Abortion Clinic Bombers: The Misapplied Christian Link to Terror

The ruins of the World Trade Centers hadn't even finished crumbling and smoldering before I heard colleagues at school telling me, "Well, Christian abortion bombers aren't any better." Personally, I wasn't interested in moral equivalency at the time, the Christian abortion clinic bombers were criminals too, but my mind was on the here and now, and unless the World Trade Centers were the centers of a grand abortion scheme that no one knows about, I seriously doubted it was Christian extremists that carried out the attacks.

Ever since then, whenever someone brings up a terrorist attack carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, you are expected to practice the Fairness Doctrine and give appropriate lip service to the "Christian" attacks on abortion clinics in order to demonstrate that neither side is beyond reproach. Of course, there is something to be said about the fact that when "Christians" attack, they are not supported by a body of religious figures that can be recognized as a legitimate authority, are wholly condemned by the Christian community both far and wide, and are doing so not for religious reasons but because in their minds these abortion clinics are clinics of death where babies are daily being killed and thus their existence means the continued death of another child. Somehow it's hard to generate the same feelings against someone who wants to preserve life as it is to generate against someone who uses planes as torpedoes. But I digress.

Perhaps the most telling thing about how absurd this argument is are the simple numbers. A simple glance indicates that, across America, there have only been 168 attacks against abortion clinics since 1982, the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Bureau reports. These attacks come with surprisingly little casualties, and most attacks are rather measured in property damage, rather than human lives lost. Therefore to run it on average, every year there will be six or seven abortion related attacks across America, with a marginal increase in these numbers in Canada and Australia (one in Australia's history, for example).