Mother's Day at the abortion clinic: Annual festival of hate and harassment

Mother's Day weekend, for most Americans, is about trying to make up for a lifetime of ingratitude for your mom's sacrifices with some flowers and a card. But for anti-abortion activists, Mother's Day is exciting mainly for what they see as an opportunity to heap extra shame on women who are seeking to terminate pregnancies. This year, there's extra reason for clinics to be concerned. Anti-choice violence and harassment has recently been on the rise, and there's reason to worry it may get worse this weekend.

“We’ve seen in the past that around Mother’s Day, activities tend to escalate outside clinics," said Vicki Saporta, the head of the National Abortion Federation, a group that accredits and supports abortion providers. She said the federation has already sent its members an alert to remind them "that this is the time of year when there is usually an increase in protests and other intimidation tactics.”

"Mother’s Day tends to be a massive protest day," explained Meg Stern, a volunteer clinic escort at the last remaining abortion clinic in Louisville -- indeed, the only one in the state of Kentucky. She explained that there are often hundreds of anti-abortion protesters standing on the sidewalk, "often with aggressive posturing or even chasing people or swarming their vehicles," trying to make women feel guilty about choosing not to have babies. 

Last year, on the Saturday before Mother's Day, a group of protesters affiliated with the radical anti-choice organization Operation Save America dramatically escalated their tactics, locking arms and blocking women from entering the clinic. That tactic was frequently used in the 1980s and '90s, but was largely abandoned after President Bill Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act) in 1994, making such behavior a federal crime. Operation Save America is trying to portray their protesters as martyrs, arguing that what they call "the doctrines of Interposition and the Lesser Magistrate" should trump federal law.

That incident is part of a larger surge in anti-choice harassment, sometimes including violence, a trend that became noticeable during the 2016 campaign and only grew worse in 2017. According to a new report from the National Abortion Federation, obstruction efforts and trespassing at clinics tripled last year over the year before, which had been the worst year on record in two decades. There over 1,700 obstruction incidents in 2017, up from 580 in 2016 and just 242 in 2015. Death threats doubled and picketing rose nearly 27 percent over last year.

“Anti-abortion extremists have been emboldened by the current political climate and their friend in the White House," Saporta said, noting that anti-choice radicals in Kentucky got a boost of support last year when Republican Gov. Matt Bevin reportedly met with members of Operation Save America and, according to people who attended the meeting, praised the "Lesser Magistrate" doctrine, which holds that fundamentalist Christian theology should trump secular laws.  

Saporta also noted that sometimes "these extremists cross over from just being anti-abortion extremists to becoming other kinds," The White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia, which blew up a mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota, last August had previously attempted to bomb an abortion clinic in Champaign, Illinois. 

The escalation of harassment around Mother's Day, while it may satisfy the impulses of protesters who want to impose their strict ideas about gender on women seeking abortion, registers as "kind of baffling" to patients themselves, Stern said. 

"A lot of the patients I’ve talked to don’t recognize the significance," she said. "And then, if it’s pointed out to them, they’re sort of flabbergasted."

The Guttmacher Institute shows that roughly three out of five women who have abortions are already mothers, a fact that doesn't seem to register among anti-choice protesters who have convinced themselves these selfish women are rejecting motherhood.

“One of the reasons women have abortions is because they truly want to be good mothers," explained Dr. Laura Laursen, an Illinois abortion provider and a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. "They want to be able to take care of the children they have, or they know that they aren’t ready to take care of another child.”

Much of the verbal abuse being dished out to abortion patients is incoherent, but that doesn't mean it's harmless.

"The patients are already nervous. They’re coming to get an medical procedure and they’re often very scared and rattled by the rhetoric," Laursen said, adding that while some patients can shrug off the abuse, others are enraged or end up in tears. 

In Kentucky, there's an effort underway to convince the city of Louisville to create an eight-foot buffer zone around the clinic entrance, so that patients can enter without having protesters directly in their faces or trying to block their path. Last summer, the ACLU of Kentucky sent a letter to the city, arguing that while protesters have a "right to express their views, they are not entitled to do so in a way that impairs the rights of women to seek out abortion services."

“Freedom of speech can be practiced from a safe and non-intimidating distance," Stern agreed. She felt that even the protesters who stand around just praying at the patients, while seemingly harmless, have helped created "an environment where not only is it acceptable for people to be shamed for making responsible decisions, but it’s also acceptable for louder, more aggressive and more dangerous people to have a presence on the sidewalk as well."

Stern noted that these newly emboldened anti-choice extremists are making life harder not just for patients, but for staff and volunteers who are there to help them.

"It can be frightening, for sure," she said, adding that even talking to journalists can cause anxiety. "It can be dangerous for the public eye to be on us."

It may be tempting to hunker down and keep quiet amid this climate of intimidation, but Laursen believes it's important to speak out. "Our patients continue to be vilified as these extremists get louder," she said. "It’s really taking away a patient’s right to choose."