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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums'Heightened alert': Abortion providers brace for ruling
In her first week on the job at a Philadelphia abortion clinic, Amanda Kifferly was taught how to search for bombs. About a year later, protesters blocked the entrances and exits of the The Womens Centers, at one point pulling Kifferly into something resembling a mosh pit, where they surrounded her and shoved her around.
And on the night of last winters arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that could end the nationwide right to abortion, people gathered outside a clinic in New Jersey with lawn chairs, a cooler and a flaming torch a sight that brought to mind lynchings and other horrors of the countrys racist past, says Kifferly, who now serves as vice president for abortion access.
Such scenes have become familiar for providers and patients across the country over the decades since the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion. At times the violence has been far more severe, including bombings, arson and murders from the 1993 killing of Dr. David Gunn outside a Florida abortion clinic to the 2015 fatal shooting of three people inside a Colorado Planned Parenthood.
Now providers and some in law enforcement worry what will come next. Theyre preparing for an increase in violence once the Supreme Court rules, saying there has historically been a spike when the issue of abortion gets widespread public attention, such as after a state approves new restrictions. If the decision ends Roe v. Wade as a leaked draft opinion indicates may happen they also anticipate protests, harassment and other violence to be more concentrated and intensify in states where abortion remains legal.
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-us-supreme-court-politics-health-new-jersey-bcecfda68434ebd9094ff489459f1183
MontanaMama
(23,294 posts)Novara
(5,817 posts)I hate this bullshit type of reporting. There WILL be protests. If there's violence it will be coming from the fascists. But this makes it sound like those protesting stripping women of their rights will be violent. Violence is their milieu, not ours.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)A large majority of Americans want legal abortion; Pew's latest says:
50% with some limits,
35% with no limits,
13% illegal in all conditions.
Note that that 50% crosses ideological lines to include a wide range of people able to agree on science/viability-based limits, and many of the 35% would accept laws protecting viable fetuses. The same reality that gave us Roe, etc.