Report: Abortion Providers Are Confronting a New Wave of Extremism

“It shouldn’t take someone being murdered for a law to be enforced.”

Laura C. Morel, Mother Jones
May 20, 2025

In November 2023, while an abortion provider in the South was on vacation, someone broke into their home, shattered the windows, and scribbled “Baby Killer” on a whiteboard. The case is still open.

That same year, a man crashed his car into a new abortion clinic in Danville, Illinois, trying to start a fire. A few months after that, someone left a one-star Google review for a Florida clinic that read, “I have a bomb waiting to go off.” The clinic was evacuated and the FBI was called to investigate.

These incidents, highlighted in a recent report from the National Abortion Federation, are among hundreds of threats and attacks experienced by abortion providers across the US in the nearly three years since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/05/report-abortion-providers-clinic-attacks-are-confronting-a-wave-of-extremism-violence/

20.05.2025

Commentary

anti-choice hatred

anti-choice misogyny

anti-choice terrorism

anti-choice violence

FACE Act

Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act

Melissa Fowler

National Abortion Federation

United States

Anti-choice

Scotland – Paramedic secretly injected pregnant woman with abortion drug to kill unborn child

Stephen Doohan, 33, concocted the plan after the woman he met while married told him she was having his baby.

STV News
May 17, 2025

A paramedic secretly gave a pregnant woman an abortion drug killing her unborn child. Stephen Doohan concocted the plan after she told him she was having his baby.

The 33-year-old – who was a clinical team leader with the Scottish Ambulance Service – was married at the time. He crushed pills into a syringe before administering the medication as she lay in bed at his home in Edinburgh in 2023.

Continued: https://news.stv.tv/east-central/paramedic-secretly-injected-pregnant-woman-with-abortion-drug-to-kill-unborn-child

17.05.2025

reproductive coercion

Scottish Ambulance Service

Stephen Doohan

Europe

Scotland

Australia – June Dryburgh was asked to help out at an abortion clinic. She stayed for 47 years

For almost five decades, she witnessed first-hand how access to safe and legal abortion improves women’s lives. Now, she fears for the future

Justine Costigan
Wed 14 May 2025

When June Dryburgh cleaned out her desk after almost five decades as a counsellor, it was a reminder that even though many of her consultations were brief, their impact was significant. “I found so many letters and cards. There was even a long letter from one woman who wanted to share just how much the care she received at the clinic had meant to her,” she says.

Dryburgh started at the East Melbourne Fertility Control Clinic (FCC) less than a decade after abortion was effectively decriminalised in Victoria, Australia. She saw first-hand how access to safe abortion changed lives, and personally helped more than 100,000 women. She was also witness to anti-choice campaigners’ relentless efforts to wind back this access, weathering daily harassment of staff and patients, which turned deadly when a gunman entered the clinic in 2001 and shot their security guard.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/15/june-dryburgh-was-asked-to-help-out-at-an-abortion-clinic-she-stayed-for-47-years

Under Texas’ Abortion Ban, Where a Pregnant Woman Lives Can Determine Her Risk of Developing Sepsis

POLITICO - by Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser and Andrea Suozzo
May 7, 2025

Nearly four years ago in Texas, the state’s new abortion law started getting in the way of basic miscarriage care: As women waited in hospitals cramping, fluid running down their legs, doctors told them they couldn’t empty their uterus to guard against deadly complications.

The state banned most abortions, even in pregnancies that were no longer viable; then, it added criminal penalties, threatening to imprison doctors for life and punish hospitals. The law had one exception, for a life-threatening emergency.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-abortion-ban-sepsis-rates-dallas-houston

USA – The Bogus ‘Category 5 Hurricane’ Hitting the Abortion Pill

By Ross Pomeroy
May 2, 2025

A new report from the Ethics & Public Policy Center, a religious conservative think tank, is being hailed amongst right-wingers as “the statistical equivalent of a category 5 hurricane hitting the prevailing narrative of the abortion industry.”

According to the report, the rate of serious adverse events amongst women who used mifepristone to medically induce an abortion is not 0.5 percent, but rather 11 percent. Mifepristone, which blocks the hormone progesterone (needed for a pregnancy to continue), is commonly used with the ulcer prevention drug misoprostol to safely and effectively end pregnancies at fewer than ten weeks gestation.
Some on the right are using the report to cudgel FDA Commissioner Martin Makary to restrict or even ban the use of mifepristone. Makary last week said he has “no plans to take action” to restrict the availability of mifepristone. He did, however, leave the door open to take action if the data changed.

Continued: https://www.splinter.com/the-bogus-category-5-hurricane-hitting-the-abortion-pill

Three Years Post-Dobbs, Abortion Providers Experience High Levels of Violence & Disruption

April 23, 2025

NATIONAL—Today, the National Abortion Federation (NAF) released its Violence & Disruption report with data from 2023 and 2024. The report shows there has been sustained and consistent harassment and violence against abortion providers, even as clinics closed and abortion became harder to access in some regions.

This year’s interactive report compares the violence and disruption that NAF members reported in 2023 & 2024 to the total data NAF has tracked since 1977. The report features “heat maps” that demonstrate the states where providers reported experiencing the highest levels of obstruction, protesters, threats, and trespassing. Finally, the report includes an audio storyteller map where viewers can click through and hear directly from providers at clinics across the country about their experiences with violence and disruption.

Continued: https://prochoice.org/three-years-post-dobbs-abortion-providers-experience-high-levels-of-violence-disruption/

‘It’s Happening Even Without You Noticing’: Increasing Barriers to Accessing Sexual and Reproductive Health Care in Romania

7 Apr 2025
reliefweb

(Berlin) – The sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls, including the right to abortion and family planning methods, have been significantly eroded in Romania, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 73-page report, “‘It’s Happening Even Without You Noticing’: Increasing Barriers to Accessing Sexual and Reproductive Health Care in Romania,” documents that, although these rights are partially protected under Romanian law, in practice women and girls are regularly and systematically thwarted in their efforts to exercise these rights.

Continued: https://reliefweb.int/report/romania/its-happening-even-without-you-noticing-increasing-barriers-accessing-sexual-and-reproductive-health-care-romania-enitro

07.04.2025

Woman’s arrest after miscarriage in Georgia draws fear and anger

Experts say the arrest is part of a pattern of criminalizing pregnancy that has accelerated since the fall of Roe v. Wade.

April 5, 2025
By Bracey Harris

On March 20 in rural Georgia, an ambulance responded to an early morning 911 call about an unconscious, bleeding woman at an apartment. When first responders arrived, they determined that she’d had a miscarriage. That was only the start of her ordeal.

Selena Maria Chandler-Scott was transported to a hospital, but a witness reported that she had placed the fetal remains in a dumpster. When police investigated, they recovered the remains and Chandler-Scott was charged with concealing the death of another person and abandoning a dead body. The charges were ultimately dropped; an autopsy determined Chandler-Scott had had a “natural miscarriage“ at around 19 weeks and the fetus was nonviable.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/georgia-arrest-miscarriage-fetal-personhood-rcna199400

Scotland – ‘We faced torrent of abuse after JD Vance’s abortion falsehoods’

Feb 23, 2025
By Lucy Grieve, co-founder of Back of Scotland

I co-founded the Back Off Scotland campaign as an undergraduate student in 2020 following a concerning surge in anti-abortion protests taking place outside medical facilities providing abortion care.

In the five years that have elapsed since, members of the campaign have, intermittently, been subjected to a handful of threatening communications.

These have involved threats of litigation, accusations of murder, and we have even received menacing phone calls from anti-abortion activists in the middle of the night.

Continued: https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24956613.we-faced-torrent-abuse-jd-vances-abortion-falsehoods/

Abortion Providers Feel Like ‘Sitting Ducks’ After Trump Rolls Back Clinic Protections

The president has limited enforcement of the FACE Act — created to safeguard abortion providers and patients — and pardoned 23 people who were convicted of the federal charge.

By Alanna Vagianos
Feb 22, 2025

Julie Burkhart’s career in abortion care started when she was a college student working at a clinic in Wichita, Kansas, during the infamous Summer of Mercy in 1991. Thousands of protesters swarmed the city to rally against abortion clinics — lying on sidewalks to block clinic entrances, throwing their bodies in front of patients’ cars and screaming threats at anyone entering the three targeted clinics. Since then, she has lived through the assassination of her former boss and mentor, Dr. George Tiller, death threats on her own life, stalkers and protesters coming to her home and, most recently, the firebombing of her Wyoming abortion clinic.

Still, this moment stands out among the rest, she told HuffPost.

Continued: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abortion-clinics-face-act-trump_n_67b8df3de4b075fafcec2f5e