By Jodi Enda | Her friend lay dead, shot at home by an assassin who had killed two people and wounded two more. The suspect had vanished, leaving behind his fake police car and notebooks listing several dozen potential targets who bore at least one commonality: their support of abortion rights.
One of the names scribbled on the list was her own. Threats weren’t new to Ruth Richardson. She had received them when she introduced her first bill—on gun safety—in the Minnesota House of Representatives. She had received them in her current job as CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States. This threat, though, was different. Her friend Melissa Hortman was dead.
Hortman, the speaker emerita of the Minnesota House, and her husband, Mark, were slaughtered in the early hours of June 14 when they opened their door to a man dressed as a police officer, his black SUV projecting flashing police-style lights. State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot and gravely wounded when they did the same.
The gunman might have been alone, but the bloodshed did not occur in a vacuum. “There’s been a lot of violent political rhetoric that has led to this point,” Richardson told Ms. weeks after the shootings. “It was one thing to get a threat; it’s another thing to have confirmed threats where you have a friend and a colleague who is assassinated. So I think there’s just a new level of concern in this moment.”
This moment is one of heightened violence in America’s long and often ferocious struggle over abortion, a “war” in which opponents of abortion have, among other things, murdered providers, set healthcare facilities ablaze and chained themselves to clinic doors to prevent patients from entering.
This moment is one in which the U.S. president, on his fifth day in office, pardoned 23 people who had been convicted and several imprisoned for blocking access to abortion clinics, some violently. “They should not have been prosecuted,” Donald Trump pronounced.
This moment is one in which the U.S. Department of Justice declared that, except in “extraordinary circumstances,” it would stop enforcing a 1994 federal law intended to reduce antiabortion violence. (In fact, though the exceptions to that dictum include death, federal prosecutors have so far not invoked the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act in the Minnesota case.)
These moments, abortion-rights advocates contend, are connected. And they are dangerous.
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