(Steven Garcia / Getty Images) |
By Ava Slocum and Kathy Spillar | Early Saturday morning, news broke of the assassination of Melissa Hortman, a Democratic Minnesota state legislator and former speaker, along with her husband Mark, at their home. State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were also shot multiple times at their home; both survived and are fighting for their lives following emergency surgery.
Vance Luther Boelter—the suspect in the shootings, who posed as a police officer to gain entry to both residences—was apprehended on Sunday night after what police chief Mark Bruley called “the largest manhunt in state history.” Boelter also went to the homes of two other lawmakers between the two shootings, trying to enter four houses in total. According to law enforcement sources, Boelter had a list of more than 50 additional “targets”; the list was recovered from his vehicle abandoned at the scene of the second shooting after police confronted him in an exchange of gunfire. The list included other Democratic officials, some from outside Minnesota, as well as abortion facilities and leading abortion rights advocates in the state.
Although we don’t yet know if his extremist views on abortion (he gave “sermons” at evangelical churches in the U.S. and in the Congo, where he criticized American churches for not doing more to oppose abortion) were the driving cause in his murderous rampage, it is proof of the ongoing threats to abortion providers in this climate of escalating political violence.
Yet, just weeks after the suicide bombing of a Palm Springs fertility clinic, and despite rising rates of threats and violence against abortion clinics after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to advance HR 589, the FACE Act Repeal Act of 2025. The bill would repeal the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a statute protecting clinicians’ and patients’ right to safely provide and access reproductive healthcare. All Democrats on the committee voted against the proposed bill.
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