Feminists, Racketeers, and the First Amendment

First Amendment freedoms are inevitably invoked by provocateurs and dissenters seeking to change or complain about the status quo, so it’s not surprising that anti-abortion protesters have discovered free speech. After abortion was legalized and normalized in the early 1970s, pro-choicers suddenly had the law on their side, and pro-fetal-life advocates began adopting the tactics of earlier protest movements. Picketing abortion clinics and conducting sit-ins, they likened themselves to civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s.

This analogy broke down when radicals in the anti-abortion movement turned from civil disobedience to violence, in addition to protests that bordered on criminal harassment of women seeking entry into abortion clinics. The enraged activists who organize clinic blockades resemble the segregationists who surrounded Little Rock’s Central High School in 1956 much more than the besieged African-American students trying to enter the school. Many anti-...