Despite the recent spate of attacks on abortion clinics, the most serious types of violence and threats against providers of abortion services have been declining.
Since 2009, significantly fewer burglaries and incidents of vandalism have occurred at abortion clinics compared to the five years prior, according to data compiled by the National Abortion Federation.
A similar trend is seen for bombings, murders and death and bomb threats against abortion providers. After a spike in the late 1990s, the numbers have been declining over the last decade and have appeared to accelerate over the last five years.
Abortion rights advocates recently have expressed fears that aggression against doctors providing abortions and women accessing them may be increasing, after last month’s shooting at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs and arsons at four clinics in Washington, California, Illinois and Louisiana.
The attacks this year all occurred after anti-abortion investigator David Daleiden raised widespread conservative ire against Planned Parenthood by releasing undercover videos showing the group’s top officials discussing compensation for providing aborted fetal tissue to a fake human tissue company.
Yet the longer-term trend could be good news for the anti-abortion movement, which overall opposes violence and finds itself having to explicitly create distance from the extremist individuals and groups who carry out or promote attacks against providers.
In the days following the Colorado Springs attack, most of the major abortion-opposing organizations jumped to condemn Robert Lewis Dear, who has been charged with murder for shooting and killing three people during a five-hour standoff with police.
“This is a teachable moment to remind Americans that the pro-life movement is committed to peaceful social action,” said Mark Harrington, director of the group Created Equal.
“Historically, every act of violence against abortionists and abortion facilities has been perpetrated by individuals acting alone and not in concert with any pro-life organization,” Harrington said. “The pro-life movement’s peaceful record is impeccable and can be put up against any other social reform movement in American history.”
There was one abortion clinic bombing this century, at a Texas Planned Parenthood center in 2011, but in the last half of the 1990s there was at least one bombing every year. Of eight recorded murders of abortion providers since 1977, the 2009 murder of doctor George Tiller was the only one since 1999.
The most serious kinds of threats against providers also have declined. There have been 13 death threats against abortion providers since 2009, but 51 death threats in the five years prior. And during the spike in abortion-related violence in the last half of the 1990s, there were 103 death threats over a five-year span.
There’s a similar trend when it comes to bomb threats. There have been 60 such threats over the last decade, but 291 threats in the decade prior.
However, there have been clusters of certain crimes, such as five arsons carried out in 2012.
And some milder types of aggression against abortion providers appear to have held steady in recent years, according to data from the National Abortion Federation. There were 78 acts of trespassing at clinics last year, a number comparable to the annual rate since 2000.
Harassment via phone calls, mail or email also appears to have remained relatively steady over the last decade, underscoring the ongoing vitality of anti-abortion sentiment in the U.S.
David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University and author of a book on anti-abortion attacks, acknowledged that some types of aggression, such as bomb threats, appears to be trending downward. But he also cautioned against inferring too much from the data, noting that crimes such as murder happen so infrequently that it’s hard to discern a trend.
“To me, the fact that they jump around and still happen shows that these incidents are always a possibility in abortion providers’ lives and a serious risk for them,” Cohen said.
It’s not clear why the most serious types of violence have declined in recent years. The National Abortion Federation didn’t respond to requests for comment. Cathy Ruse, a legal fellow at the conservative Family Research Council, said she doesn’t know the reason for the decline since she says the anti-abortion movement has never advocated violence.
“I regard any of these incidents as absolutely random because they have no connection whatsoever to the pro-life movement,” Ruse said.
And it’s difficult to predict when or where attacks might occur. All the attackers on abortion clinics have been white men not associated with more mainstream activist groups, although some have had ties to Army of God, a group that sanctions the use of violence to fight against abortion.
A coalition of abortion rights groups, including NARAL Pro-Choice America and UltraViolet, recently petitioned the Department of Justice to start classifying attacks on abortion providers as “domestic terrorism.”
UltraViolet started running an ad on Friday on broadcast and cable news urging the Justice Department to investigate the attack in Colorado Springs as terrorism, although it’s not clear how that would change the agency’s approach.
“People are dying, clinics are burning — and only a domestic terrorism investigation can help us find out who is driving this violence,” said UltraViolet founder Shaunna Thomas. “These are more than random acts of violence.”
