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.