Rescue's tactics. When Operation Rescue used mob rule to close down abortion facilities in Wichita, Kan., last year, a determined federal judge, Patrick Kelly, broke the blockade with a Ku Klux Klan Act injunction. When Operation Rescue threatened to blockade clinics in Buffalo, N.Y., last winter, an energetic response by clinic supporters coupled with a vigorous federal injunction broke the blockade. When Operation Rescue tried to disrupt clinics in New York, Maryland and Virginia, Ku Klux Klan Act injunctions stopped them.