Abstract
In Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism, authors Cohen and Connon discuss the results of a 3-year project involving interviews of 87 abortion providers. The authors organize their book around their two self-proclaimed messages: first, that “targeted harassment continues to be a serious problem” and second, “that the legal system’s response can improve” (p. 9).
The authors begin by discussing the 2009 murder of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider who was murdered in a church by an antiabortion extremist. Like Dr. Tiller, many of the abortion providers in the book traveled across the country to different abortion clinics to provide not only the less controversial (but still protested) first and second trimester abortions but also the rare but heavily contested “late-term” abortion. In the first chapter, Cohen and Connon discuss the immense risk associated with their “day at the office”—many of the providers wore bulletproof vests, periodically altered their routes to work, and had the Federal Bureau of Investigation on “speed dial” to report imminent threats. In the second chapter, the authors discuss where the harassment takes place—ranging from right outside of given clinics to the doctors’ homes, other places of work, or online and in the media. In the third and fourth chapters, the authors cover various tactics used by antiabortion protesters, such as shouting references to previous killings and acquiring doctors’ personal information to scare or unsettle the doctors and their children or families. In the fifth and sixth chapters, the authors focus on the providers’ reactions to terrorism and the preventative measures taken to protect their lives.
The seventh, eight, and ninth chapters of the book focus on the legal system’s response to antiabortion terrorism, whether that response comes in the form of interaction with law enforcement or with the court system. The authors also discuss the legal system’s response in terms of laws that are in place specific to abortion providers or targeted harassment, including the implementation of laws commonly known as “buffer zone” laws, which forbid people not receiving services from being within a certain distance of the building or those going in or out of the building. The authors take time to carefully analyze and critique many of the legal responses to antiabortion terrorism, which allows the reader to understand such policies in terms of their implications. For instance, the authors discuss the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and its complexities, strengths, and weaknesses. In one scenario, a provider mentioned receiving a call saying that “they were all going to die.” Although this was categorized as an implied threat, federal authorities had the discretion to determine that there was possibly not enough evidence that something would actually happen or enough evidence to determine who the offender was. The 10th and final chapter discusses the providers’ perceptions of the need to continue their work in the face of dangerous adversity.
The authors take care to present the providers’ experiences without judgment or interpretation. The greatest strength of this approach is that it allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions from the experiences presented. The authors constantly complement any subjective claims with factual information—for instance, in the earliest pages of the book, they discuss that antiabortion movements frequently take extremist forms by including statistics on reported acts of bombings, bomb threats, vandalism, trespassing, and death threats. In the second section of the book, the authors again present the legal system’s response to antiabortion terrorism and the options that providers have, particularly under the Obama administration—leaving the reader with the question of “What will happen now, in this political climate?”
The only blatant subjectivity in the book is in the final chapter, in which the authors present the experiences of abortion providers in such a way that the reader actively feels the same intensity that the providers themselves often feel. The authors report that, without the day-to-day risks taken by abortion providers, many women would very likely die, and many more women would experience extreme emotional distress.
In conclusion, I recommend this book to scholars, activists, or professionals with interests in the areas of women’s issues or domestic terrorism. Further, the language of the book makes it accessible to students at the undergraduate level, making the book a contender for a wide variety of classes such as criminal justice policy, social issues, or women’s and gender studies.