After the mourning, action.

• Position: Brookline, MA abortion clinic murders, Dec 30, 1995 - Editorial

The murders of two receptionists at two separate abortion clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 30 brings to five the number of persons murdered by anti-abortion fanatics in less than two years. These murders are a call for progressives to mobilize in defense of a woman's right to choose abortion.

We are faced with a horrific increase in violence on the part of anti-abortion forces. The National Abortion Federation, which runs a computerized tracking system, reports that 1993 and 1994 saw eight attempted murders, four bombings, fourteen incidents of arson, and eleven attempts at bombings and arson. The Federation also cites 153 cases of vandalism, 128 death threats against clinic workers, 204 cases of the "stalking" of abortion providers, clinic workers, or patients away from the clinic. And the Federation counts 4,157 incidences of disruption, a category which includes hate mail, phone calls, bomb threats, and picketing.

Don Treshman, the national director of the militant anti-abortion group Rescue America, calls this "a war," and it has already gotten serious. It threatens only to get worse.

The reckless rhetoric of violence is responsible for these murders. Words have consequences - we now know they have deadly consequences. Dead are five people - the two women in Brookline, and one clinic escort and two physicians who provided abortions in Pensacola, Florida.

Alive is the hate-filled rhetoric that makes such murders possible - even inevitable.

There is, for example, the Reverend David Trosch, a Roman Catholic priest in Alabama whose theology leads him to the conclusion that killing abortion workers is "justifiable homicide" and who predicted, in a letter to members of Congress last July, "massive killing of abortionists and their staffs." He also issued a "target list" of members of organizations he doesn't like, such as Planned Parenthood, NOW, and the ACLU, and said they would be "sought out and terminated as vermin are terminated."

And there is the manual found at the home of Shelley Shannon, the Oregon woman who is now serving a ten-year prison term for the attempted murder of an abortion-provider in Wichita, Kansas, and who has been charged with setting fire to eight clinics in four states. Titled "Ninety-Nine Covert Ways to Stop Abortion," it includes, for example, instructions on how to squirt superglue into clinics' locks so the doors can't be opened; how to drill holes into the roofs of clinics to cause "pesky roof...