Content warning: The following story describes disturbing threats involving violence against women that are at times sexual in nature. Please access the National Alliance on Mental Illness for resources.
If your job necessitated that you cope with constant death threats against you and your three-year-old, would you do it? What if you weren’t getting paid? Cathy* is an abortion rights activist whose answer is a resounding, yes. But Cathy wasn’t always an activist. Four years ago, she was a pregnant woman living in Ohio and thought she was having a miscarriage. “I went to the emergency room because I was having a lot of fluid leaking. And when you're pregnant, that's obviously a cause for concern, and I was having horrible pain, and I thought, Oh, my God! I'm miscarrying.”
She came into the ER sobbing, and the staff immediately took her into a small room without her partner. “What did you do to cause this miscarriage?” they asked. “I'm sobbing, and leaking, and I'm like, ‘Nothing, nothing! Can you help me? I think I’m losing my pregnancy,’” Cathy recalled saying.
Over and over, they asked, “What did you do to cause this miscarriage?” She said she didn’t even understand the question because she was so terrified she was losing her baby.
“Finally, I came around and I said, ‘I had a cup of coffee today and I know you're not supposed to have [a lot of] coffee when you're pregnant.’” That apparently satisfied them and they took her back to a patient room where her partner was allowed to rejoin her. There, they told her: “We can't do anything, whether you're having a miscarriage or not. We can't do anything anyway.”
“This experience shook me to my core,” Cathy recalled. “I’m terrified … I’m having a pregnancy that’s having complications. I feel like I’m … potentially being criminalized for my pregnancy.”
Unfortunately, the criminalization of abortion (as well as the criminalization of pregnancy) in post-Roe America is a fact, not a hypothetical. Across the country, abortion bans have increased as anti-abortion politicians work to eliminate access state by state. At the same time, anti-abortion groups feel emboldened to push for further restrictions. This surge of activity is radicalizing women like Cathy, who have now become activists. These activists are predominantly women and they are facing violent, gendered attacks that threaten their civic engagement.
At the University of Texas at Austin’s Propaganda Research Lab, we conducted 19 interviews with pro- and anti-abortion activists in the US in the four months following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. Nearly all said they experienced some kind of violent threats against themselves and their families. Yet all of them said: “We will push forward.”
Cathy attended her first abortion rights protest visibly pregnant with her now three-year-old son. But afterward, “the photos and videos and everything from that protest went viral. I was immediately hit with an onslaught. … Death threats, sexual assault threats to myself being pregnant. I remember the most violent was, ‘I’m going to cut your baby out of your stomach and then rape you.’”
And she’s not alone. These kinds of threats are a tactic to keep women from participating in the public sphere and political life. Online attacks against women are often distinctly gendered, in that they are centered on appearance or sexuality. Women at times respond by self-censoring, which is often the exact goal of those who harass them.
Since Roe was overturned, abortion has been banned in 14 states. Even in states where abortion is legal, it’s still under attack — Republican attorneys general have threatened pharmacies to prevent them from legally dispensing the abortion pill mifepristone, one of two pills in the medication abortion regimen. The FDA approval of mifepristone is being challenged after a ruling from a federal judge in Texas, and while the issue works its way through the court system, there is a chance that the abortion pill may be banned across the country, even in states where the procedure is legal. In March 2023, Wyoming became the first state to specifically outlaw abortion medication, though for now, the ban is blocked.
This is all against the backdrop of 62% of Americans saying that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to 2022 Pew Research data. Abortion was once an issue that varied across party lines, but politicians and news media have so effectively polarized the topic that activists experience threats, harassment, and general vitriol from those who oppose their beliefs. Social media has not helped — due to online echo chambers we don’t often engage with those whose views on abortion differ from our own. In our interviews, this polarization presents as highly violent and particularly gendered threats against female activists on either side of the abortion debate. In many cases, these women are in their early 20s.
Data shows that pro-choice organizations and abortion providers experienced a 600% increase in stalking from 2020 to 2021, according to a 2022 National Abortion Federation report. Still, anti-abortion groups also experienced a rise in attacks when the Dobbs decision was leaked. This tracks with what our interviewees said: Dobbs was a catalyst for violence on both sides of the issue. “Threats have gotten worse since the leak [of the Supreme Court decision]… that’s when it got really bad,” Rose,* an anti-abortion activist said.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the threats and harassment that anti-abortion activists recounted to us mirrored those of activists who advocate for abortion rights, in both their violent and gendered nature. Rose told us, “It's actually just been from people on Instagram mostly. I've received death threats, rape threats, saying that I should die.”
Who is behind these threats to organizers on both sides of the issue? Our interviewees told us that those who threaten them are often men: “These are men who are out to get us [pro-choice activists],” Ratna* said. “I’ll tell you what we are scared of. The thing that we are actually facing is heavy attacks [and] stalking. Some of it stems from people who see us at protests and try to stalk you back and figure out where you live and get your license plate. But it's also from social media, if you’re trying to recruit more people to protest then it has to be public posts... Facebook or Instagram.”
What these threats have in common with those aimed at anti-abortion activists is their highly gendered nature. “It's mostly like, personal hate,” Phoebe,* a young anti-abortion activist told us. “It's not even like, ‘Oh, we don't like you because you're pro-life,’ but, ‘You're ugly. You're fat.’”
“They certainly drive by all the time,” Ratna told us. “Leave a note threatening to kill your dog, set a fire on your lawn, camp out at your workplace. … People give up. You can’t do it anymore … [It] essentially crushes the will [of activists].”
According to Melissa Fowler, chief program officer at the National Abortion Federation, those attacking abortion rights groups are “the same people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 to try and overthrow the government,” she said in a press release from the organization last year.
After Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced the Protecting Mothers and Babies From Terrorism Act, which proposes to categorize some pro-choice groups as domestic terrorist organizations, Cathy and her group began to take increased precautions, including organizing and planning on the end-to-end encrypted messaging app, Signal.
“That's when I decided to move some conversations to Signal," Cathy said. "Not that I've ever had any conversation that would warrant it, but that's the level … the anti-choice movement really drives and strives on … ‘Let me shame you into silence.’ That's really the basis for their entire movement to try to shame and stigmatize abortion and also activism.”
In our data, pro-choice rights activists rely much more on encrypted messaging apps (EMAs) for security and protection from surveillance than anti-abortion activists do. Both groups use the apps to a certain extent to organize and plan protests, but anti-abortion activists generally said that they would rather be public about their beliefs, while pro-abortion rights activists were concerned about conducting protests in a post-Roe America.
Social media sites were where our interviewees said they encountered the most threatening messages. Activists we spoke with were somewhat perplexed by the lack of action when it comes to these threats. Platforms like Facebook have been taking down abortion content swiftly since Dobbs and, in some cases, even removed content that did not break their rules. According to the activists we’ve spoken to, other platforms have left up alarming content including personal information and violent threats, at least long enough for other users to see it: “You'll see … activists' addresses, full names, pictures, death threats, violent rape threats, all of that publicly up there,” Cathy said. “Why aren't the police or anybody using their money and resources to investigate those credible, violent threats to women and activists? … Those are credible and a safety concern, but … it seems like the money and the effort is in policing and controlling women's bodies and not protecting us.”
Rose agreed: “I think there’s definitely an issue with people getting away with too much crime … like I'll report people who have tried to harass me sexually on DM. … I can block them. … But I don't know when I report them if it ever actually goes through.”
EMAs can offer activists more control over who they’re in contact with and how their conversations may travel, they told us. This is also because they choose to communicate with people they already know on EMAs. In fact, activists are “working at the speed of trust,” one pro-abortion rights activist told us. This means that high-risk conversations with your most trusted group, those who you know won’t screenshot your texts, might take place on Signal, but less risky conversations will take place on Facebook or Instagram.
Others work on only one platform, like Instagram, but keep it fully anonymous and don’t give out information about themselves — no names, no age, nothing. Activists are negotiating what platforms best serve them and what degree of anonymity is appropriate as they struggle to continue their work while keeping themselves safe.
Ultimately, Cathy and her family decided to move to California to protect themselves, both from the offline violence that could result from online threats and harassment, and from attacks on her bodily autonomy. As more states crack down on access, more people will be forced to relocate to places where they can access reproductive care — whether for a miscarriage or an abortion. Increasingly, we are seeing bills that threaten the lives and free expression of marginalized people. A Texas Republican introduced a bill to keep people from accessing websites with abortion content, making fears of a splintered internet post-Roe become real. The legal limbo surrounding FDA approval of mifepristone may determine future access in states where abortion is legal and illegal alike. Some of those who are able to leave states where abortion is restricted may do so and those who aren’t able to relocate will struggle even more to access reproductive care.
If this continues, it’s possible that fewer women will risk putting up with the dangers of activism and political engagement. Not only will they face violent harassment, but they could face criminalization or civil penalties for conducting online activism under laws that make it illegal to aid and abet abortion. Although those we spoke with are resilient, they said that it takes a deep psychological toll. And when policymakers continue to introduce and pass legislation that actively works against them, they might be tempted to give up. The end of Roe could affect more than reproductive care. It could affect women’s civic engagement writ large.
“I hate that we have to do this,” Cathy said at the end of our conversation. “I hate that this is where we're at.”
Editor's note: Names have been changed to protect sources' privacy.
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