This page covers the strand of anti-abortion activity that targets individual clinics and providers directly — through obstruction, publication of their identifying information, and in documented cases violence — as distinct from the legislative and electoral activity covered on the pro-choice-and-pro-life-movements page.

That distinction is the reason the page exists, and it is a real one: Congress legislated specifically about this conduct.

The statute

The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act was enacted on May 26, 1994. Codified at 18 U.S.C. § 248, it makes it an offence to injure, intimidate or interfere with — or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with — any person because that person is obtaining or providing reproductive health services, where this is done by force, threat of force or physical obstruction. It separately criminalizes intentionally damaging or destroying the property of such a facility.

The Act was passed in response to a pattern of conduct, and its existence is the clearest evidence in the public record that such a pattern existed. It is symmetrical: the same section protects people exercising religious freedom at places of worship in identical terms.

Dobbs, decided June 24, 2022, returned abortion regulation to the states. Abortion remains legal in many of them, and the FACE Act remains federal law regardless of state abortion law.

What could not be sourced

The previous version of this page contained a detailed four-phase history naming specific organizations, a website launched in 1997 that published providers’ names and addresses, a federal court order against it in 1999, a named group linked to acts of violence, and a 2015 undercover video campaign followed by congressional investigations.

Several of those accounts are probably accurate and the litigation in particular is a matter of public record. But this page makes serious allegations about named organizations and, by implication, identifiable people, and the appellate opinions that would document them could not be retrieved during this pass — the accessible case-law hosts returned HTTP 403 to automated clients.

Rather than repeat serious allegations without a citation, the specific claims have been removed and this page reduced to what the statute and the Supreme Court’s opinion support. It is recorded in reports/citations/movements.md as a page needing restoration from court records by someone with access to them.

The founded field, which read 1993, has been removed with the chronology it belonged to.

Sources

  1. 01.

    United States Congress. Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, Public Law 103-259; 18 U.S.C. § 248. (1994). Enacted May 26, 1994 as S. 636, "To amend title 18, United States Code, to assure freedom of access to reproductive services". The codified text at 18 U.S.C. § 248, confirmed separately at the Cornell Legal Information Institute, prohibits injuring, intimidating or interfering with a person obtaining or providing reproductive health services by force, threat of force or physical obstruction, and criminalizes damaging or destroying the property of such a facility. The same section extends identical protection to places of religious worship.

    www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-108/pdf/STATUTE-108-Pg694.pdf
  2. 02.

    Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, No. 19-1392. (2022). Decided June 24, 2022. Cited for the change in legal context: abortion regulation returned to the states, which is what the previous version of this page described as reorienting this activity toward states where abortion remained legal.

    www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf