No Sanctuary

One session made national headlines in 2019, when meeting attendees jeered at 13-year-old Addison Woosley, who challenged councilmembers: “Are you choosing to be like the plantation owner flogging the little black child? Or are you going to protest [abortion] even if it going to cost you your life like Martin Luther King, Jr.?”[2]

Weeks later, Woosley appeared on Gospel of God’s podcast, “Truth That Transforms,”^[3] alongside Braddy, who explained their focus on city council meetings as following from Christians’ obligation to call on “local magistrates” to “do justice” by ending abortion.

The rhetoric sounded a lot like Matthew Trewhella, a pastor and prominent leader of the anti-abortion movement’s pro-violence wing in the 1990s, who discussed this principle in his 2013 book, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates. As he wrote, “The lesser magistrate doctrine declares that when the superior or higher civil authority makes unjust/immoral laws or decrees, the lesser or lower ranking civil authority has both a right and a duty to refuse obedience to that superior authority. If necessary, the lesser authorities even have the right and obligation to actively resist the superior authority.”

Unbeknownst to Raleigh councilmembers and residents, Braddy considers himself an abortion abolitionist: part of a nationwide network of far-right Christians who compare themselves to 19^th Century anti-slavery activists. Like Braddy, the network advocates for “ministering” in front of municipal and county councils to declare a city or county a “sanctuary for the unborn”—policies that generally seek to ban abortion within city or county limits, criminalize abortion providers and people seeking abortion care, and block pro-choice groups from operating within the jurisdiction. Abortion abolitionists have also worked closely with state legislators to introduce state abortion abolitionist bills. For them, the work is guided by the need to bring the “Gospel into conflict with the evil of the age.”[4]

Under the Trump administration, the reproductive rights movement has largely—and understandably—focused on the potential fall of Roe v. Wade, and far less on the symbolic victories of groups like the abortion abolitionists. But it would be unwise to overlook the successful ways this network is mobilizing for policy and legislative change and building alliances across far-right sectors. Through their policy activism, abortion abolitionists are normalizing the criminalization of abortion at all stages and creating small but meaningful shifts toward theocracy. If history tells us anything, it’s that fanatical, uncompromising activists can push the Overton Window, creating space for political violence and moving ideas that once seemed radical from the margins to the mainstream.

The Abortion Abolitionist Network

Arizona Apologia Church pastor Jeff Durbin’s long brown beard, tattoo-filled arms, and appearances (as a martial arts stuntman) on MTV’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles[5] make him an unlikely fit for the founder of End Abortion Now, one of the country’s leading abortion abolitionist organizations.[6] Like generations of anti-abortion activists before him, Durbin cites as inspiration anti-slavery abolitionist leaders like John Brown, who died fighting for their cause.[7] But in Durbin’s view, the contemporary anti-abortion movement has become mired in incrementalism, leading to moral and strategic failures, and the need for a more uncompromising approach instead.

Durbin claims to have over 350 churches globally in his End Abortion Now network,[8] which until recently was dedicated to forming “abortion clinic ministries” to deter people from accessing abortion care. But in November 2018, Durbin expanded the organization’s focus to target legislators and elected officials.^[9] The organization developed a six-point plan to “minister” to city councilmembers “on their duty to preserve innocent life within their jurisdiction.” In practical terms, they lobby city councilmembers to declare their jurisdictions “sanctuaries for the unborn.” (Though abolitionists’ core framework is steeped in anti-slavery metaphors, their tactic of proposing abortion “sanctuary cities” evokes a different racial justice framework, muddling the boundaries between the groups’ appropriation of anti-slavery history and contemporary immigrant rights advocacy.[10])

Before he made his Facebook page largely private, Zachary Braddy’s posts showed he was highly networked with Durbin’s ministry. And he wasn’t the only one. Durbin’s fellow Apologia Church pastor James White called on the Phoenix City Council to adopt an abolitionist measure in April 2019,[11] and that February in New York, bookstore owner Jon Speed[12] requested the same of the Batavia City Council.[13] In addresses to their respective city councils, both White and Speed compared abortion to the Holocaust and urged councilmembers to make their cities sanctuaries for the “pre-born” and “unborn,” respectively. Speed appears in Babies Are Murdered Here, a documentary produced by Apologia Studios, the media arm of Durbin’s ministry, which has more than 200,000 YouTube subscribers.[14]

Some jurisdictions successfully adopted abortion sanctuary policies. Before they were sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) this spring, 10 Texas towns sought to render Roe v. Wade illegitimate by banning abortion within city limits and criminalizing abortion.[15] Although the policies in Waskom, Naples, Joaquin, Tenaha, Rusk, Gary, and Wells were largely symbolic, they were successful in further stigmatizing people seeking abortion care and spreading misinformation about abortion access. And there is evidence to suggest that the network of so-called abortion abolitionists is growing and increasingly influencing more mainstream anti-abortion advocates nationwide.

In February 2020, state and national abortion abolitionist leaders, including Durbin, Speed, and Trewhella, gathered at the “Abolition Now!” conference in Oklahoma City. The conference brought together young, contemporary abortion abolitionists; their forebears, who led the violent wing of the 1990s anti-abortion movement; grassroots activists disillusioned with the mainstream anti-abortion movement’s incremental approach; and Oklahoma state representatives—all strategizing how best to fuse church and state through an abortion abolitionist approach to legislative action.

Hosted by the Norman, Oklahoma-based group Free the States,^[16] the conference was the culmination of years of networking and activism, sparked in the early 2010s after movement leaders called for a “reformation” in how Christians fight abortion. One of those leaders was T. Russell Hunter, a former University of Oklahoma grad student turned full-time anti-abortion activist who founded both Free the States and Abolish Human Abortion,^[17] which together have helped turn Norman into the center of abortion abolitionist organizing.

For Hunter and his peers, the abortion abolitionist movement is markedly different from its mainstream counterpart. “The pro-life movement has opposed abortion by seeking to compromise with it. Pro-life strategists have accepted Roe as the ‘law of the land’ and have focused on trying to regulate the murder of children in the womb to the greatest degree the courts will allow,”[18] Hunter wrote. “As abolitionists we are attempting to bring the Gospel of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ into conflict with the culture of death… The abolitionist calls for the total and immediate criminalization of abortion as murder and never attempts to simply regulate or reduce abortion by treating it as healthcare.”[19]

Conference panels reflected this idea. One session entitled, “Ignore Roe: Why Incrementalism Hurts the Cause to End Abortion,”[20] was led by the co-founder of Abolish Abortion Texas, Bradley Pierce. Pierce’s group claims to have 90,000 members. The group also takes credit for convincing the Texas GOP to propose criminalizing abortion in their official party platform for 2016.[21]

As vice president and co-founding attorney of the Christian homeschooling legal advocacy firm Heritage Defense,[22] Pierce used his panel to describe how he took his legislative approach to abortion abolitionism to a new level. Founded in 2016, Abolish Abortion Texas quickly built a following by appearing at Texas legislative hearings on abortion. In a post on its Facebook page, the group describe itself as “a grassroots network of Christians in Texas who desire to glorify God and in doing so abolish what He hates—the murder of tens of thousands of babies in Texas every year.”^[23] In 2019, Pierce’s group authored a bill, the Abolition of Abortion in Texas Act, which proposed charging abortion providers and their patients with murder. State Representative Tony Tinderholt,[24] whom Abolish Abortion Texas claims as a member,[25] introduced the act.

Although the bill failed to pass, Pierce claims that the publicity it generated led Abolish Abortion Texas’ membership to skyrocket and influenced a wave of new proposals for abortion sanctuaries across the state. Ultimately a dozen[26] anti-abortion ordinances were proposed in Texas, all of which described abortion as murder and made abortion illegal within city limits.”[27]

Pierce’s victories were just one example of legislative success showcased at the conference. Since 2018, six state-level abolitionist bills have been introduced in Oklahoma,[28] Texas,[29] Indiana,[30] Washington,[31] Idaho,[32] and Alaska,[33] all seeking to nullify Roe v. Wade and treat abortion as murder from the moment of conception on, even in instances of rape and incest. Some bills seek to only criminalize abortion providers, while others would subject people accessing abortion care to murder charges, life in prison, and even the death penalty.

While much of the Oklahoma conference showcased the efforts of a new generation of anti-abortion activists, the speaker line-up also made clear how much this contemporary network is borrowing approaches and theories from the violent anti-abortion leaders of the 1990s.

Trewhella, an early Operation Rescue activist known for distributing how-to manuals on creating paramilitary militias, was present at the event.[34] While these days Trewhella mostly makes the rounds in the abortion abolition circuit as a pastor and the founder of the Wisconsin-based group Missionaries to the Preborn, he is also lauded as the architect of the Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates, a real paradigm shift for the anti-abortion movement. Trewhella’s book makes a “militia-like argument” for defying the federal government when it comes to Roe V. Wade. At the Abolition Now! conference, Trewhella gave a talk, “Why We Must Disobey the Despotic Court,” outlining the necessity of defying federal laws. And in a recent post on his website, Trewhella continued the theme, writing, “We must quit the nonsense that the pro-life movement has taught us for the last 46 years, namely, that our only hope to protect the preborn is to go with hat in hand to the tyrant and ask the Supreme Court to undo their evil. You cannot appease a tyrant. Tyranny must be confronted.”[35]

Also featured prominently at the conference was Rusty Thomas, national director of Operation Save America (OSA), a longstanding anti-abortion organization known for its targeted harassment of abortion providers.^[36] Thomas has been part of the effort in Texas to establish “sanctuaries for the unborn,” and testified in favor of one at a city council meeting in Waskom, Texas, as well.[37]

Common Cause

Recent events have made it clear that the abolitionist approach resonates across other sectors of the Far Right, particularly among supporters of the Patriot and militia movements. Many anti-abortion and Christian Right activists share the anti-government ideology and revolutionary rhetoric of militia groups, which see abortion not only as murder, but as proof of an increasingly secular, tyrannical, and explicitly anti-Christian government.[38]

In January 2020, a pastor named Jordan Hall[39] teamed up with the Richland County Republican Party in Montana to introduce the first-ever resolution proposing a joint sanctuary for the unborn and for Second Amendment rights.[40] The resolution, which is still under consideration, would simultaneously ban abortion and any kind of gun restriction from being enforced in the county. (Since 2018, gun advocates, members of the Patriot movement, and constitutional sheriffs have used the sanctuary framework to block the enforcement of gun-control measures, including universal background checks and bans on assault weapons through introducing “Second Amendment Sanctuary” resolutions and ordinances across the country.[41])

Hall often promotes Patriot movement rhetoric on his Facebook page, where his profile picture depicts him wielding a shotgun. He defended his joint resolution by speaking disparagingly about pro-immigrant “sanctuary city” policies in an interview with Redoubt News,[42] a small outlet that calls for Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and eastern parts of Washington and Oregon to become a safe haven or “redoubt” [43] for militia members and other anti-government activists.[44]

“[W]e thought to ourselves as the pro-life community,” Hall said, “if they can declare themselves a sanctuary and resist federal law when it comes to unrighteous causes, why can’t we do it when it comes to righteous causes?”[45]

Redoubt News has been a hub for other supporters of abortion abolitionist and militia movement causes. In an April 2020 video on Redoubt News’ YouTube channel, Idaho state legislator Heather Scott compared the governor’s COVID-19 shelter-in-place order to a global socialist agenda and called on residents to defy it, reflecting a popular position within the Patriot movement.[46] In 2019, Scott sponsored the Idaho Abortion Human Rights Act, which would criminalize all abortions in the state[47] and was championed by the local abortion abolitionist group Abolish Abortion Idaho.[48]

Along with Washington State Rep. Matt Shea, Scott is well known for supporting the 41-day armed takeover at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. In his own legislature, Shea also sponsored a 2019 state bill, the Abolition of Abortion in Washington Act (HB 2154),[49] demonstrating the striking overlap in networks between abortion abolitionists and Patriot movement leaders. Like the Idaho and Texas bills, HB 2154 would ban all abortions and nullify any federal law protecting reproductive rights in Washington, and subject all parties involved in abortion to murder charges.[50] (There is one exception: if a medical provider accidentally kills a fetus while attempting to save the life of the pregnant person.) Shea was notoriously accused of engaging in domestic terrorism[51] when he collaborated with militia leaders to plan and execute the Oregon occupation.[52] And in a manifesto leaked to the press in 2018,[53] “The Biblical Basis for War,” Shea argues that Christians have a right to “kill all males” who support abortion, same sex marriage, or Communism.[54]

Intersections between radical anti-abortion, White supremacist, gun rights and militia movements is not a new concept.[55] Rather, it’s a convergence that dates back decades. In the 1990s, formidable Christian Reconstructionist Larry Pratt—also executive director of the libertarian group Gun Owners of America—met with neonazis and Christian Identity groups to discuss the idea of forming Christian militias: something many see as the inception of that era’s militia movement.[56] In 1995, when PRA senior research analyst Frederick Clarkson was working for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, he noted that many of the same people were involved in both the violent wing of the anti-abortion movement and 1990s militias.[57]

As Goes the South

Back in Raleigh, abortion rights advocates were troubled to learn that Zachary Braddy—whom had first been identified through his street preaching outside abortion clinics—had shifted his focus to harassing city councilmembers and trying to turn the city into a sanctuary for the unborn.

NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina, a statewide abortion and reproductive rights advocacy group, worked with local clinic escorts to organize abortion rights supporters to attend and speak at these city council meetings in order to counter this new presence. In a statement, NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina said: “Seeing these groups of mostly men, many of whom don’t live in Raleigh, converge on Raleigh City Council month after month to push for closing abortion clinics and punishing patients underscores the misogyny at the root of anti-abortion politics. That they’re choosing this forum to escalate their anti-abortion rhetoric isn’t necessarily about turning Raleigh into a sanctuary city, but using the public platform to build power.”

Kamyon Conner, executive director of the Texas Equal Access (TEA) Fund, an organization that helps low-income people in Northern Texas cover the cost of abortion services, has actively fought abortion sanctuary ordinances because she understands the dangers of hyper-local anti-choice activism and how effective their disinformation can be.

Conner warns against dismissing attacks on abortion access in states like Texas and North Carolina as issues limited to the “backwards” South. On the contrary, she said, the South is often a vanguard, with right-wing lawmakers using Texas to pilot draconian policies before rolling them out nationwide. Under the Trump administration, this has certainly been true regarding attacks on asylum seekers and other migrants, and Conner said this has always been the case when it comes to abortion access.

Historically, Texas has always been an abortion battleground. After all, Roe v. Wade originated there. Conner said she would never downplay the importance of the landmark case, but she questions what good it is if people can’t access the abortion care they need because of the ever-growing patchwork of anti-choice state laws. The spread of sanctuaries for the unborn ordinances across Texas, aiming to restrict abortion at the local level, has only made things worse. Conner warns that it’s only a matter of time before we see similar efforts nationwide.

Earlier this year, the ACLU sued the seven Texas towns that declared themselves sanctuaries for the unborn—and sought to outlaw abortion in their city limits—on behalf of the TEA Fund and the Lilith Fund. Even if the ordinances were largely symbolic, the ACLU argued, they suppressed free speech and created confusion about Texans’ legal right to access abortion care. In May, the ACLU dropped the lawsuit after the cities backed down and revised their ordinances, allowing pro-choice organizations to operate. The jurisdictions also agreed to stop calling Conner and her associates “criminal”—one of the primary reasons Conner had sued.

Even in its early stages, the sanctuaries for the unborn movement has drained precious time, energy, and resources from organizations focused on reproductive health, rights, and justice. However, what the ACLU lawsuit illustrated is that these local battles can be won, if pro-choice advocates take them seriously enough to fight back.

“Anti-abortion extremists are crisscrossing the state in order to limit access to abortion in rural communities that already face barriers to health care,” Conner said. “Politicians could be working to expand access to care that could actually help communities thrive. Instead, they’re choosing to prioritize the political ideology of anti-abortion extremists. It’s not right.”