Why isn’t pro-life terrorism treated as…terrorism, asks Kaili Joy Gray in the Daily Kos under the headline “Another day, another ‘pro-life’ terrorist bombs an abortion clinic”.

“It’s almost hard to get worked up about stories like this, when they’re so damned common. Bombs thrown, buildings burned, car tires slashed, patients stalked, doctors assassinated … You can look at the statistics. You can read about the thousands of acts of violence and tens of thousands of acts of “non-violent” terrorism against health care providers and their staff and their patients and their landlords and their landlords’ children. It’s all part of the “pro-life” movement to save the fetuses. And hey, if some property, or some people, have to get hurt, well, that’s a fair price to pay.”

 

Sadly, those attacks are common. The National Abortion Federation has published a sobering chart about these acts of violence in the past decades and the killings of doctors who perform abortions.

Andrea Stone raises in The Huffington Post another reason for concern: Attacks against abortion clinics are not included in the Government’s main terrorism database.

“[…] missing among the [terrorism] statistics are numerous cases of anti-abortion violence in the United States, an omission that raises questions about what defines terrorism and underscores how sensitive the issue of reproductive rights remains — even when dealing with statistics. A search of “abortion” in the Worldwide Incidents Tracking System, a database created after the 9/11 terrorist attacks by the National Counterterrorism Center, brings up just two abortion-related incidents — one of them in Nepal. Though the database includes the 2009 murder of prominent abortion doctor George Tiller by an anti-abortion extremist, it is effectively whitewashed, making no reference to abortion in the entire entry. In the summary, Tiller is described merely as a “medical doctor,” even though he and his clinic had been a target of anti-abortion activists for years.”