Who's Afraid of Virginia Dare? Confronting Anti-Abortion Terrorism After 9/11

Abstract

Anti-abortion terrorism blatantly exemplifies the contradiction of claiming human rights for the unborn while denying them to women and clinic workers. When so-called pro-lifers' began, paradoxically enough, to kill for life in the early 1990s, pro-choice advocates screamed "hypocrisy," but anti-abortion organizations barely suffered. 2 On the contrary, the most militant pro-lifers were emboldened and began to openly air their apocalyptic ideas that abortion is a sign of the "End Times" of humanity and life itself.3 Few pro-choice organizations understood the significance in the shift away from "rescue" and toward apocalypse. Feminist scholars were busy examining the fetus as text in popular culture and the public sphere or seeking, in the name of gender analysis, if not coalition building, compromise and common ground among pro-life and pro-choice women.