Orchestrating Mayhem: The Role of Community in Anti-Abortion Violence
Abstract
This paper explores the existence of the radical anti-abortion community. After a
brief overview of the literature, I will begin with a factual background of anti-abortion
violence; a history of events and people, as well as the current attempts to curb clinic
violence through legislation. Because the Feminist Majority's 1996 Clinic Violence
Survey helps to provide a clear picture of the present status of anti-abortion violence, I
will next discuss the survey and its results. Following this is a look at the visible radical
anti-abortion community and the way it treats anti-abortion violence. I finish with an
examination of anti-abortion activists in the DC area and the possibilities of anti-abortion
violence as local DC pro-choice activists perceive it. This is by no means an exhaustive
examination of the pro-violence anti-abortion community. It is the very beginnings of a
description of the ways in which clinic violence, something that seems on the surface to
be a series of crazy, desperate, unrelated acts, in reality is linked to actions and networks
in the anti-abortion community.