Storytime. A true one.

Sally (not her real name, of course) is rushed to a hospital suffering complications from a pregnancy. She’s eight months pregnant. Living in a rural area with no car, her husband is nearly an hour away at work. It takes hours before she arrives in the emergency room where it is confirmed that the fetus has already died. She is given drugs to induce labor because an abortion would be illegal, she is told. She is young, her small-frame makes her look even younger. Nurses wander in and out of the delivery room while she cries. The nurses, obviously unaware of Sally’s situation, try to reassure her with their own labor stories, stories about friends’ labors. “It’ll be worth it once you see your baby. Don’t be afraid.” One even sighing in frustration with Sally’s tears, “You shouldn’t be so upset. You’re going to be a mommy!”

Another story. Also true.

Katie (again, fake name) carries to term a very wanted second child knowing that the infant will not survive more than a few minutes outside of her womb, and might not even make it through birth. Katie is strongly pro-life but feels guilt and shame when she is asked about her baby. Strangers, as they are so annoyingly apt to do, place their hands on her belly swollen with life. They see her first child and smile, “You’re going to be a big sister.” Innocuous questions make Katie’s life hellish: “When are you due? What is the sex? What will you name it?” I’m not due, it has no sex, it has no name.

Third-trimester abortions make up less than 1% of all abortions in America. The so-called “partial birth abortion ban” has not changed that. There are people (and not just women) who have made decisions they would never, ever dream they had to make to end daily guilt, fear, and shame over unsuccessful attempts at parenthood. And regardless of how you might feel about it, some people will violate their faith and otherwise fundamental metaphysical/moral metanarratives for some small relief. And maybe they grieve their loss until they die; or maybe they are comforted. It’s not for me to say. I’ll never likely be faced with that decision and I hope I never am. But it would be tyrannical, dictatorial, even fascist of me to say that decision should only be made by Congress, the president, or the tyranny of the majority.

Enter Scott Roeder. The one man who believes that his moral or metaphysical capacities are so objectively and definitively correct that he and he alone may make that choice.

And this isn’t just about Scott Roeder. I hesitate to write about him so specifically as I know I only serve to elevate him to the status he would so willingly accept. Roeder is not a hero or a martyr.

So, let’s not focus on him but on the systematic tactics of violence and threats of violence made against the people who put their lives in danger to give us a choice.

Jennifer Boulanger, Executive Director of the Allentown Women’s Center in Pennsylvania, appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show to describe… well, terror. A volunteer clinic escort was threatened earlier this week when an anti-choice demonstrator asked her if she preferred to die by knife or bullet. Maddow’s report also highlighted what many people who have studied clinic violence have seen/read/heard for years: threatening phone calls, compromised security measures, and vandalism (which may or may not be violent in nature but sometimes is a warning sign of violence). These acts are designed “to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” And, FYI, this appears in quotation marks because it is the definition of domestic terrorism according to a 1994 report by the FBI. (Wikipedia, yo.) (Also, please note I use this definition and not the definition provided by the more recent (but less credible) PATRIOT ACT.)

What’s more, in April of this year the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning that extremist right-wing domestic terrorism was increasing as it had in the early 1990s—when Bill Clinton signed the FACE Act into law (which federally protects clinic entrances.) On the list of extremist right-wing domestic terrorist organizations? Army of God. Undeniably associated with Army of God? Anti-abortion terrorists. Past, present, and future.

Now, really. I’m not the person who goes around slinging “the t-word” at her enemies for any ol’ reason. I was once called a terrorist by Warren County Executive Judge Mike Buchanon, so I can appreciate the humor in the finger-pointing and neighbor-outing that ensues after a new synonym for “Commie Pinko” becomes fashionable. But, really, old ladies in Afghanistan who are detained for yelling at American soldiers who appear to have kidnapped her sons? Not terrorism. Threatening to assassinate people who do something you find disagreeable so they won’t do that anymore? Um, yeah, terrorism.

It was a successful act of terrorism that has permanently shut down the clinic where Dr. Tiller worked. And it will only encourage more acts of terrorism, which will show these freakshow extremists that terrorism works. I mean, really, if you want evidence that terrorism is an effective means of shutting down abortion clinics just read the fucking news today—Operation Rescue wants to buy the old Women’s Health Care Services building that Tiller worked in and turn it into a memorial museum as “a tribute to the babies”.

Are we suddenly going to “let the terrorists win”? I’m not trying to sound like Bush II, not trying to dichotomize into good and evil the myriad ideas (and ideals) that sway like pendulums across the political spectrum. But you don’t have watch Fox News or vote McCain to see that terrorism and terrorists are real threats to whatever it is that we like to call “the American way of life.” Rights, liberties, freedom, checks and balances, protections, elections… You know, stuff in the Constitution.

And this is kind of terrorism familiar to feminist scholars—and not just the scholars branded as “feminists” simply because their work relates to clinic violence (though, I am led to believe that many are actually feminists). For centuries, women have been threatened with personal violence as a method of control. Marylin Frye writes about oppression as having the root word “press”; as in “restrain, restrict, or prevent the thing’s movement. Mold. Immobilize. Reduce.” (from Frye’s essay, “Oppression”). That control works because it has permission to do so—we grant that control access to our actions, our lives, our being, our identity because we, as women, are taught to fear it. Don’t leave the house, or else. Don’t wear your hair short, or else. Don’t flirt too much, or else.

“Else” is violent. “Else” is fear. “Else” is terror. And we let “else” deny our personhood as women, as people, because we don’t want it. The nature of violence against women is obviously and primarily about power/control, but the target of it is women’s sex. The punishment for short skirts or flirtatious smirks is rape. The punishment for being gay (for gay women AND gay men) is rape. Justifications for rape (all false, of course, as rape is never just) run the gamut from “slut” to “prude”. Studies have shown for years that women, as a social group, are disproportionately afraid of rape. Terrorized by it. And, of course, that fear has kept women from smiling when they want, wearing what they want, and doing what they want in ways that men, as a social group, will never experience.

So, it should go without saying that I’m not equating clinic violence with rape. These things are not the same… but you’d be skipping the context to ignore the similarities.