From Kansas: A warning of impending abortion battles

The menacing message was spray painted in neat script on the side of a charred and graffitied building: “If Abortions aren’t safe; then you aren’t either.”

The threat to an anti-abortion nonprofit organization in Wisconsin might as well have been an edict to the nation, warning that volatile days may well be ahead.

Reasonable people shouldn’t just be bracing for what comes next; we need to head this off.

There’s a reason that tall, difficult-to-scale fencing went up almost immediately around the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington after a leaked draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito indicated the court might be ready to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling.

In this context, Kansas sends a historical shudder, along with some lessons.

After all, the state saw the murder of an abortion doctor in 2009 and some of the nation’s most outspoken protests in front of family planning and abortion clinics, during Wichita’s infamous Summer of Mercy in 1991. This was the era of abortion clinic bombings.

I remember reporting on protests leading up to the Summer of Mercy as well as what happened when all the extremist rhetoric broke out. Protesters carted around bloody pig fetuses to represent aborted babies. Women who just wanted to get a pap smear were being met with a gauntlet of protesters, screaming at them and accusing them of murdering their babies.

But eventually, one of those early anti-abortion followers put a gun to late-term abortion doctor George Tiller’s head during a Sunday church service, and shot him dead. The now-convicted murderer was aligned with anti-government groups and was believed to be mentally ill.

It’s a sad statement that in under a week since the leaked opinion, violence broke out. On Mother’s Day, anti-abortion agitators attacked a Wisconsin Family Action organization. A vandal or maybe a group of them threw a Molotov cocktail through a window and set the building on fire. The non-profit was closed at the time, so nobody was injured.

Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin was among the many groups that condemned the attack.

If the 1973 decision that legalized abortion is overturned, the issue goes back to the states.

That potentially sets up a hodgepodge of widely divergent policies, everything from criminal charges for women who have an abortion, as well as the elimination of exceptions for rape and incest and the health of the mother, to states that would continue to allow legal abortion under laws that limit the procedure until the fetus is viable outside of the mother’s body.

In terms of abortion, here’s the rub: Most Americans, in poll after poll, are far more nuanced, far less absolutist in their beliefs.

A majority of Americans (61%) support legalized abortion, but within limits. They do not want to revert to a time when women didn’t have access to contraception, when women turned to dangerous self-inflicted abortions or quack surgeries.

But on the issue of abortion, we are more divided along partisan lines than in the past, according to recent polling by Pew Research Center.

The sneak peek draft is not a final document. A final opinion is expected mid-summer. But the waters are already churning, with implications for upcoming elections. There are people willing to risk physical danger to others to assert their view.

One thing that can help tamp down those who seize on the opportunity for chaos is for the more reasonable masses to step forward.