The other abortion battle

The right has used courts and state legislatures to curtail abortion access. Decades of violence were instrumental in achieving these legal victories.

By Lorie Shaull from Washington, United States - Pro-Choice Clinic Escort, CC BY-SA 2.0

There’s a popular phrase among activists: “direct action gets the goods.” In short, taking matters into your own hands is sometimes the best and only way to get things done. Among left-wing activists, that could mean disrupting a fascist conference at a hotel, liberating animals from a cruel laboratory, damaging fossil fuel infrastructure, or any number of other direct — rather than symbolic — activities.

On the right, manifests in many forms, but one of the most consistent, deadly, and unfortunately effective forms it takes is in the fight against abortion rights. Or, more clearly stated, in the right’s fight for forced pregnancy. It’s worth taking a second to reexamine the role right-wing violence has played in inching closer to achieving this long-term goal of the conservative movement, following the disastrous Supreme Court hearing on December 1st that appeared to signal the likely end of Roe.

Just to preface this, as many noted on Twitter, Roe has already been functionally overturned in large swaths of the country. That’s not to downplay the looming catastrophe of the Mississippi case — known as Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization — it’s just to acknowledge how successful conservatives have already been in making forced pregnancy the de facto law of the land for millions.

Shortly after the hearing, author and journalist Eyal Press tweeted that although there was blame to be found among the “fecklessness of pro-choice advocates, [and] the machinations of McConnell, Kavanaugh,” another important takeaway was that “the terrorists won.” He continued, “The zealots who bombed and vandalized clinics in the 1980s and 1990s, who screamed at women trying to enter them, who harassed and eventually started shooting doctors” were in part responsible for likely end of Roe.

I would refer to these actions as reactionary violence rather than terrorism — which I think is too loaded a term to be used with any precision — but Press’s point is a good one. As he notes in his thread, anti-abortion violence helped to stigmatize abortion providers, forcing those services into specialized clinics that then continued to be targeted by far right extremists. These isolated clinics were not only subject to regular harassment at their sites, but were also targeted by conservative legislators for pretextual Targeted Restriction of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws. These laws appeared to be about creating rigorous health standards, but in reality were always intended to shutter as many providers as possible. The Supreme Court struck down two of the nation’s most restrictive TRAP laws in 2016, and affirmed the ruling in 2020, although 23 states still have laws on the books that are unnecessary in protecting a patient’s health. Many of these laws were crafted almost word for word on model bills written by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The regular, consistent violence against providers helped create the conditions in which the legal assault, both in courts and in state legislatures, was able to be so effective. It’s important to see these twin approaches as a self-reinforcing totality. The violence leads to stigma, which creates isolation for both providers and patients, which reduces the available political coalitions to affirmatively fight for free abortion on demand, which makes clinics more vulnerable to official and legal sanction and shuttering.

As sociologist Lori Freedman writes, this creates an overall climate where providers often place both explicit and implicit barriers on physicians who would like to perform abortions. Freedman’s initial findings, published in 2010, didn’t find that “physicians avoid abortions out of fear of violence or harassment” per se, rather that hospitals and HMOs decline to integrate abortion into their practice because of the “stigma of abortion and ideological disagreement.” But as one physician told Freedman et al, her HMO administration is “happy not to have to deal with” providing abortions. Violence, harassment, legal battles, and cultural discomfort — ie, stigma — all create enormous costs and burdens for individuals and firms who would otherwise like to offer abortion services.

The numbers on what abortion providers “have to deal with” are bleak. The National Abortion Federation has found that since “1977, there have been 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 189 arsons, and thousands of incidents of criminal activities directed at abortion providers.” When harassment and threats are included, the numbers are even greater. As Feminist Majority Foundation found in 2019, about a quarter of all clinics “experienced the most severe types of threats and violence, including death threats, stalking and blocking clinic access,” while almost half had “experienced at least one incident of severe violence and/or at least one incident of severe harassment.”

Bill O’Reilly’s monstrous targeting of Dr. George Tiller is probably the most well-known example of popular conservative figures encouraging vigilantism against specific doctors, but there’s an entire right-wing ecosystem who traffics in virtually the same rhetorical registry.

All this illustrates why it’s so alarming that the Republican Party is increasingly open in its embrace of street-level violence and vigilantism, as I wrote about last week. There can be a tendency to see the Proud Boys or Patriot Prayer or whoever only through the lens of 20th Century interwar Europe — which is to say the analysis can get stuck in whether or not these groups are the next iteration of the Blackshirts or the Brownshirts. That’s a fine question to ask, but we should also see the emergence of an armed (if irregular) wing of the conservative movement as a tool to achieve specific and discrete policy goals. The violence and threats directed at abortion providers isn’t the only area we see this, either. I’d argue that the recent history and subsequent rollback of voting rights, as well as the issue of border enforcement, both share similarities to the right-wing war on abortion access. Attacks on voting rights, historically and relatively recently, depend on the two-pronged approach of legal curtailment and extralegal suppression. I think there’s something similar that’s happened at the southern border, but that’s for another post.

This isn’t purely theoretical, either. As Rewire reported shortly after the Dipshit Putsch of January 6, many of the attendees had histories of targeting abortion providers. There is a well-funded media and legal apparatus on the right that identifies enemies, provides cover for vigilantism, and then exploits the ensuing controversy using legal means.

As a final thought, it’s worth considering briefly why reactionary violence against women, femme-presenting people, and anybody who can get pregnant is so frequently a common denominator among the far right. There are no doubt many overlapping reasons, and its safe to say patriarchal, gendered violence is over-determined in the United States. Certainly when we’re talking about restricting abortion rights, its important to put religious zealotry front and center.

But one aspect that I think doesn’t get enough attention is the way anti-abortion politics can be made legible in the larger right-wing populist moment currently dominating the conservative movement.

Nearly all so-called right-wing populism is a scam, whether we’re talking about Donald Trump’s rhetorical appeals to “the forgotten man” or Marco Rubio’s flailing attempts to position himself as a friend of workers. But if we frame right-wing populism as an attempt to reproduce patriarchal and white supremacist power structures both publicly and, crucially, privately, then a real (if horrifying) populism starts to emerge.

In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin writes that “to appreciate fully the inventiveness of right-wing populism” we must look to the Confederacy, where “the slaveholder created a quintessential form of democratic feudalism, turning the white majority into a lordly class.” Thus, “even without slaves or the material prerequisites for freedom, a poor white man could style himself a member of the nobility.” Similarly, conservatives told men that they could be, and rightly were, kings of their own castle. Or, as David Brooks writes (via Robin), “Everyone can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus.” If we understand right-wing populism in the context of eliminating abortion rights as the impulse to extend lordly powers to husbands and fathers, regardless of their broader class position, we can see why there is such broad and consistent buy-in across the conservative movement.

Restricting and eliminating access to abortion is about exerting social and economic control over people who can get pregnant. The right has been successful in building and exercising power towards this end, using extralegal violence as well as the officially prescribed channels. Democrats could make safe and legal abortion the law of the land tomorrow, as Obama should have done in 2009. When they don’t, they will be inviting conservatives to run this playbook back again on abortion and other policy priorities.