Her friend lay dead, shot at home by an assassin who had killed two people and wounded two more. The suspect had vanished, leaving behind his fake police car and notebooks listing several dozen potential targets who bore at least one commonality: their support of abortion rights.
One of the names scribbled on the list was her own. Threats weren’t new to Ruth Richardson. She had received them when she introduced her first bill—on gun safety—in the Minnesota House of Representatives. She had received them in her current job as CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States. This threat, though, was different. Her friend Melissa Hortman was dead.
Hortman, the speaker emerita of the Minnesota House, and her husband, Mark, were slaughtered in the early hours of June 14 when they opened their door to a man dressed as a police officer, his black SUV projecting flashing police-style lights. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot and gravely wounded when they did the same.
The gunman might have been alone, but the bloodshed did not occur in a vacuum. “There’s been a lot of violent political rhetoric that has led to this point,” Richardson told Ms. weeks after the shootings. “It was one thing to get a threat; it’s another thing to have confirmed threats where you have a friend and a colleague who is assassinated. So I think there’s just a new level of concern in this moment.”
This moment is one of heightened violence in America’s long and often ferocious struggle over abortion, a “war” in which opponents of abortion have, among other things, murdered providers, set healthcare facilities ablaze and chained themselves to clinic doors to prevent patients from entering.
This moment is one in which the U.S. president, on his fifth day in office, pardoned 23 people who had been convicted and several imprisoned for blocking access to abortion clinics, some violently. “They should not have been prosecuted,” Donald Trump pronounced.
This moment is one in which the U.S. Department of Justice declared that, except in “extraordinary circumstances,” it would stop enforcing a 1994 federal law intended to reduce antiabortion violence. (In fact, though the exceptions to that dictum include death, federal prosecutors have so far not invoked the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act in the Minnesota case.)
These moments, abortion-rights advocates contend, are connected. And they are dangerous.
“The administration has essentially gutted civil rights enforcement and the FACE Act enforcement … and pardoned the serial offenders who were traveling from state to state to obstruct, invade and terrorize reproductive healthcare providers,” says duVergne Gaines, director of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s National Clinic Access Project. (Ms. is published by the foundation.) Those decisions, she says, have “emboldened these extremists, really like something we have not seen in decades. And it was bad. It’s gotten worse.”
The Trump administration’s decisions have had real-life implications. Early this year, the FBI was investigating a 2024 bomb threat to a clinic in Charlotte, N.C., according to the clinic’s executive director, Calla Hales. The day the Justice Department stopped enforcing the FACE Act, Hales says the FBI informed her it was dropping the investigation. A local police investigation is ongoing.
Melissa Fowler, chief program officer for the National Abortion Federation, an umbrella organization of providers and advocates, notes that over the years different administrations have enforced the FACE Act in their own ways. “But we’ve never seen this,” she says of the Trump administration’s directive to eschew enforcement. “To have this kind of message from the federal government is really scary. It shouldn’t take someone being murdered to have the law enforced.”
Congress passed the FACE Act the year after the first known murder of an abortion provider, Dr. David Gunn, who was shot three times in the back during a 1993 protest at a Pensacola, Fla., clinic. Since then, 11 providers, clinic staff, volunteers and first responders have been murdered at clinics and in their homes. Others have survived shootings and stabbings.
Four days before the Hortmans were gunned down in Minnesota, the Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee voted to move a bill to repeal the FACE Act. All Democrats voted against doing so. The bill has to pass the full House and the Senate before Trump can sign it into law. The high-profile killings of the Hortmans and the shootings of the Hoffmans in their suburban Minneapolis homes made national news. But they are just one tragic data point in a yearslong string of events that jeopardize or destroy the lives of those who provide abortion care or advocate for reproductive rights.
According to the National Abortion Federation, threats and violence have intensified even as clinics have closed in states that banned or restricted abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision to end the constitutional right to abortion. In 2023 and 2024, NAF members reported 777 incidents of clinic obstruction, 621 incidents of trespassing, 296 threats of death or harm and 128,570 antiabortion protesters picketing clinics. Further, there were 169 acts of vandalism, 38 incidents of assault and battery, 37 incidents of stalking and three arsons.
Those numbers, however, represent an undercount of the actual incidents of harassment and violence, the NAF’s 2024 Violence and Disruption Report said. Providers and clinic staff, it said, “are experiencing intense burnout and fatigue as a consequence of today’s abortion landscape” and may not have the resources to track and report incidents. “Sadly,” the report stated, “many clinic staff also normalize the unacceptable harassment, threats and violence they endure, which likely contributes to underreporting.”
Since the Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a dozen states have banned abortion outright and another six enacted gestational limits between six and 12 weeks. Southern states have been particularly restrictive, as almost every one from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean has made it difficult, if not impossible, to access abortion. In response, women have been forced to crisscross the country to find clinics in so-called surge states that will take them.
Just as women have traveled in search of clinics that still perform abortion, so too have people intent on blocking their access, says Gaines, who shared with Ms. long spreadsheets filled with incidents. Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the FACE Act has given abortion opponents “carte blanche,” she says. “Now they have essentially an invitation to break the law.”
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This piece is the first in a four-part Ms. series on the escalating crisis of antiabortion violence in the United States. Part 2, out Wednesday, examines the long shadow of the murder of Dr. George Tiller and the persistence of clinic attacks across the country.
Great Job Jodi Enda & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
