Changes in Protest Policing Strategies of the Anti-Abortion Movement 1973-2022

• In Event: 20861 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14: The Protest-repression Nexus

Abstract

While protest policing has been a well-studied topic by sociologists since the 1960s, the majority of the work produced by this subfield of social movement studies has focused on how leftist movements, or movements that fight for liberatory causes have experienced police repression. What has yet to be thoroughly examined is how conservative movements, like the anti-abortion movement, who are fighting for a return to status quo, experience protest policing. In this project I seek to examine 1) how the anti-abortion movement has historically been policed, 2) whether the policing of this movement has changed over time. I answer my research questions by analyzing 50 years of newspaper data published at four publications; The New York Times, The Wichita Eagle, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and the Louisville Courier Journal. I chose the New York Times to provide national coverage, and the subsequent three newspapers to provide local coverage of cities with larger amounts of anti-abortion protest historically, which vary in their time periods of activity, and the social movement organizations which frequented the space.
I overall find that the largest shift in policing strategy occurs due to changes in federal law namely the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entries Act which makes it a federal crime to block access to clinic entries. This change in law shifts some of the burden on policing strategy to federal law enforcement, subsequently changing the resources which can be used to police these protests. In the 1970s the police are rarely mentioned in coverage of the protests, but their presence increased in the late 1980s as the violence of anti-abortion movement tactics increased. This continues into the early 1990s, although throughout the 80s and 90s the police are often caught unprepared, or overwhelmed when dealing with large unruly crowds of anti-abortion protestors.

Author

• Molly Broscoe, University of Cincinnati