On Mother’s Day this year, Alabama legislators passed the most draconian anti-abortion law in the United States since Roe v. Wade established the legal right to abortion. The Alabama law bans abortion in all but the most extreme cases to save a woman’s life, and makes no exceptions for rape or incest. Many states have recently passed similar “heartbeat” laws, including Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi, banning abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected around six to eight weeks. These bans are widely seen as the basis for test cases for the ultimate goal of the anti-abortion religious right — the overturning of Roe at the Supreme Court level.

Roe has been suffering a death by a thousand cuts for many years, but the rise of Trumpism has deeply emboldened the reactionary right. Tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists listened to Trump himself speak at the 2018 and 2019 March for Life rallies on the National Mall — the first president to do so since the March for Life began in 1974. Despite consistently high public support for abortion rights, the anti-abortion lobby has steadily gained ideological ground with a single-minded focus on abolishing abortion at any cost. This has included a consistent protester presence outside abortion clinics throughout the country, where dozens to hundreds of anti-abortion activists aggressively berate, film, and sometimes physically block patients from entering the clinic doors.

The feminist left, desperate for a response and with limited resources compared to the deep coffers of mainstream organizations like NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood’s political arm, has increasingly supported counter-protesting at abortion clinics. This is often referred to as “clinic defense.” Leftist proponents of this tactic have argued that reclaiming physical and political space outside clinics is an effective way to radically confront the religious right. For example, Christine Pardue recently wrote in Jacobin that, “[t]he goal [of clinic defense] is to take back the primary space that antis use for mobilization and violence, build a radical display of support for free abortion on demand that politicians couldn’t afford to ignore, and keep clinics safe.”