Threats are always present at abortion clinics, advocates say
FBI warned of staffers, facilities being targeted
As Julie Burkhart prepared in February 2013 to reopen a Wichita abortion and women’s health clinic shuttered since the shooting death of George Tiller in 2009, she looked out the window of her home and saw protesters waving signs. One of them read, “Where’s your church?”
To Burkhart, the message was clear. Anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder gunned down Tiller, her mentor and former boss, as he ushered at his Lutheran church.
Although shootings like the one that killed Tiller are rare — his was the last recorded death involving an abortion provider — records, and a shooting Friday at a Planned Parenthood in Colora- do Springs, suggest people who work in the field do so under the constant threat of violence.
In September, the FBI warned of “likely criminal or suspicious incidents” against reproductive
health care providers, their staff and facilities. Investigators said they were tracking nine criminal or suspicious incidents nationwide since July, when anti-abortion activists released undercover videos allegedly showing employees of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, discussing the sale of tissue and organs from aborted fetuses for profit. Planned Parenthood vehemently denies the allegation, saying the videos were heavily edited and misleading. Women who undergo abortions are asked whether they want to donate fetal tissue for medical research, the group’s officials said.
According to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), there have been eight murders of abortion providers over the past 38 years. Incidents of vandalism, harassment, bomb threats and other violence and disruption number in the thousands, the group said. Its figures include incidents in the USA and Canada, and, since 2013, in Colombia, where the NAF has member clinics. The NAF reported 662 bomb threats, 16,301 harassing calls and hate mails, and 1,507 cases of vandalism. It said incidents of harassment at Planned Parenthood facilities increased ninefold after the videos surfaced online.
In court filings, the NAF said anti-abortion activists have perpetrated more than 60,000 “recorded instances of harassment, intimidation and violence against abortion providers, including tens of thousands of acts of violence and other criminal activities against NAF members including murder, shootings, arson, bombings, chemical and acid attacks, bioterrorism threats, kidnapping, death threats and other forms of violence.”
In addition to Tiller’s murder in 2009, police nationwide have investigated hundreds of antiabortion cases over the past several years, including:
The arrest in 2011 of Ralph Lang, 63, in Madison, Wis. After Lang ’s handgun went off accidentally in a motel room, he admitted to police that he had the gun “to lay out abortionists because they are killing babies.” Lang said he planned to shoot abortion provid- ers at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Madison the following day. A judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
A fire that heavily damaged a Planned Parenthood clinic in September 2015 that officials in Pullman, Wash., said was due to arson. The fire followed a protest less than two weeks earlier in which about 500 protesters gathered outside the clinic.
The shooting death in 1998 of Barnett Slepian, a physician and abortion provider, in his Amherst, N.Y., home. Anti-abortion activist James Kopp was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
The arrest Friday of Robert Lewis Dear, 57, who surrendered to police after a five-hour standoff at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. Dear is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of three people, including a police officer. Nine others were wounded.
Saturday, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch condemned the Colorado Springs shooting, calling it an “unconscionable attack” that was “not only a crime against the Colorado Springs community but a crime against women receiving health care services at Planned Parenthood, law enforcement seeking to protect and serve and other innocent people.” It was also an assault, she said, “on the rule of law and an attack on all Americans’ right to safety and security.”
Women’s groups say the attacks are more prevalent than ever. An annual survey conducted in 2014 by the Feminist Majority Foundation found the percentage of women’s health clinics reporting they had been targeted in some way by anti-abortion violence, stalking, threats or intimidation had nearly doubled over the previous four years, from 27% in 2010 to 52% in 2014.
The survey, released last January, found the “most severe types of anti-abortion violence” affected one in five clinics nationwide, down slightly from 2010. It also found that clinics reported “significantly” higher levels of threats and targeted intimidation of doctors and staff than in prior years.
Such threats included distribution of “Wanted-style” posters and “Killers Among Us” leaflets featuring doctors’ photographs, home addresses and other personal information. The foundation said these leaflets had been spotted at 28% of all clinics.
“The steep increase in the targeted intimidation of doctors and staff is striking and of great concern,” the foundation said, “as these types of true threats have all too often in the past preceded the use of deadly violence.”
The survey found about 43% of clinics said they experienced anti-abortion activity on a weekly basis. One in four saw it daily.
“I really think that the public should get good and fed up with this,” said Eleanor Smeal, the group’s president. “I think the public does not realize how widespread the harassment is.”
Burkhart, who worked with Tiller from 2002 until his death in 2009, recalled media accounts in which critics called the physician “Tiller the Baby Killer.”
“The language was highly charged, which I feel contributed to his death,” she said.
According to the National Abortion Federation, there have been eight murders of abortion providers over the past 38 years.