Recommended Reading

[Content Note: War on agency; anti-choice terrorism.]

The indispensable Robin Marty: "America's Abortion-Free Zone Grows."

Please read the whole thing, but I just want to highlight this incredible passage:

Closing abortion clinics has become a primary goal for anti-abortion activists, who have used bills requiring expensive clinic renovations or medically unnecessary transfer agreements to force clinics that can't meet to shut their doors. The reasoning is simple: If abortion can't be outlawed, closing off clinics is the next best thing.

The gambit has been highly successful: between 2010 and 2013, one in 10 clinics closed across the country—and that was before Texas's HB 2 began to go into effect, which will close another 20. For states like Alabama, Mississippi, and Wisconsin, the only thing standing between losing most or all of their clinics are court orders blocking bills from being enforced.

Ten percent of the nation's abortion clinics have closed in four years, and we are still not having a serious, meaningful, loud, public conversation about the increasing restriction to abortion access. Ten percent of the nation's abortion clinics have closed in four years, and our ostensibly pro-choice president doesn't think that's worthy of a dedicated national address.

"We don't have to see a Roe v. Wade overturned in the Supreme Court to end it. … We want to. But if we chip away and chip away, we'll find out that Roe really has no impact. And that's what we are doing."—Rev. Pat Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, 2011.