Anti-abortion clinic protests are getting bigger and more aggressive, and they will likely get worse with Roe overturned. We spoke to regional volunteer clinic escorts, clinic staffers, and abortion doulas about the trend.
Since then, most of NAF’s key metrics have remained elevated, but clinic picketing—which is NAF’s term for protesting at clinics—stands out among them. After tripling to 21,715 reported incidents between 2014 and 2015, picketing has since continued to climb: In 2021, NAF recorded 114,093 picketing incidents.
Dale Philp, a volunteer escort at the Hagerstown clinic, mostly finds these protesters “annoying.” “They get in the way, they harass the patients, they verbally accost the escorts, saying we’re all going to hell in a flaming basket,” she says. “But then sometimes there’s a group of younger adults who are really verbally aggressive. They shout at the window of the clinic and condemn us.” Many other escorts and clinic staffers describe relentless verbal harassment outside clinics.
According to escorts, patients’ reactions to being approached outside the clinic are varied. “Some of them just turn around and say, ‘Fuck you, get away from me,’ or some variation thereof,” Megan says of the patients she works with in DC. “But I’ve seen some patients cry and say they didn’t expect there to be some random person on the street telling them they shouldn’t murder a baby.
The fetuses became a national story, but PAAU’s next actions barely made the news: they issued a $25,000 reward for information leading to the criminal conviction of a particular doctor at Surgi and leafleted the doctor’s neighborhood with postcards featuring his photograph, name, and home address.
Of course, clinic staffers and volunteers worry about their safety, too. Hayley McMahon declines to name the DC clinic where she currently escorts, since she doesn’t want the protesters there to associate her face with a name, particularly because videos of her sometimes surface online. “I think a lot of people don’t realize that they’re videotaping us every day, all the time,” McMahon says of the protesters.
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