Today in Anti-Choice Terrorism

[Content Note: Anti-choicery; harassment; intimidation.]

Bearing in mind the previous item, about the Trump Regime empowering their base of violent bigots to 3D-print unlicensed and untraceable guns, it's terribly chilling to contemplate the escalating violence toward abortion providers, against whom anti-choicers have waged a long-running terrorist campaign ignored by presidents of both parties.

Teddy Wilson at Rewire.News reports on the latest in Indiana, where former governor and current vice president Mike Pence oversaw sustained attacks on abortion providers and abortion-seeking people:

Residents in a pair of Indiana neighborhoods were recently mailed flyers that disclosed the home addresses and included photographs of physicians who provide abortion care at clinics operated by Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky (PPINK), as part of a campaign by anti-choice activists to target abortion provider for harassment.

Operation Save America (OSA), the radical anti-choice group with a history of similar acts of targeted harassment of abortion providers, produced the flyers in conjunction with a conference being sponsored by the organization this week in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Anti-choice activists have often used mailers and flyers with graphic images and inflammatory rhetoric to target abortion providers.

Harmony Glenn, a member of the Leadership Team of Indy Feminists, told Rewire.News that while she was not surprised, she was angered by anti-choice activists' invasion of the privacy of abortion providers.

"I find myself unable to be surprised anymore by what groups like OSA are willing and able to do in the name of their cause," Glenn said. "Nobody should have to worry that when they go home their home isn't safe, especially doctors and providers who are facing more than enough [harassment] at work."

There has been a massive surge in violent actions against abortion providers. There were more than three times as many incidents of trespassing, obstruction, and blockades of abortion clinics in 2017 than in the previous year, according to a report by the National Abortion Federation (NAF).

Which is precisely the point. Anti-choicers are waging a terrorist campaign designed explicitly to terrorize healthcare providers so they will stop their work; clinic staff so they will quit their jobs; patients so they will not seek legal healthcare procedures.

James Farrar, a pastor of Aletheia Church and a speaker at OSA's conference, told the Indianapolis Star the flyers were intended to inform residents that one of their neighbors "makes their living by killing children," and dismissed concerns that the public disclosure could affect the safety of the physicians and their families.

Of course he dismissed those concerns, because that's the entire objective. He and his co-conspirators use incendiary language with the hope that it will provoke someone into doing violence from which they will then distance themselves.

It's textbook stochastic terrorism, and they continue to get away with it because we have indulged the disgusting and dangerous pretense that "both sides have equally valid views" on abortion for longer than I've been alive.