The first murder of an American abortion provider happened on March 10, 1993. Michael Griffin shot Pensacola, Florida, doctor David Gunn three times in the back as he left his clinic. Prior to shooting, Griffin reportedly shouted, “Don’t kill any more babies.”
Traces of that same rhetoric appeared in the most recent attack on an abortion clinic, at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood. The alleged gunman, in rambling remarks after the shooting, told the police, “No more baby parts.”
By their own admission, the attackers of abortion providers and clinics operate by a utilitarian logic: that they can prevent the termination of countless pregnancies with the murder of just one doctor. A small number of anti-abortion groups have echoed that view in recent weeks.
“It’s acceptable to violently kill a baby, so why isn’t it acceptable to violently kill other people?” Judie Brown, president of the anti-abortion American Life League, told MSNBC’s Irin Carmon recently.
Pro-choice advocates have drawn a similar connection.
“If we take pro-life rhetoric seriously — if we accept that hundreds of thousands of unprosecuted and unpunished murders are being committed every year in the United States — then violence sounds like a perfectly reasonable response,” Damon Linker wrote in the Week.
But for most pro-life leaders, that logic doesn’t hold. They see violence against abortion providers not just as antithetical to their own beliefs but also as standing in the way of their goals of eliminating abortion in America.
"Abortion does not entirely depend on one abortion provider"
“Abortion does not entirely depend on one abortion provider,” says Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor at Liberty University who is pro-life and has written on violence against abortion providers. “It depends on an entire culture that makes abortion legal. All a woman needs to do is go to another abortion clinic.”
In a way, the violence is easy for pro-lifers to denounce — it’s the fringe, rather than the core of the pro-life movement, that sees illegal action as the best way to protest abortion in America. Most mainstream abortion opponents agree that violence is a grossly inappropriate action to protest the termination of pregnancies. The trickier part is agreeing on what the right tactics are.
Abortion is currently legal in the United States — but about a third of Americans think it shouldn’t be. That’s tens of millions of people — all of whom likely have nuanced views on the best ways to protest.
“Part of what has fueled abortion clinic violence, I think, is that there is not a coherent, widely accepted pro-life philosophy that has been articulated, communicated, and received by various communities” on how to best protest abortion, Prior says.
