“Jane was here”: those were the words graffitied on the walls of a “pregnancy crisis center” in Amherst, New York, this week, as part of a targeted arson attack.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, the message was more explicit: “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either,” read the words scrawled in red paint across another center, which also had its windows broken.
The same message was found on the walls of “pregnancy crisis centers” in Texas and Wisconsin in May, and another attack took place on a similar institution in Washington, also in May. The attacks on these centers – which try to dissuade women from seeking abortions – are believed to be linked to Jane’s Revenge, an extremist, militant pro-choice group.
No one has been injured during these attacks, but the methods have been extreme: vandals have thrown molotov cocktails, committed arson, damaged property and made threats. At a time of rapidly increasing abortion restrictions in the US – and an upcoming supreme court decision this summer that is expected to result in total abortion bans in as many as 26 states – can more violence be expected?
After the attack in Wisconsin, a letter signed by “Jane’s Revenge” was sent to a Bellingcat journalist laying out a kind of mission statement, and threatening further action. “This is not a mere ‘difference of opinion’ as some have framed it,” the letter said. “We are literally fighting for our lives. We will not sit still while we are killed and forced into servitude.”
The letter also demanded that “anti-choice establishments” – institutions that have a reputation for trying to lure women into unwanted pregnancies and spreading misinformation about the impacts of abortion – to disband within 30 days, or else face more violence.
“Wisconsin is the first flashpoint,” the letter said. “But we are all over the US, and we will issue no further warnings … We will not stop until … the inalienable right to manage our own health is returned to us.”
Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis with an expertise in the abortion movement, believes the attacks can be read as an expression of distrust in the government, and a loss of faith in democratic institutions.
“A lot of people – conservatives and progressives – have lost faith in a lot of democratic institutions. A lot of people believe the supreme court is partisan and illegitimate,” she said.
She notes some of the public discourse around the supreme court in recent years: Donald Trump referred to supreme court justices as “my judges” and was specific about the ways they would serve his aims. “He would just come out [and say] ‘my’ judges will give you specific outcomes on abortion, guns and a variety of other things,” said Ziegler.
The supreme court’s impending rulings in a number of high-profile cases, from abortion to gun rights – in quick succession since Trump’s appointments of justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch – have only deepened the public’s impression of partisanship, Ziegler said.
“This is not something that’s unfolding over a very long period of time. And [the supreme court] is rendering decisions that are all helping conservatives,” she said. “If the court just does things that help conservatives, people will ask ‘why is there a partisan body that isn’t elected? Why is there a partisan body with lifetime appointments?’”
What is surprising about these recent attacks, however, is that the vast majority of violent protest tactics – including around abortion – have come, historically, from the right of American politics. Rightwing protests over lockdown, racial justice and abortion have seen armed militias taking justice into their own hands, even storming the US Capitol. The tactics of the right on abortion have been similarly extreme: 11 people were murdered by anti-choice protesters between 1993 and 2016, and another 26 murders were attempted. The tactics of anti-abortion advocates have included bombings, arson, death threats and hate mail.
Are violent protests successful?
Ziegler believes that some people on both the left and the right might feel they are enacting some sort of vigilante justice when they resort to violent protest tactics around abortion. At present, pro-choice advocates may be seeing an apparent mismatch between public opinion and legislation: 61% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, yet states are enforcing increasingly extreme restrictions.
These tactics, however, are not commonly successful, academics say – even if protesters feel their grievances are valid. Take the example of American civil rights protests in the 1950s and 1960s.
Omar Wasow studied the political consequences of different kinds of protests during that period: violent and non-violent. He found violent protest seemed to have the unintended effect of chilling support for the movement, leading to more votes for conservatives, while peaceful protest apparently had the effect of liberalising white voters.
“Even if we think violence might be justified in response to state repression under segregation, or Jim Crow, it may produce outcomes entirely contrary to what activists were fighting for,” said Wasow. “Norm-violating tactics can be repulsive to put to potential moderate allies.”
Ziegler said the same has been true for the anti-abortion movement, whose own violence has rarely been effective.
“I don’t think that violence was particularly effective for conservatives,” she said. “It’s not wrong to say that progressives need to be willing to use the strategies that conservatives have used. But committing illegal acts of violence has not historically been why the anti-abortion movement has succeeded.”
Instead, she said, the movement has succeeded as well as it has due to big, long-term, structural changes: essentially changing the rules of the game. “They have gotten involved in changing the rules of campaign finance, they have changed access to the vote, and changed how the supreme court confirmation process works.”
“People often focus on a narrow period of time and say, ‘Oh, look at how all of this success was made [in a small period],’ but there’s really decades of activism that’s slowly building the kind of social and political capital to make change happen,” Wasow said.
With popular opinion seemingly on the side of keeping abortion legal at least in some instances, such tactics could simply sully the aims of the cause, Ziegler warned.
“If you have majority support for what you stand for, and the message you send is, ‘Who cares, we’re gonna go out and commit acts of violence,’ that will probably also be counterproductive.”
