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This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 26 episode of Velshi.
In 1970, Dr. George Tiller took over his father’s family practice in Wichita, Kansas, after his dad passed away. When his dad’s old patients started rolling in, Tiller learned a secret: His father had been providing safe, but illegal, abortions to his patients for decades.
It had not been Tiller’s plan to go into family practice, much less women’s health, but he was so moved by meeting his father’s patients and hearing their stories — seeing the need his father had been filling — that once the Supreme Court affirmed the right to an abortion with Roe v. Wade in 1973, Tiller began a decadeslong career, eventually becoming Wichita’s lone abortion provider.
She posed as a patient with an appointment before eight of her allies barged into the building and blocked the doors with chains and ropes.
While his father operated in secret, Tiller became perhaps the most famous public face of abortion. To the anti-abortion movement, he became a target. In 1986, his clinic was bombed overnight. No one was hurt but there was extensive damage. Tiller hung a sign outside that said, “Hell no, we won’t go.”
In 1991, thousands of anti-abortion activists descended onto Tiller’s clinic in Wichita in what they dubbed the “Summer of Mercy” — weeks of protests and blockades designed to shut down the clinic and end abortion access. Protesters would block the entrance to the clinic and adjacent streets, screaming threats and prayers at patients. Over the course of six weeks, 2,600 people were arrested. In 1993, Tiller was shot five times by an anti-abortion extremist outside his clinic, though he managed to survive. But 16 years later, in 2009, another anti-abortion activist shot Tiller, this time during services at his church in Witchita, killing him.
But Tiller wasn’t the only one being terrorized by violent anti-abortion extremists. Clinics across the country were vandalized and blockaded. Doctors, nurses and volunteers were stalked, harassed and assassinated. Between 1977 and 1988, there were 110 cases of arson or firebombing by anti-abortion extremists, according to researchers at the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
And in 1993, the same year Tiller walked away from that attempted assassination, an OB-GYN in Pensacola, Florida, named Dr. David Gunn was shot dead outside the abortion clinic where he worked. Gunn was the first known targeted killing of an abortion provider in America.
The following year two receptionists were shot and killed and five others wounded at a pair of Boston area clinics. In all, at least 11 people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics since 1993.
This was the political climate in which then-President Bill Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances or “FACE” Act in 1994. It prohibits anyone from using “force, threat of force, intimidation or injury” to prevent someone from “obtaining or providing reproductive health services.”
It sends a very clear signal to women and women’s health providers: The government will not protect abortion rights even in states where they are still guaranteed.
On Thursday, 23 people convicted of violating that act were pardoned by President Donald Trump.
One of them, Lauren Handy, was sentenced to five years in prison for essentially invading a Washington, D.C. clinic. She posed as a patient with an appointment before eight of her allies barged into the building and blocked the doors with chains and ropes.
When police searched her home, they found five fetuses Handy claimed to have taken from a medical waste truck driver outside the clinic. In an interview with New York Magazine, Handy said, “I’ve accepted the reality that my life will be in and out of jail.” Not so. The president has pardoned her and her co-conspirators.
On Friday, Trump’s Justice Department took things a step further and issued an order curtailing all prosecutions under the FACE Act, save for “extraordinary circumstances.”
So despite Trump’s insistence on the campaign trail that states will do what they want with abortion, his pardon of people convicted for violating the FACE Act and his order that it largely no longer be enforced in the future sends a very clear signal to women and women’s health providers: The government will not protect abortion rights even in states where they are still guaranteed.
And, worse, is the signal he’s sending to extremists: It is now acceptable to make use of threats, intimidation and even perhaps violence to shut down abortion clinics.
Armand Manoukian and Allison Detzel contributed.