AP Photo/Dylan Lovan
Meg Stern, left, and other escort volunteers line up in preparation for an anti-abortion protest outside the EMW Women's Surgical Center in Louisville, Kentucky in July 2017.
Fifteen years ago, when Eileen learned that anti-abortion protesters were jeering at people entering Equality Health Center in Concord, New Hampshire, she decided to take action to ensure patients’ security in her city.
Eileen, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her privacy, has been a clinic escort ever since, walking patients into the building, listening to their stories, and doing what she can to distract them from anti-choice taunts. “I can’t abide injustice or inequality,” she tells The Progressive. “Escorting is highly emotional work, but I feel privileged to be able to help. As escorts, we put our bodies on the line and make a real difference.”
New Hampshire law allows for abortions up to twenty-four weeks of pregnancy, but prohibits later-term abortions except in the cases of fetal complications or threats to the life or health of the person who is pregnant. Eileen says that some patients, including an increasing number who travel from out of state for abortion care, are “able to stride right into the center,” but that others “need someone to offer a shoulder or a hand because they’re terrified.”
That’s why escorts are needed. But Eileen says the work has gotten even harder since Donald Trump took office, as protests outside the clinic have grown larger and more visibly menacing. Pre-Trump, she reports that between three to five picketers would show up at the center on the days when abortions were performed; since January, the number has grown to between twenty-two and twenty-five.
duVergne Gaines, director of the National Clinic Access Project at the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF), says that Eileen’s experience mirrors that of escorts throughout the country. While anti-abortion harassment at clinics has increased, she says, several pharmacies that sell abortion medication (mifepristone and misoprostol) have also been invaded by demonstrators who harass staff and visitors. In May, an extremist espousing antinatalist views blew up a fertility clinic in California with a car bomb; a month later, former Minnesota House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, outspoken supporters of reproductive choice, were killed in a targeted assassination.
“We’re seeing a doubling down in blue states,” Gaines tells The Progressive. At the local and national levels, anti-abortion groups such as Live Action, the Center for Medical Progress, and the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising have formed an aggressive coalition alongside legal teams from the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Thomas More Society. “Anti-abortion activists are traveling or moving to California, Colorado, Illinois, and other states where abortion is available,” says Gaines. “They’re targeting reproductive healthcare providers in these places, and we’re seeing an unprecedented level of cooperation between different groups.”
Moreover, because there are fewer brick-and-mortar clinics providing abortion care—the Guttmacher Institute reports that there were 765 in the United States in 2023, down five percent since 2020—anti-abortion activists have been able to boost picket line turnout. Even more frighteningly, Gaines adds, aggressive anti-abortion activists have begun livestreaming their clinic invasions, a tactic she believes is intended to inspire copycat actions. Livestreaming invasions “puts a target on the backs of providers,” she says, “but it also violates the privacy of staff and patients.”
Gaines places the blame for this spike squarely on the Trump Administration. From his first week in office, she says, Trump provided encouragement for those engaged in these tactics when he pardoned twenty-three anti-abortion activists who were in jail for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a thirty-one-year-old law that makes obstructing access to abortion facilities a federal crime. But the initial swell of anti-choice intimidation and violence, she says, came from the June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.
According to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), anti-abortion violence and harassment began to tick upward following Dobbs: Between 2023 and 2024, NAF-affiliated clinics reported 296 death threats or threats of harm to providers; thirty-seven instances of stalking; thirty-eight cases of assault and battery; three arsons; seventeen thefts; twelve bomb threats; 621 cases of trespassing; 777 of obstructing entryways; and 128,570 clinic picket lines. Both NAF and FMF recognize that these numbers are a gross underestimate.
Melissa Fowler, NAF’s chief program officer, tells The Progressive that abortion providers “are on heightened alert because they realize that this administration will do nothing to protect them.” And while she notes that clinics are working hard to stay safe—hiring armed and unarmed guards, installing bulletproof glass or protective window coatings, and equipping facilities with panic buttons, cameras, and locks—she says that these measures can be costly.
“These are costs that other healthcare providers don’t have and likely never even think about,” she says. “For many clinics, it’s a tough balance. They have to make improvements to their security while operating on a tight margin to keep costs down for patients. We’re about to launch a modest fund to help clinics make improvements, but it’s not just the facility they need to worry about. An invasion of a Planned Parenthood fundraising luncheon in California in the fall showed us that providers have to pay attention to security everywhere they go and in everything they do.”
Merle Hoffman, the founder and CEO of Choices Women’s Medical Center in Queens, New York, tells The Progressive that after observing the increasing intensity of anti-abortion vigils, she decided to proactively meet with local lawmakers and the neighborhood police precinct rather than wait for an overt escalation. Choices, which serves between 40,000 and 50,000 patients each year for mental health counseling, gynecological care, prenatal care, and medical and surgical abortion, opened two years before Roe v. Wade, and is one of the largest clinics in the United States.
Hoffman says the clinic is constantly reinventing itself to meet patient needs. Due to the Trump Administration’s targeting of immigrant communities across the United States, for example, clinic staff have begun strategizing about ways to protect patients from potential raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “We have to have a vigilant mindset to protect people who come in,” she says, “so we’re going out into the community to meet patients who might be afraid to come to us.”
This is especially true given the increased demand for abortion care in recent years. In 2024, The Guttmacher Institute reports that just over 1 million abortions were provided nationwide, an increase of 11 percent since 2020. The institute attributes this spike to the availability of abortion medication and telemedicine for counseling and pill provision.
But these realities have done nothing to dissuade anti-abortion activist groups from organizing to end legally available abortion in all fifty states, or pushing for incremental limits to care in progressive, prochoice states. This has included maintenance of a nationwide network of more than 2,600 “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), which provide “counseling” and other deceptive services designed to coerce patients into carrying their pregnancies to term. CPCs are typically run by staff without clinical training or licensure; most are located near bona fide clinics. This proximity, Gaines says, allows them to serve as “staging grounds” for pickets and invasions, as well as “rescues” to temporarily prevent patients from getting the reproductive health care they came for. “When CPCs are located near legitimate clinics,” she says, “the violence is always greater.”
Meanwhile, state and federal antiabortion legislation has continued to whittle away at access. Iowa, Florida, and Georgia have banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, and fourteen states have passed laws limiting access to abortion medication. What’s more, the FACE Repeal Act of 2025, sponsored by Texas Republican Representative Chip Roy, is an attempt to remove the federal prohibition on clinic disruption. The bill currently has thirty-nine House cosponsors.
“FACE did not completely remove the problem of clinic violence, but it has nonetheless been a law that providers rely on,” Fowler says. “It has made conditions somewhat safer, but recent invasions in Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco have shown us how much more is needed.”
In the future, pro-choice advocates hope to restore federal protections for reproductive health centers and the valiant workers who staff them. But until these protections are brought back, escorts like Eileen will continue to offer compassionate, direct support to both clinicians and the patients they serve. At clinics such as Choices, Hoffman says, “existence is resistance. We have to keep going.”
For more information on how to become an abortion clinic escort, visit https://abortionescortstories.com/collection/