What NAF's Report REALLY Reveals About Abortion-Clinic Violence
The National Abortion Federation's report on abortion-facility violence tells a different story than what is being reported
In lieu of the National Abortion Federation’s (NAF) report on violence and disruption towards abortion facilities, the media’s fixation on the ‘extremism’ of pro-life groups has been renewed. Numerous media outlets have claimed that, since the leaking of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, anti-choice attacks are on the rise in America.
But despite the media’s effort to paint a menacing image of the pro-life movement following Dobbs, the same report actually shows some contrary results.
Of the 15 categories of violence and disruption listed, only six of them experienced an increase in overall cases following the leaking of the Supreme Court decision. In the other nine categories, the number of violent cases actually decreased from 2021 to 2022.
This is not to say that abortion providers faced no violence or disruption at all in 2022–regrettably, they did–but not to any outlying extent relative to previous years, even following the Dobbs leak.
On the other hand, pro-life pregnancy resource centers and churches saw a massive spike in attacks and vandalization since Dobbs. According to FBI director Christopher Wrey, seventy percent of abortion-related threats since Dobbs have been directed toward pro-life groups and communities.
The number of confirmed attacks on pro-life charities and resource centers amounted to eighty-seven total, according to CatholicVote–the latest of which took place only just last week and involved the ritualistic murder of several animals in front of a pregnancy center in Florida.
The small Catholic pregnancy center, based in Orlando, Florida, found the decapitated corpses of a chicken, a lamb, and a pheasant scattered about in a “ritualistic” fashion around the building’s perimeter, which were a direct attack on the Catholic and faith-based mission of the organization.
Other instances of harassment are prevalent in the form of crude and often anti-Christian comments on Twitter, and more severe attacks have included the assault of pro-life ralliers and even firebombings of pregnancy centers in Buffalo, N.Y.
Despite this disparity in post-Dobbs statistics, little attention is given to the injustices suffered by pro-life charities and institutions at the hands of self-proclaimed “pro-choice” extremists. Instead, the media remains fixated on occasions of “pro-life” extremism and uses it as a means of portraying the entirety of the pro-life movement as one of division and terror.
I do not suggest that instances of “pro-life” extremism are made up or imagined. Certainly, there are a tragic number of individuals who believe that they enable the pro-life creed by acts of extremism, which in and of itself overturns the very ideology they claim to fight for.
But whether these few extremist individuals profess to be pro-choice or pro-life, their actions should never be held as a reflection of the entirety of the group they claim to represent. Doing so will only further damage our ability to engage in civil dialogue with one another and to truly change the culture's mind to one that respects human life.