After Luigi Mangione, a Pro-Life Activist Explains Why Political Violence Rarely Brings About a More Peaceful Society

Progressives aren't the only ones confronting systems they believe to be evil.

Photo by Elyssa DeDios on Unsplash

A prominent health care leader is assassinated.

While few condone the assassin’s deed, many people argue that the health care leader’s business model was just as cruel.

Is this about 2024 and the killing of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson?

No, this describes the 2009 killing of George Tiller, an abortion doctor who was notorious for taking part in late-term abortions.

“I don’t really like to think of it as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203rd trimester,” right-wing personality Ann Coulter quipped at the time.

Bill O’Reilly, one of the most popular cable news hosts, insisted that he didn’t condone the killing but asked us instead to think about the “the 60,000 fetuses who will never become American citizens,” thanks to Tiller’s abortions.

O’Reilly had used his program to make dozens of references to Tiller’s work prior to his assassination, something his liberal critics quickly pounced on.

Rod Dreher, the famed social conservative writer, was blunt: “George Tiller was a violent man, and the fact that he died violently, at the hands of a criminal, does not change who he was and what he did for a living.”

Damon Linker, a liberal writer, provocatively asked why, if abortion really is murder, anyone should condemn the violence at all:

If abortion truly is what the pro-life movement says it is — if it is the infliction of deadly violence against an innocent and defenseless human being — then doesn’t morality demand that pro-lifers act in any way they can to stop this violence?

A pro-life activist explains why the movement rejected violence

Terrisa Bukovinac at a pro-life demonstration. Photo credit: Terrisa Bukovinac.

Linker’s question is a good one. How should you think about violence when you’re confronting a system that you can only describe as evil? For decades, people on the fringes of the pro-life movement responded to the presence of America’s abortion clinics with violence — including with bombings and assassinations. For the most part, that is no longer part of the equation for the movement. Why is that?

To answer that question, I turned to Terrisa Bukovinac, a long-time pro-life activist. Like Monica Snyder, the executive director of Secular Pro-Life, Bukovinac stands out as a non-religious activist against abortion. In addition to being an atheist, she’s also a Democrat and animal welfare proponent.

But she has had to confront the same big moral questions as the rest of the pro-life movement: when faced with the juggernaut of an abortion industry that, in their view, has taken millions of innocent lives, how should they respond?

In an interview, Bukovinac told me found an answer to this question from Gene Sharp.

Sharp was one of the leading academics in the world who studied nonviolent revolution. Bukovinac pointed to the findings of his many years of studying social movements.

“One of the things that he discovered is that nonviolent efforts are much more successful than violent efforts,” she said. “That once violence is employed, right or wrong, it turns people off. It makes people less likely to get involved in your effort. It gives the state a lot more ammunition to crush you.”

She also presented me with a statistic I’d never heard of — according to the book Wrath of Angels, which chronicles the pro-life movement, there were 75,000 arrests made as part of civil disobedience actions in the 1980s and 1990s.

This makes the pro-life movement one of the most robust nonviolent movements in American history.

Bukovinac agreed that violence does sometimes rise when there isn’t a nonviolent alternative available for people who oppose a form of injustice.

“It is wrong,” she said about the killing of Thompson. “And I think that…what happened does seems to be evidence that there isn’t a strong nonviolent movement.”

Bukovinac concluded to me that it’s hard to create a more peaceful society on the backs of violence:

I'm always telling people, we cannot build a better, more progressive society on the backs of a bunch of murdered babies. And we can't do it on a bunch of murdered Abortionists, either or murdered CEO healthcare workers. We need stronger nonviolent resistance. We need a stronger commitment to nonviolence and a willingness to go to jail, a willingness to be arrested, a willingness to be hated, a willingness to lose your freedoms, to some degree, but a willingness to commit violence against someone else is just, in my opinion, not helpful to the causes that we care about, and our commitment to nonviolence is what's going to bring us to victory.