Anti-abortion violence in the US: the terrorism stats that disappeared into thin air
Since the US Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling that effectively legalised abortion in the US, anti-abortion extremists have been waging increasingly violent campaigns against family-planning clinics and their staff. What started as peaceful protests and picketing slowly deteriorated into harassment and, eventually, violence as the first reported arson attack against a clinic took place in 1976.
In 1978 a series of bombings followed. Ever since, reported incidents of anti-abortion violence have expanded to include murder and attempted murder, kidnapping, bombing and cases of arson, vandalism, stalking, assault and battery, Anthrax threats, Butyric acid attacks, and death threats. And for those who think that these are isolated incidents by a select few madmen, take a look at the National Abortion Federation (NAF) Violence and Disruption Statistics from 1977 to 2010 and think again:
Murder: 8
Attempted murder: 17
Bombing: 41
Arson: 175
Attempted bombings and arson: 98
Assault and battery: 188
Stalking: 523
Bomb threats: 653
Anthrax threats: 662
Vandalism: 1,451
Number of arrests: 33,834
Yet if you were to do a search for “abortion” on the National Counterterrorism Centre’s (NCTC) WITS terrorism database, your search would yield only two incidents - and one of them took place in Nepal. Another federally supported terrorism database, the Global Terrorism Database, lists nine.