Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette
	Albert Brunn, of Stanton Heights, wears a wooden crucifix while standing in front of the Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania clinic at 933 Liberty Ave., Downtown.

Pickets had already been outside Planned Parenthood for an hour yesterday when Bill Depner rolled up, set down a briefcase plastered with anti-abortion bumper stickers, whipped out a tape measure, and took the distance from a guarded front door to the frozen sidewalk's end.

"Twelve and a half feet," he told the others. In a few weeks, he'd be illegal, even standing on Liberty Avenue.

Then Mr. Depner did what he usually does: He pressed leaflets on women going inside and shouted at them through the glass front door.

"Your future could be so bright," Mr. Depner yelled. "Everyone loves a baby after they see it. You can be a hero, but you have to be a stand-up girl."

Under a proposed city ordinance, Mr. Depner and his companions, who regularly stand, pray, chant and leaflet outside the Downtown clinic, would have to back off another 2¹/₂ feet or face fines and possibly arrest. The bill is based on a Colorado "bubble zone" law upheld five years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Pittsburgh proposal would require pickets to set up at least 15 feet from any clinic entrance, then keep eight feet away from any person who gets within 100 feet of the clinic and asks them to back off.

"We need to be able to talk to the women," said Mary Kay Brown, an Indiana Township woman who joins the protests during what the clinic terms "procedure days" -- days on which abortions are performed at Planned Parenthood.

"Eight feet is going to be hard. I don't want to yell at people, and from eight feet back it's going to be hard to have a personal conversation."

Just how personal the abortion debate becomes on a sidewalk was played out a day earlier on the streets of East Liberty. Two students from Franciscan University of Steubenville were beaten by what they described as a gang of teenagers, apparently angered by their sidewalk protest outside Allegheny Reproductive Health Center. Pittsburgh police said one of the assailants reportedly pulled a box cutter and threatened a picket.

The students, members of the school's Students for Life chapter, have been a regular feature outside the clinic, where they attempt to dissuade women from entering to obtain abortions. Depending on the version, the assault was unprovoked or the result of rising tensions between patients and their families and what clinic director Claire Keyes calls their increasingly assertive manner.

"These students are very aggressive and so much in these patients' faces," said Ms. Keyes. "Just today a patient said she had said 'no thank you' four times and they persisted and she had to hold her boyfriend back because he wanted to push them out of the way and they just wouldn't stop."

Billy Valentine, one of the Franciscan protesters who witnessed the confrontation, said students are trained to avoid confrontations.

"We did not touch anyone and we did not block the door from anyone," he said.

Ms. Keyes said the young woman whose companions became involved in Thursday's street altercation returned to the clinic with her mother for a scheduled abortion after the Franciscan students departed.

Abortion providers describe the East Liberty incident as the most vivid example yet of what they have been seeing on sidewalks outside their clinics since last spring, when the cash-strapped city of Pittsburgh withdrew regular police patrols that had been stationed Downtown and in East Liberty to stop confrontations before they escalated. With police gone, said Kim Evert, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania, protesters became more forceful and patients and families responded in kind.

"What it is is pushing and shoving," she said. "Oftentimes it's a parent of the patient, sometimes a passerby. A lot of times what the protesters will do is move in very close to people, want to give them literature, crowd them and, particularly for protective parents, the reaction is to push them away.

"We've had times when somebody's punched somebody."

Under the proposal introduced by city Councilmen William Peduto and Doug Shields, the 100-foot zone around the clinic would become a protected area in which persons approached by the pickets could decline to converse or accept literature and, upon that refusal, the protesters would have to keep at least eight feet away.

This zone would, conceivably, reach across Liberty Avenue, where one protester, Albert Brunn, a retired baker from Stanton Heights, regularly stations himself with brochures, a bloody crucifix around his neck, and intercepts women and couples headed toward the clinic.

"Give your baby the Christmas gift of life," he shouted after one young woman as she crossed the street and entered the clinic. Mr. Brunn said he has developed a technique for figuring out what pedestrians are headed to the clinic.

"When you're doing this for 15 years you can tell. It's like they have an A on their forehead," he said. "I can spot them from a block away."

While not quite a block, one anti-abortion activist has roughly calculated the distance 100 feet covers on the 900 block of Liberty Avenue. At 15 feet, the anti-abortion pickets would be setting up their signs in front of adjacent businesses, not the clinic. At 100 feet , they would be well down the street.

If the proposed bill is enacted, Mr. Brunn might need that block-long gift of prophecy.