Kansas City News Blog

Last night, Rachel Maddow recapped the history of violence against abortion providers in the United States. This segment is long -- it's nearly 12 minutes -- but it's sobering and frightening and worth seeing. Maddow slowly lays out a case for "an anti-abortion terrorist movement in the United States."


Here's a clip of Maddow's commentary, if you don't want to watch the video:

There's an anti-abortion terrorist movement in the United States that operates relatively openly. They advocate and their members commit acts of violence, including murder, against Americans who are not breaking the law, who are engaged in protected legal activity on American soil. These acts of violence are politically motivated. They are designed to change American policies and to terrorize Americans. They have succeed in making providing abortion services to American women so dangerous, so intimidating that there are only a handful of doctors in the entire country who provide late-term abortions--as Dr. Tiller did--abortions late in pregnancy.

In other words, this terrorism is working. Violence as a political strategy is working to make abortions so unsafe for doctors that they are unwilling to bear the risk of performing it so women can't actually get one regardless of whether or not it's legal. It's the same outcome as if abortion had been outlawed. They're winning.

And while you're at it, watch this clip of Maddow interviewing Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elects, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All or Almost All of It Back. Schaeffer renounces his past, which included making an anti-abortion documentary in the 1970s.