Talia Lavin - Natural Born Killers: Arson, acid, and the deadly war against abortion rights

[Nevilledog]

https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/natural-born-killers

In 2018, a woman walked free after twenty years in prison. In wire photos from her 1993 trial, 46-year-old housewife Rachelle Renee “Shelley” Shannon had long dark hair, cut in an unfashionable fringe, and round coke-bottle glasses, her head cast down and her body bundled in a trench coat against the cold wind of a Kansas autumn. Months earlier, she had flown to Oklahoma City from her home in Oregon, and then driven hundreds of miles to ambush workers at a women’s health clinic that had long been a target of anti-abortion extremists. With a hail of bullets, and through a blizzard of broken car-window glass, she shot Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions, in both of his arms. He went back to his clinic the following day swathed in bandages; Shannon was arrested at the Oklahoma City airport, to be deposited in a Wichita jail.

Later, during her incarceration, she would admit—with pride, not remorse—to an interstate string of arsons and butyric-acid attacks targeting nine abortion clinics in Oregon, California, and Nevada. Since 1988, Shannon had been involved in the radicalized anti-abortion movement, engaging in protests that obstructed clinics and trespassed on their property, resulting in several arrests. Over the ensuing years, her commitment became increasingly violent, dedicated to eradicating abortion in the U.S. by any means necessary, including murder. She had written dozens of letters to Michael David Griffin, who had murdered abortion provider Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida in March 1993. A month before her attempted murder of Dr. Tiller, Shannon visited John Brockhoeft, who was serving a seven-year sentence in a federal prison in Ashland, Oregon, for firebombing an abortion clinic in Cincinnati. (Decades later, Brockhoeft would participate in the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.)

The Shelley Shannons of the world—along with an assortment of firebombers, arsonists, attackers and the crowds that routinely picket abortion clinics, harassing patients and holding up placards splattered with gore—believe intensely in the notion of a war against the unborn, and that they are fighting against public murder. Shannon and her compatriots in the Army of God no doubt celebrated the culmination of their homicidal efforts in 2022, when a new Supreme Court stacked explicitly with members of the Christian right overturned Roe v. Wade and let loose a series of increasingly restrictive state laws criminalizing abortion providers, patients and supporters. This decision released a tide of maternal death that would put any individual firebomber, arsonist or assassin to shame.

In Missouri, lawmakers have recently pre-filed legislation that defines the beginning of personhood as the moment of fertilization. Under the “Abolition of Abortion Act,” IUDs and emergency contraception such as Plan B would be categorized as forms of murder, as Jessica Valenti points out in her indispensable Abortion, Every Day newsletter, and criminal charges could be applied to anyone who obtains or helps anyone obtain these as well as an abortion. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton went on a public crusade, threatening criminal penalties to prevent a woman from obtaining a medically necessary abortion, despite the fact that said woman had gone to the extraordinary step of obtaining a court order determining that the abortion was medically necessary: a fatal fetal abnormality meant that the child she was carrying would inevitably die. The woman in question, Kate Cox, fled the state to obtain an emergency abortion; the Attorney General had specifically threatened her Texas doctor with imprisonment. The Texas Supreme Court justice who ruled against Cox has bragged that, in his private life, he has been arrested no fewer than 37 times for harassing abortion providers. Such are the wages of a movement built on terror and sustained by state fiat.

*snip*

[Hekate]

1. KnR

[sinkingfeeling]

2. Excellent history of the 'birth' of the anti-abortion movement. I

have lived through the same 6 decades the evangelical hate has focused on segregation and abortion. I remember, clearly, the 1960s, when 'pro-life' was run by Catholics.

[MattBaggins]

3. The Texas Justice did what?

Is this true, and if so why didn't they recuse themselves?