How Abortion Providers Are ‘Living in the Crosshairs’
Eight abortion doctors have been murdered by “pro-life” terrorists since 1993. These assassinations, and the somewhat more frequent bombings and arson attacks on abortion clinics, usually make national news. What doesn’t often make headlines, and in fact has remained mostly undocumented until now, is the daily stalking and harassment of abortion providers and their families.
Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism, a new book by Drexel University law professor David S. Cohen and attorney Krysten Connon, is the first in-depth national analysis of what life is like for abortion providers who routinely endure harassment, stalking and paranoia-inducing surveillance.
Cohen and Connon interviewed 87 providers, who shared their experiences of being followed to their homes, of protesters turning up at their children’s school, and of finding posters of their face inside a bull’s eye. (The authors use the term “abortion provider” to mean not just doctors, but nurses, administrators and accountants – pretty much anyone associated with an abortion clinic.)
Frightening doctors and staff out of working at clinics is just one piston in a well-oiled machine that, for all its sinister sophistication, is built on a false premise: that forcing abortion clinics to close and scaring people away from working in the field will “end abortion.” But of course, even if every abortion clinic in the United States closed tomorrow, that wouldn’t stop women from getting abortions — it would only stop poor women from having access to safe, affordable care.
Nonetheless, here we are, living in a country where medical professionals are forced to don bulletproof vests, carry guns, alternate their routes to work, hire body decoys and pay experts to scrub their addresses from the Internet out of fear of being killed.
And the situation is getting worse. According to recent research, the kind of targeted harassment of abortion providers documented in Living in the Crosshairs has increased since 2010 — which is, not coincidentally, right around the time the number of abortion restrictions around the country spiked to unprecedented levels.
Nearly all of the abortion providers Cohen and Connon interviewed said they’ve experienced harassment. Almost half said they’ve had protesters picket their homes. More than one mentioned that even though they wear a bulletproof vest, they assume doing so is pointless — if they’re shot, they figure, it’ll probably be in the head, like Dr. George Tiller was in 2009. One provider talked of catching herself gazing out her kitchen window, idly wondering if there could be a sniper out there, waiting in the dark.
But they also spoke of resilience. One doctor whose barn was burned down by an apparent anti-choice terrorist, killing more than a dozen horses and other family pets, said that after the attack he decided to start providing abortions full-time. “I went to the hospital and told them I was going to resign my privileges on the staff there and I was going to travel and do abortions,” he told the authors.