Murdering Abortion Providers in America: A History

It's happened before, and will happen again

On March 11, 1993, in Pensacola, Florida, Dr. David Gunn was murdered. He was a physician guilty of the heinous crime of providing healthcare.

Abortion is healthcare. It doesn’t matter why someone wants to end a pregnancy. It doesn’t matter how old they are, or how they got pregnant, or whether their life is in danger. You can’t force someone to donate blood even if it would save the life of the president. Likewise, you cannot force someone to be an unwilling host. If you don’t have the right to your own bodily autonomy, you don’t have freedom.

Pregnancy is dangerous, especially in the U.S. Here is a sampling of death rates. America doesn’t rank so well.

And it’s far worse if you’re not white. For Black people, death from pregnancy is triple the average.

Prior to the late 1970s, the religious right in America wasn’t that unified on the subject of abortion; there was diversity of opinion. But with Roe v. Wade passing in 1973, abortion suddenly became more common. I want to make one thing very clear: Abortion becoming more common was a good thing! The increase in rates of abortion, coupled with the rise of second-wave feminism, had American evangelical Christians in a tizzy. And where there was a misplacing of excrement, there was opportunity. By 1979 the issue of abortion was a unifying message in the religious right, a mobilizing political force where life began at conception and any message other than forcing people to give birth was an intolerable viewpoint.

With such cohesiveness of messaging, it bred radicalization. People who got abortions were murderers, they said, and so were those who performed the procedures.

Back to Dr. Gunn. For years doctors who performed abortion were threatened with violence and death. Their clinics were bombed and vandalized. An organization called Operation Rescue had created a “Wanted” poster of Gunn months earlier, with both his face and phone number, and displayed it all over the country, including at his daughter’s school in Alabama.

The 1993 shooting of Dr. Gunn outside his clinic is believed to be the first time in the U.S. that an abortion doctor was murdered. He was getting out of his car outside the Pensacola Women’s Medical Services clinic when a protestor shot him three times in the back. Gunn later died in hospital.

The man who murdered Gunn was Michael Frederick Griffin, a member of the Christian terrorist group Army of God. It is reported that immediately before shooting Gunn, Griffin yelled, “Don’t kill any more babies!” The other protesters present didn’t react in shock at the murder of the doctor, but rather seemed quite pleased with it.

Griffin surrendered to police, showed no remorse at trial, and was sentenced to life in prison for first degree murder. Immediately after the killing, the forced birth activists released a statement supporting Griffin and saying that what he did was a “godly action” that was “legitimate” and “justified.” And a leading forced birther, Paul Hill, went on the popular Donahue show only five days after the murder to proclaim that Dr. Gunn deserved to die, likening it to “killing a Nazi concentration camp doctor.” And then the following year, in July of 1994, Hill murdered Dr. John Britton and James Barrett (a clinic escort) outside a different clinic in Pensacola. Hill was equally unrepentant right up to his death by lethal injection in 2003, his final words being some Christian terrorist bullshit.

A sick new trend had begun.

Later in 1994, two receptionists, Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols, were murdered at two different clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts. The killer took his life in prison two years later.

January 1998: Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer working security at a clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, died when it was bombed. The bomber was the same one later convicted of the bombing during the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.

October 1998: Dr. Barnett Slepian was murdered in his home in Amherst, New York. Dr. Slepian was shot from a distance with a high-powered rifle. It’s believed that his killer, James Kopp, was responsible for similar shootings in Canada and elsewhere in New York state that had seriously wounded a number of physicians. Kopp is serving life without parole.

May 2009: Dr. George Tiller was murdered while attending church in Wichita, Kansas. The killer is currently incarcerated. It was the second time Tiller had been shot. Inspired by murder of Dr. Gunn in 1993, five months later a Christian terrorist and fellow Army of God fuckhead Shelley Shannon shot Dr. Tiller in both arms. She showed no remorse at her trial and spent 23 years in prison.

November 2015: A shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs left three dead and several more were injured. The killer proclaimed himself “a warrior for the babies” and was determined incompetent to stand trial.

I didn’t even get into all the attempted murders, kidnappings, bombings, and acts of arson.

It wasn’t just acts of violence by Christian terrorists that horrified the nation, but how the issue of abortion unified and galvanized white evangelicals. Early in Trump’s run for the leadership of the Republican Party he had strong support from the religious right. And it was hypocritical as fuck, because he was the opposite of the “family values” they professed to embrace with their “Moral Majority” bullshit. It’s alleged that Trump has paid for several abortions of those he impregnated. Or, knowing Trump, said he would pay then ducked out on the bill.

But the Christofascists didn’t give a fuck about how awful Trump was. They supported him because he said he would fight for them, and he did. They were thrilled with his Supreme Court picks, and overjoyed when it paid off with Roe v. Wade being overturned. To them, the end justified the means.

And now things are really going to shit.

In Ohio, a ten-year-old rape victim had to travel to Indiana to have an abortion. Then the Indiana Attorney General went on Fox Fucking News and said that the doctor who performed the abortion may have broken the law and that they were looking into her. It was bullshit. She hadn’t broken the law, but her name and face were out there. And this wasn’t the first time the doctor had faced threats for providing abortions. The FBI reports that the doctor’s daughter faced a credible kidnapping threat after her name was published on an extremist forced birth website earlier in the year.

That extremist website, by the way, was endorsed by none other than Trump Supreme Court appointee Amy Coney Barrett. And now another abortion provider’s life is at risk.

Forcing birth is a proven route to power in American politics. It’s just so fucking easy to advocate for fetuses because a small clump of cells can be warped into a morally pure entity that needs warriors to defend them. But defending a fetus is easy. All you have to do is deny people healthcare. It doesn’t require a lot of effort beyond that. It doesn’t ask the forced birthers to give up any power or wealth and status. Rather, forcing birth is a path to increasing those things by unifying their political beliefs and getting their chosen representatives elected.

And as we know, these same people don’t give a single fuck about that fetus once it becomes a child. They don’t care if it’s fed, educated, sheltered, loved, or has access to healthcare.

We are witnessing a new rise in extremist thought regarding abortion in the U.S.; such Christian terrorism will rear its ugly head again. More abortion providers are certain to die, but I expect a new twist. I expect that one such terrorist is going to use some kind of “justifiable homicide” defense of the unborn bullshit, and they’ll not be convicted.

You only need one bugshit religious righty on the jury for a mistrial.

Get my book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.