Inside the latest, and scariest, iteration of America’s endless abortion wars

“I have a bomb, I have a bomb,” the male voice said. “Don’t let anyone in or out of the clinic, or I’ll set it off.”

For about 25 years, A Preferred Women’s Health Center, an abortion clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina, has endured more than its share of threats—usually, broad warnings about damnation in both this life and the next for the murder of innocent babies. But on July 2, 2024, a call came in that, as the clinic’s executive director, Calla Hales, recalls, “absolutely shook staff.”

Hales, who is in her mid-30s, co-owns this clinic and three others in the Southeast with her parents, Stuart and Lois, who have retired from daily operations. Their children grew up knowing that discussing the family business was not a good idea. “My parents were very clear,” she says as we drive around Charlotte. “We don’t talk about it with other people.” No one was allowed to answer the phone at home—an anti-abortion caller might be on the line.

For the last few years, as protesters from the evangelical organization Love Life have ramped up their demonstrations, caution and vigilance have again become second nature. So when the bomb threat came, Hales knew what she needed to do. “I have the somewhat unique advantage,” she says, “of living my whole life like this.”

Hales’ team of about 20 halted their services and emptied the waiting and recovery rooms. As patients and protesters watched, police searched the clinic with bomb-sniffing dogs. After an anxiety-provoking hour, they told Hales that the call had been a hoax. Weeks of a federal investigation followed, until agents zeroed in on a suspect—a 37-year-old man with a record that includes child abuse, aggravated assault, and burglary—and prosecution seemed imminent.

The case was being investigated under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a 1994 federal statute enacted after a series of assassinations and clinic attacks during an era of abortion-related violence three decades ago. Before the FACE Act, protesters suffered minor, if any, penalties for making threats or erecting blockades around clinics. After it passed, they risked real prison time and significant fines. “There was this big, foundational shift,” UC Davis abortion historian Mary Ziegler says about the reduction of violence that followed.

Then Donald Trump was reelected.

A few days after his second presidential inauguration, Trump pardoned 23 people convicted under the FACE Act, including those who had accosted pregnant patients, stolen fetal tissue, and physically blocked access to clinic entrances. The following day, Trump’s Department of Justice announced it would pursue FACE Act prosecutions only in “extraordinary circumstances”—cases that resulted in “death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage.” In an online event hosted by the anti-abortion group Live Action, one of the people Trump pardoned, Paul Vaughn, who’d been convicted of obstructing a Tennessee abortion clinic in 2021, said the president’s reprieve had “emboldened” him and other anti-abortion demonstrators. “They wanted to spread fear into the church and people that would dare stand up for the unborn,” Vaughn said. “And yet, God had other plans.”

Soon after the pardons, Hales received more disquieting news: The feds were dropping their investigation of the bomb threat and handing off the case to law enforcement in Georgia, where the suspect resides. For the next year, Hales and her staff heard almost nothing. She had pretty much given up hope when authorities surprised her—they had charged their suspect with calling in a bomb threat and the case was being tried at the federal level after all. But with the suspect out on bail and the federal government signaling that it was open season on abortion clinics once again, Hales knew she would have to get used to feeling vulnerable and alone. “These people really don’t give a fuck if I live or die,” she tells me.

Anti-abortion protests have been a part of Hales’ world since she was a kid. But she calls the last five years, since the Covid pandemic and the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, “the most difficult landscape” she’s ever worked in. She estimates that up to 20,000 protesters now target her Charlotte clinic each year. Most of them are affiliated with Love Life, a national anti-abortion group headquartered in Charlotte and active in 13 states. After Love Life moved into the empty lot next door to Hales’ clinic in 2022 and stationed its headquarters a fraction of a mile down the road, the number of protesters has steadily grown. They show up every day, and monthly prayer walks around the block where the clinic is located draw big crowds.

Back in 1991, during the “Summer of Mercy” protests in Wichita, Kansas, thousands of Operation Rescue anti-abortion protesters brought the city to a halt with sit-ins and clinic blockades. Some 2,600 protesters were arrested over six weeks, and the chaos and menace were catalysts for the FACE Act.

So far, the Love Life protests certainly haven’t had that sort of paralyzing effect on either the city or clinic operations. But there is a link: A former director of Operation Rescue, Flip Benham, has been demonstrating in Charlotte for the last 25 years and is now a respected elder in the Love Life family. The 78-year-old minister has been arrested and convicted of stalking and harassing providers, but is most famous for having baptized Norma McCorvey, a.k.a. Jane Roe of the landmark case that established a national right to abortion. (McCorvey became a born-again Christian and public anti-abortion icon before she ultimately reneged her conversion during a deathbed confession.) Benham is a regular presence outside Hales’ clinic, brandishing a graphic poster of a fetus he calls “Baby Malachi,” which he says was 21 weeks old when it was aborted. His twin sons, David and Jason—whose HGTV show Flip It Forward was canceled before it even aired after their views on abortion and gay marriage became public—sometimes join him, along with Benham’s sister and grandchildren. Benham’s sons have both served on Love Life’s board.

As one of the last Southern states to allow abortions past six weeks of pregnancy, North Carolina is a natural magnet for the anti-abortion movement. It “is definitely a hot spot and a place where they have had a large protester presence for a long time,” says Melissa Fowler, chief program officer for the National Abortion Federation, “and we have seen that escalate.”

But North Carolina is also part of a larger pattern. “There’s no question that there has been increased fear of violence and threats of violence since the Dobbs decision,” says Katie O’Connor, director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center. “The decision by this administration to pardon those 23 people really has created a sense that it is open season on abortion providers and abortion patients in an already charged atmosphere.”

The National Abortion Federation reports that clinics across the country are seeing increasing numbers of protesters and levels of aggression. “If you’re leading a protest organization, anger is good, right? It recruits people,” Ziegler says. “It gets people to protest; it does all the things you want. But too much anger is bad, because then you can’t control it.”

In Florida, a man left a one-star Google review for a clinic that included a bomb threat. A clinic in Ohio received an envelope full of what the sender claimed was anthrax, but turned out to be flour. “You had your time to repent and quit killing babies,” the attached note said. “To [sic] late now.” Doctors report being stalked and receiving explicit, credible death threats. In June, former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were murdered in their home; the man charged with their killings appears to have been motivated by anti-abortion beliefs. The shooter, who also wounded Democratic state Sen. John A. Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, had a list of dozens of targets that included more Democratic politicians, abortion care workers and advocates, and Planned Parenthood locations. Hortman had led the House to pass a law that codified the right to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care in Minnesota after the Dobbs decision.

No physicians have been killed since 2009, when Dr. George Tiller was murdered in Wichita. But in 2015, a gunman opened fire at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, killing three people and wounding eight others. And in November, a leader of a local anti-abortion group allegedly shot a man in the stomach during an altercation outside a Planned Parenthood in Columbia, South Carolina—he has been arrested and charged. (The incident was caught on video.) Today, many people in the reproductive health movement think it’s only a matter of time before these kinds of attacks become more frequent.

Carol Mason, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky and author of multiple books on the intersection of anti-abortion and right-wing extremism, says she’s noticed an increasing “fight club mentality” among the people she studies. Encounters have escalated from provocative efforts to spark debate to physical altercations. Anti-abortion extremists inspired by Trump’s reelection and rhetoric are operating within what Mason refers to as “kairotic” time, “the moment of revolution where people decide what’s happening in real time is not as important as the sense of yourself in a revolution or in a fight that is ongoing.”

In other words, when people see themselves as crusaders in a holy war, they begin to act accordingly.

A year after the bomb threat, I visit A Preferred Woman’s Health Center. The clinic and its administrative building are unremarkable twin brick structures positioned side by side on Latrobe Drive, a lasso of a road that connects to a busy main drag in southeast Charlotte. The loop of the lasso is home to some medical buildings, therapy practices, and industrial businesses, including a construction company that hosts Love Life’s headquarters. The empty lot where Love Life demonstrators gather is next to the clinic’s administrative building. The rules of engagement require that protesters go no farther than the sidewalks that lead up to the parking lot. To step off the sidewalk is a violation of North Carolina law.

For people seeking abortions in the South, where most states have made the procedure illegal, North Carolina has become a crucial option, albeit one with its own restrictions. In addition to lowering the gestational limit to 12 weeks and six days in 2023, North Carolina passed a law requiring two in-person visits to a clinic—even for people who are getting medication abortions. By design, this has added new hurdles for patients and additional costs for clinics. Abortions in Charlotte range from $550 for a medication abortion to $650 for a surgical one, depending on gestational age, but that’s only a fraction of what patients have to shell out. Hales estimates that nearly 80 percent of her clients receive some form of aid from abortion funds, grassroots groups that help pay for travel, child care, and the abortion itself. But abortion funds are stretched thin as well—the post-Dobbs surge of donor generosity has diminished—and the need to cross state lines for care increases costs. Because so many of Hales’ patients are already struggling financially, raising prices is not an option.

Since Dobbs, one of North Carolina’s 15 clinics has closed, even as abortion procedures have shot up 44 percent. With one of the busiest airports in the country, Charlotte is a vital abortion access point for a region that has been decimated by abortion bans. Mecklenburg County—where Hales’ clinic is located—accounted for 45 percent of all abortions in the state in 2023. Nearly 40 percent of patients came from out of state.

The patients who appear often are emotionally fragile. Every week, Hales estimates, her four clinics in North Carolina and Georgia see 10 to 15 minors. Many patients require more care than others needed in the past. They may be undocumented, non–English speaking, or illiterate. Patients seem angrier and more frightened than in the past, Hales says, and many know nothing about the legal constraints under which clinics must operate. They expect an experience akin to their local urgent care or hospital.

Their confusion and anxiety are unsurprising. By the time they arrive, Hales tells me, many patients have been so jerked around by a system they have no control over that they’re furious. Staff often struggle with figuring out how to balance their clients’ emotional needs with their own complicated reactions to them. A similar phenomenon is playing out around the country among patients who call her organization for help, says Fowler of the National Abortion Federation. “We’ve talked to people on our hotline who are really angry about all the barriers in place, and sometimes they take out that anger on the clinic staff or hotline staff who are helping them,” she says. Here, too, she says, many callers are shocked to discover just how arduous the path to care will be for them—all of which makes the situation, when they finally arrive at clinics, even more combustible.  

On the day I arrive, about 10 Love Life demonstrators, juggling clipboards and pamphlets, pace the sidewalk in front of the clinic’s buildings. As I drive into the parking lot, I see volunteers from each organization, like competing sports teams, dressed in their own colors and vying for the attention of people in the cars that approach. A Love Life volunteer in a coral T-shirt that reads “Hope Is Here” in white lettering—the “o” in “hope” contains a heart—pleads with me to roll down my window, presumably so I can be dissuaded from a decision to terminate a pregnancy. At the same time, a clinic volunteer wearing the uniform of a rainbow-hued and purple-and-black vest and holding a bright pink sign telling patients to “KEEP DRIVING, CLINIC AHEAD” tries to redirect me to the clinic. I tell them both I’m a reporter, and they turn back toward the road.

Cars in the parking lot bear license plates from South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, all states where abortion is banned after six weeks of pregnancy, and Texas, where it’s banned from fertilization. Upon arrival, patients scan a QR code to check in, and most wait in their cars, windows closed, with the air conditioning cranked against the smothering summer heat. Brown tarps hang like shower curtains from tree limbs and encircle the clinic grounds, providing some privacy from the protesters on the sidewalk out front. Occasionally, someone cautiously exits their vehicle for a free snack or drink from a table set out for visitors, maybe a toy for a child. Earplugs are also available.

A slender brunette wearing a Love Life T-shirt near the perimeter of the parking lot begins to shout to anyone who might be able to hear her. “Mama, your little baby is alive. He loves you. Your baby has an actual heartbeat…Your baby doesn’t deserve a death sentence.” She pauses. “God is knitting your baby in your womb right now, fearfully and wonderfully made, the Bible says. We’re still out here praying for you and that beautiful little baby—”

“—And yellin’ at you,” finishes Shannon Bauerle, a woman in a rainbow vest with “CLINIC ESCORT” in bold letters across the front. Her skin is tanned from countless hours pacing in the sun, commanding her small volunteer army. Bauerle tosses her adversary a sardonic grin. The brunette ignores her and continues her pleas, careful not to cross the property line, as Bauerle keeps watch. Bauerle teaches women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and is the executive director of Charlotte for Choice, which trains and schedules volunteers. There are escorts who get patients in and out of the clinic safely and defenders who confront the protesters to distract them from patients. She describes the clinic as a “destination spot” for protesters from all over the country and says her team already has spotted a few of the activists who’ve been pardoned by Trump.

Later, I catch up with her in the administrative building, where, as she organizes granola bars, water bottles, and walkie-talkies for her volunteers, she tells me a story that has become a constant reminder of the human stakes of her work beyond the rhetoric that ping-pongs across the parking lot on any given day.

In 2020, a 12-year-old girl who’d been raped came to the clinic, escorted by an uncle. The child was distraught, Bauerle says, and the protesters’ shouts pushed her into hysteria. The uncle climbed out of the car and begged the protesters, one man in particular, to just lower their voices. “Please, she’s been through hell,” the uncle pleaded. The protester refused, insisting that by giving birth, the girl would be “healed.” Giving up, the uncle returned to his car. Bauerle tells me it’s the closest she’s come to physically intervening between protesters and patients, but she knew that if she crossed that line, she could be arrested or sued. Instead, she used an oversized umbrella as a way to try to shield the child from the protesters’ view, but she felt helpless nonetheless.

Even now, when she thinks about that day, her face flushes with fury.

Love Life began as a small, nondenominational religious community in Charlotte, but over the past decade, it has become an anti-abortion force to be reckoned with. According to the most recent tax forms available, Love Life employs 77 people—full and part time—and mobilizes more than 600 volunteers. Its total revenue in 2023 was $3.7 million. That’s still small as national right-to-life groups go, but it’s growing, with active chapters in at least 10 other states, including California, Idaho, Illinois, New Mexico, and New York.

I meet the 45-year-old executive director, Daniel Parks, at Love Life’s headquarters, which is only 0.2 miles from the clinic. Friendly, if a bit wary, Parks represents a younger generation of anti-abortion activists, respectful of trailblazers like Flip Benham but preferring a more contemporary style. For one, you won’t catch Parks brandishing posters of dismembered fetuses. Love Life strives to present itself as a community of engaged men and women, moms and dads with young families, the kind of people one might see at the local trendy coffee shop. It has an Instagram page with more than 62,000 followers, where posts announce, “Another precious baby saved in Charlotte, NC, this morning.”

Parks, who sports stylish spectacles and slicked-back silver-blond hair, bristles at my description of the group’s work as “protesting.” Instead, it’s a “ministry,” he clarifies, one that provides pregnant women with church mentors, housing, and parenting classes, among other meaningful social services. A report on Love Life’s website estimates that it has helped “more than 6,700 families choose life for their babies” across the country since its work began in 2016. In the first half of 2025, the report claims that 486 babies were born to women who had planned to terminate their pregnancies before Love Life intervened. Like the previous generation of activists, Parks fervently believes that abortion is murder and that clinic escorts like Bauerle are accomplices. “The people with the vests on,” he tells me, “in some practical ways are, you know, the enemy.”

The group operates out of a basement office tucked below a property management company that owns the space. The walls are covered with large photographs of people caught up in the rapture of worship and babies with toothy grins who’ve been “saved” by the organization, as well as portraits of high-profile pastors like Rep. Mark Harris, a Republican who represents the state’s 8th Congressional District. An ordained Southern Baptist minister, Harris has preached at Love Life events. (In 2018, he was accused of election fraud, and his initial congressional election was overturned, but he never went to trial.) Unlike most people in the anti-abortion movement who identify intensely with the GOP, Parks claims he has no interest in partisan politics. Were he forced to choose, he says, he would prefer to describe himself as a libertarian. As for Trump, “I certainly respect some of the pro-life things,” Parks says. “But yeah, I’m super-skeptical that he’s actually pro-life for the sake of protecting innocent children.”

Saving babies from abortion is the primary goal of Love Life, and for that, it targets not just expectant mothers, but also places of worship; its goal is to build a national network of ministry partners. “Really, we’re after the church,” Parks says. “We want to see the church—the evangelical church, in particular—be aware of the issue of abortion in their city, but then actively do something to help the families that are considering abortion.”

I recount the story Bauerle told me about the pregnant 12-year-old. Parks is skeptical and suggests that the story deliberately positions the Love Lifer as the villain. Such situations, he insists, ought to be handled with compassion. “I’m pretty confident that abortion, in her case, is not,” he lets out a humorless laugh, “going to bring healing to her.” He says he would have been gentle instead, attempting not to “add insult to injury,” but sharing “what we believe is true about that baby and about the situation.” Which is, put simply, that she should have carried her assailant’s child to term. In the end, no matter how expansive and supportive the organization Parks describes may be, Love Life is carrying on the tradition of the hardline anti-abortion movement.

Other experiences Parks describes mirror those reported by those who work at the clinic. Bauerle had related the intrusive actions of some demonstrators in approaching cars. Parks, on the other hand, recounts how one Love Life volunteer was merely handing out a pamphlet to someone through an open car window when a clinic volunteer snatched the literature away.  “It’s like, wow, okay, that’s not pro-choice,” Parks says.

Parks and I emerge from the basement into the bright morning to head over to the prayer walk, which Love Life holds on the second Saturday of every month. We encounter a woman, looking lost and uneasy, who has wandered up from the parking lot behind the group’s office. “Is this the entrance?” she asks.

Parks pauses. “Well, what are you looking for?”

“A Preferred Women’s Health Center.”

“Are you pregnant?” he asks. “Are you looking to have an abortion?”

A guarded look crosses her face, and she starts to back away toward her car.

“I don’t wanna talk about that.”

“God loves you, God loves your baby,” he says. “We can help you.”

“I gotta get to my appointment.” She opens her car door and climbs in.

Parks backs off, and we stand in silence for a moment. “Wow,” he says. “How cool that you got to see that.”

The first chords of worship music begin to silence the chatter of the gathered crowd, which looks to be nearing 200 strong. After a few songs led by a full band, a pastor ambles onstage. More than 230,000 “prayer walkers” have convened “around abortion centers to date,” he tells the crowd. Love Life chapters in other states like New York and California also organize prayer walks on the second Saturday of every month. But since “500 to 600 abortions happen in Charlotte” every week, he goes on, their work is far from over. (According to state data, the number is more like 370.) Protesters fall silent and kneel on the gravel as the pastor prays. Then a Love Life representative announces that guns are prohibited at “parades,” so anyone who is armed should stow their firearms in a vehicle. (No one moves.) The congregants stand and start their march. At the first prayer station, a sign commands, “Repent!”

We pass Benham and his “Baby Malachi” placard. Signs at three more prayer stations ask us to pray for “moms & babies,” “dads,” and “all involved in abortion.” We stop directly in front of the clinic, across the road so as not to trespass. The front doors are hidden by trees and the brown tarps. A man with a guitar picks up a melody, and the group begins to sing a contemporary Christian tune, hands lifting toward the clinic.

Parks tells me that the purpose of the walk is simply to pray, worship, and reflect—not to engage with clinic workers or patients. Love Life draws a hard line at “vigilante justice,” he says, or any sort of physical confrontation. After a few songs, we return to the gravel lot next door to the clinic, where there is a call for volunteers and, of course, donations. “Every dollar that you sow into this ministry, God is going to use to save babies, to save lives, and continue to unite and mobilize the church,” the pastor urges. After one more prayer, the crowd slowly disperses. Many head back up the road to Love Life’s headquarters for fellowship and Chick-fil-A sandwiches.

But according to Bauerle and Hales, other, more ardent protesters attend Love Life’s events and are less committed to nonviolence. The people whom they most fear are the most extreme wing of the anti-abortion movement, the abortion “abolitionists” whose aim is to outlaw abortion in all circumstances—seemingly no matter the cost. Abolitionists believe in criminalizing women who have abortions, their doctors, and anyone who offers any assistance. A bill in South Carolina that did not pass illustrates the idea: It proposed 30-year prison sentences for people involved in abortions. Some abolitionists go further, arguing for the death penalty for both providers and patients.

Parks says Love Life does not identify as an abolitionist organization—“that’s not really our forte.” But he says it does offer a training called “Legalize Life” run by Bradley Pierce, president of the Foundation to Abolish Abortion and Abolish Abortion Texas, who has pushed for legislation that would charge anyone who gets abortion care with murder.

When I press Parks on Pierce, he acknowledges, “Many of the people in our organization align with that ideology, and there are variations of it.” As he describes Love Life’s position on abortion, it sounds very much like one an abolitionist would embrace. “We agree abortion is murder and that it should be outlawed and every human life should be protected under our laws,” he says. “And we believe that children in the womb are human life.”

A few days after I leave Charlotte, Bauerle emails me. “We got this video today,” she writes. “There are a few things, like them talking about guns, that you might find interesting.” I open the file and see an older woman and another woman on the sidewalk outside the clinic, recorded by a security camera affixed to a nearby tree. “I tell you what, the older I get,” the white woman says, “I am tired of rolling over to their acts of aggression and evil.”

The older woman then describes gently pushing away a clinic defender’s sign when the defender got too close to her while she was trying to counsel someone. She says she talked to a police officer who routinely patrols the clinic, and he told her that defending her personal space was fine, so long as it’s done carefully. “Maybe it’s time for me to retire,” she says, adding that she’s talking to Love Life’s lawyer about what she describes as “the slander and the lies”—that Love Lifers are a threat, for instance—the people she describes as “pro-abortion” antagonists spread.

The other woman responds: “A lot of Christians will say, you don’t need no gun, you shouldn’t have a gun. What did Jesus tell ’em?” She then refers to Luke 22:36—“If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one”—which some Christians have interpreted as a call to arms.  

Bauerle believes the exchange encapsulates a common problem the clinic frequently faces: At what point do vague references to guns and swords lead to actual violence? At what point does a simmer erupt into a boil?

When I ask Hales about the exchange, she sighs. She hasn’t heard about it—probably, she says, because Bauerle is trying to shield her from more stress. Hales used to try to get police to issue citations for credible-sounding threats—if someone said she was going to die that day or someone was going to shoot her—and they would tell her to press charges. “Every single time I did,” she says, “I would be told that the language wasn’t actionable.” And to be clear, the footage Bauerle shared with me did not lay out a specific threat, which makes it protected as free speech. But it was still unnerving for staff and volunteers. Hales says she stopped trying to get the law to intervene.

In October, when Operation Save America, an abolitionist rebrand of Operation Rescue, joined Love Life’s monthly prayer walk following a conference, some 500 protesters showed up. Charlotte-Mecklenburg police allowed them to pierce the boundary to hand out pamphlets, even though doing so would constitute a violation of local and state law. (The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department declined to comment.) The most aggressive of the protesters clustered along the entrance to the clinic parking lot, where clinic defenders tried to hold them back with rainbow umbrellas. Every so often, someone broke through and blocked the driveway for as long as possible, until a volunteer herded them away with an umbrella. Parks, who wasn’t there, told me that as far as he knows, everything proceeded normally on Love Life’s end, but Operation Save America “sort of did their own thing.”

Bauerle and her volunteers had met several times in advance to plan, and it seemed to have paid off—protesters were frustrated by the organized response of the umbrella brigade. “If we didn’t have the volunteers that we do, we’d have been fucked,” she texted me. Still, she describes the day as a “shit show,” particularly local authorities’ response. At least five times, adult protesters crossed the driveway slowly, holding hands with a child. No citations or tickets were issued.

Last year, blocking the driveway was a federal crime. Now, it’s more complicated.