Editor’s note: This is Part 3 of Ms.’ series on antiabortion violence. Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. The final installment publishes Friday, Sept. 19.
“I must admit, I do have a very jaded sense. I’m unfortunately very used to it,” Calla Hales, told Ms. when asked about antiabortion violence and threats. It’s quite a commentary from someone who has been steeped in the abortion-access world most of her life.
When Hales was a child, her stepfather, a trauma surgeon, began performing abortions, and together with her mother opened four clinics in North Carolina and Georgia. The Charlotte clinic, in particular, attracted unusually large groups who tried to block access during the tumultuous antiabortion protests of the ’80s and early ’90s.
Hales says that since the pandemic, there have been fewer protesters. But since Dobbs, more of them are traveling from states with abortion bans to North Carolina, a state where restrictions kick in at 12 weeks and six days’ gestation. The hostility has been more overt during President Donald Trump’s second term.
“There’s a lot more intentional trespassing—intentionally, you know, stopping cars, walking in front of vehicles, attempting to block the driveway and seeing how much they can get away with,” says Hales, who runs all four of her family’s clinics. In Charlotte, she says, clinic workers reach out to local police for help almost every day.
Before the 2024 election, Hales recalls, protesters presented themselves as “the grandmothers and the gentle parents that really want what’s best for patients.” That outward kindness—phony or not—has disappeared. “There’s not even an attempt to hide behind that anymore,” she says. “It is very much more aggressive. It is berating towards patients.”
After a two-day manhunt described by authorities as the largest in Minnesota history, Vance Boelter, 57, was spotted on a private trail camera and tracked via a helicopter using infrared technology as he crawled through shrubs. He was apprehended without incident in a wooded area. Boelter has been charged with state and federal crimes, including murder and stalking, in the killings of State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the shootings of State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. He could face the federal death penalty.
Details that have emerged in the case are chilling. The acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, Joseph H. Thompson, said officials found hundreds of pages of the suspect’s writing, containing names, surveillance efforts, plans and home addresses of elected officials and their family members. His primary residence contained 48 firearms, according to unsealed search warrants obtained by local news station KARE 11. His notebooks listed some 50 to 70 potential targets.
Among them were Democratic officials in Minnesota and other states as well as abortion providers. A friend and roommate of the suspect told The New York Times that Boelter voted for Trump last year and passionately opposed abortion. By late August, authorities had not determined, or revealed, a motive. (The U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis did not respond to Ms.’ request for an interview.)
But several outside experts have said there are clues in Boelter’s religion and in sermons he delivered in a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past few years.
“Many churches in America didn’t listen to Jesus,” Boelter said in one sermon in 2023, according to a report in Wired. “And the enemy, the devil, comes through and rips everything apart. The churches are so messed up, they don’t know abortion is wrong, many churches.”
In another sermon, he said, “God will raise an apostle or prophet to correct their course.”
It’s that kind of language that led Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at the progressive Political Research Associates, to take a closer look at Boelter’s religious background. The suspect attended Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas and appears to have links to a growing movement within evangelical Christianity called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). (The Christ for the Nations Institute has condemned the Minnesota shootings.)
“You don’t talk about apostles and prophets, God sending apostles and prophets, unless you have some orientation to NAR,” Clarkson told Ms.
Clarkson also saw clues in at least one text that Boelter sent to his wife and other family members a few hours after the shootings. “Dad went to war last night … I don’t wanna say more because I don’t wanna implicate anybody,” he wrote, according to an affidavit filed by an FBI agent.
NAR adherents commonly use language of war because they reject the doctrines and institutions of the church, according to Clarkson, who has been studying the NAR movement for years. “They’re in the process of demolishing and reinventing from the ashes what they think God intended, Jesus intended, what the church should be. So it’s a violent vision at the outset,” he says. “There is a distinct uptick in the frequency and the severity and the rhetoric of violence that’s been going on, broadly speaking.”
He adds, “I think that needs to be taken seriously.”
Tomorrow in Part 4, Ms. explores how abortion providers and advocates are fortifying their clinics, their patients and themselves against this rising tide of violence—despite a chilling lack of federal protection.
