Abortion providers are at risk for all kinds of violence for doing their jobs and making sure that women have access to safe, legal abortions. We often hear about the fanatical pro-lifers who protest, stalk and harass people who work at clinics that provide reproductive health services for women. We know that they make these workplaces incredibly unsafe for these employees. But we don’t ever hear about how that work also targets them for sexual assault and abuse.
Calla Hales is the director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, which operates abortion clinics in North Carolina and Georgia. In 2015, she went on a second date with a guy who wanted to know the specifics of her work in what she described as “women’s health.” She got a strange feeling from him during their date. After he abruptly ended their dinner, and asked her to go home with him, she declined. That’s when he walked her to her car and proceeded to rape her.
“He said things like I should have expected this and that I deserved it. He asked how I could live with myself and said I should repent. That I was a jezebel. That I was a murderer. That he was doing no worse to me than I had done to women. He said he would make me remember him.”
Hales was targeted by an anti-abortion extremist. Unfortunately, what happened to her is not an isolated incident. Anti-abortion activists are known for their violent behavior directed at abortion providers and volunteers and it has dramatically escalated over the last several years. It’s not enough that they disagree with a woman’s legal right to have an abortion. Some of them believe that murder, rape, and arson are acceptable tactics in their war to preserve fetal rights.
In its 2016 report, the National Abortion Federation (NAF), which monitors clinic harassment and violence, found that picketing, vandalism, obstruction, invasion, trespassing, burglary, stalking, assault and battery, and bomb threats are all on the rise. Clinics reported 60,000 incidents of picketing that year, an all-time high since the NAF began tracking these statistics in 1977. The report also documented a five-fold increase in hate speech and internet harassment, which escalated after the election. The 2016 National Clinic Violence Survey, published by the Feminist Majority Foundation, found that the percentage of clinics reporting the most severe types of anti-abortion violence and threats of violence has dramatically increased from the first six months of 2014 to the first six months of 2016 — from 19.7 percent to 34.2 percent. Hales was raped in November 2015.
Notice the correlation between how the numbers have escalated in the last two years, and especially after the election. So many Americans were willing to overlook Trump’s predatory “locker room talk” and put him in the White House. You cannot have a man on the national stage running for the presidency who normalizes sexual assault and not expect this. This is exactly what happens when a rapist is allowed to aspire to and hold the highest office in the country.
Let’s also point out the sheer absurdity and incredible hypocrisy of how this behavior is the exact opposite of preserving life. The physical, moral, cultural and religious violence involved in justifying sexually assaulting women associated with providing abortions is nothing short of vile and grotesque. Of course, it’s most certainly a crime. But it also became a sick strategy that pro-life protesters used to intimidate Hales.
Within weeks, though, Hales began to see her attacker’s face in the crowd of protesters outside the Raleigh clinic. At first, she thought she was being paranoid. But then, she says, the protesters began to yell things they hadn’t yelled before, echoing words said to her during the assault.
“The protesters outside started calling me a jezebel a lot more,” Hales said. “And I got letters in the mail saying that I deserved it.”
It’s not enough that they have actively conspired in a heinous crime against this woman for doing a job which is perfectly legal, these groups have even posted her address online. This kind of act is only reflective of the most, deep misogyny imaginable. It is terror designed to halt women’s freedom and autonomy over our women bodies. And yet, it has not stopped Calla Hales from doing her job. “They haven’t kept me from doing my job and from wanting to be a human,” Hales said. And thank goodness. She is needed and with Republicans trying to take away women’s access to abortions and reproductive care, her work is vital now more than ever. There is no doubt that she is still fully human and an important contributor to our society. The protestors who have participated in this disgusting monstrosity on the other hand—that’s an entirely different story.