How Anyone Who Works At An Abortion Clinic Becomes A Target For Violence And Harassment

ThinkProgress

Joan, the president of a network of women’s health clinics in the Rocky Mountain region of the United States, isn’t comfortable using her real name in this story because her private residence was vandalized last year. Someone threw a bucket of red paint all over her house.

. ...

... she was pretty sure it was anti-abortion harassment. There wasn’t much the cops could do.

Ascribing blame to the anti-abortion movement — whose particularly far-right actors regularly picket at abortion providers’ private homes, and occasionally use sidewalk chalk to scrawl messages declaring them to be “serial killers” and “monsters” — wasn’t totally a shot in the dark. Protesters clearly know where Joan lives because they’ve shown up at her house several times before. One year, they rewrote Christmas carols to feature lyrics about “how horrible I am,” according to Joan.

“I don’t feel particularly paranoid,” said Joan. When she started her current position, she was given a bulletproof vest by her organization’s security director, but it’s been sitting untouched in a drawer ever since. However, she acknowledged that the risks associated with her line of work do have some impact: “When someone knocks on my door at night, I wonder why.”

More
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015/04/27/3650625/targeted-harassment-abortion-providers/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tptop3&elqTrack=true&elqTrackId=bd3d8800ab2f47ac8a5faa5878c35ebf&elqaid=25381&elqat=1


x p Women's issues