This week an anti-choice vandal was sentenced to jail time and ordered to pay restitution after destroying the only clinic in the Flathead Valley to provide abortion services. The judge’s sentence sends a strong message that anti-choice violence will not be tolerated in our state…but we cannot end the conversation here.
Violence against abortion providers has a long and troubling history in the United States, including in Montana. Since 1977, 6,400 acts of violence against abortion providers have been reported. These include at least 41 bombings, 175 arsons, 17 attempted murders, and eight assassinations of clinic workers. Notably, clinics near crisis pregnancy centers are twice as likely to experience severe violence. (See the vandal’s connections to Kalispell’s crisis pregnancy center.)
The threat to abortion providers is real—harassment, assaults, bombings, and assassinations—these are terrifying realities that people like Susan Cahill endure. Not in the distant past, but every day.
As Cahill stated in her victim impact statement, “Destroying persons, places, property because of a difference in belief is called TERRORISM…Zachary systematically destroyed my property, my profession, my plans for the future and, I feel quite sure he would have destroyed me if I had happened to show up at my office when he was in it. The feeling of hate in my destroyed office was palpable”. We cannot turn a blind eye to the real terrors experienced by providers like Susan Cahill.
Even without anti-choice laws in place in Montana limiting abortion, we are seeing access decrease around the state. Of all the compounding factors limiting abortion access (and there are many), the loss of a clinic to violence is surely the most difficult to bear.
Violence and intimidation have a lasting ripple effect beyond the closure of one clinic and the trauma of one provider. (Horrific and damaging as these things are by themselves.) For over a year, more than 400 Flathead Valley residents have been without their primary healthcare provider. That, in and of itself, is a horrible circumstance which Klundt created when he destroyed the clinic. But even beyond Susan, beyond her patients, beyond Kalispell or even Montana, this destruction has an insidious effect on abortion access because it creates a climate of fear in the medical community.
Violent acts, such as Klundt’s destruction of the Kalispell clinic, are done to send a message: you are not safe. This stokes a fear in healthcare providers—even ones who support abortion rights—which compounds the difficulty of already dwindling access to abortion services, particularly in rural areas of our state. This fear deters professionals from entering the field, from providing abortions if they are in the field, and from moving to (or staying in) a rural area that needs services.
Moving forward, we need to push back against this climate of fear and create safe spaces for medical professionals to talk about abortion access, it’s legitimacy in the medical field, how we can support abortion providers, and how we can ultimately increase access to this necessary, and legal, medical procedure.
Maggie Moran, Executive Director
Pro-Choice Montana