Series of Fires at Abortion Clinics Probed : Crime: Third Central Coast arson incident in a week damages San Luis Obispo facility. Similar blazes were set in Ventura and Santa Barbara, officials say.

An early morning arson fire extensively damaged a Planned Parenthood clinic in San Luis Obispo on Wednesday, the third blaze set at Central Coast abortion providers in the past week.

The fire, which caused no injuries but did $50,000 in damage to the clinic’s reception area and operating rooms, closely followed similar attacks in Santa Barbara and Ventura. Federal officials are investigating to determine if the three incidents are linked.

“It would be pure speculation at this time to say that all three are connected,” said John Hoos, a spokesman for the FBI, one of several agencies probing the fires. “But that will be looked at during the course of the investigation.”

The apparent arson fires are “part of a violent campaign designed to shut down women’s health centers,” said Pamela J. Maraldo, the New York-based president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. However, local health care providers said the Central Coast had been relatively quiet until last Thursday.

Early that morning, firefighters were called to a small fire at the Family Planning Associates Medical Group in Ventura, where a tire filled with small plastic bottles and doused with a flammable liquid had been ignited. The center suffered minimal damage and has reopened.

Two days later, a similar fire did a small amount of damage at the Santa Barbara Women’s Medical Group, a private doctors’ office where abortions are performed. John D’Angelo, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said tires were involved in the ignition of both earlier fires but not in the Wednesday fire in San Luis Obispo.

Never a hotbed of anti-abortion violence, the coastal area from Ventura north “has been a relatively quiet, sleepy community compared to other areas and incidents that have happened around the state,” said Terri Thorfinnson, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Santa Barbara, Ventura and San Luis Obispo counties.

John Russell, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, said recent violence at abortion clinics has generally been confined to Northern California. Rachelle Shannon, who is in prison for attempted murder after shooting a Kansas doctor, has been indicted in those incidents, which included arson, acid and firebomb attacks in Chico, Redding and Sacramento.

Federal officials have investigated only one incident between 1982 and last January in which a Central Coast abortion clinic was attacked--a 1993 bombing of the Ventura Planned Parenthood office, D’Angelo said. However, he quickly cited the violence that has occurred elsewhere in the state: 21 incidents in the same period of time, more than in any other state.

Clinics along the coast have not been immune to anti-abortion activism. The Santa Barbara Planned Parenthood office is picketed twice weekly, Thorfinnson said. Demonstrations are held occasionally at the organization’s office in San Luis Obispo.

On Wednesday, San Luis Obispo firefighters were called to that center at 1:50 a.m. because of a fire believed to have been started underneath the building, Hoos said. It was extinguished within an hour, but not before causing extensive damage to the interior. Staff members at the burned center declined to comment about the incident.

Investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the FBI and local police and fire agencies will report their findings to a Justice Department task force looking into links with abortion-clinic violence nationwide. The task force was formed after the July murder of a Pensacola physician and his escort.

On Wednesday, John C. Salvi, an apprentice hairdresser, pleaded not guilty to killing two women and wounding five others in two December shooting incidents in Boston.

“We are saddened that the violence is drifting over to the West Coast,” said Teri Reisser, executive director of the Right to Life League of Southern California, which has a minimal presence on the Central Coast. “I’m not sure what gives or what’s behind it. I just wish they would stop.”

One San Luis Obispo obstetrician, who stopped doing abortions several years ago after epithets were scrawled in front of her home and office, said she was the target of a bumper-sticker campaign claiming that she “killed babies.”

“This whole thing makes you very paranoid,” said the doctor, who drove by the burned clinic Wednesday morning. “They strike and then disappear and you can’t tell them from anyone else.”