This is a script for a segment that appeared on Velshi. You can watch it here. Because it was written to be spoken, it does not have formal grammar or style.

((ALI/OC))

In 1970, Dr. George Tiller took over his father’s family practice in Wichita, Kansas after his dad passed away. When his dad's old patients started rolling in, Dr. Tiller learned a secret: his father had been providing safe, but illegal, abortions to his patients for decades. 

((VO))

It had not been Dr. Tiller's plan to go into family practice, much less women's health. But he was so moved by meeting his father's patients and hearing their stories — seeing the need his father had been filling — that once the Supreme Court affirmed the right to an abortion with Roe v. Wade in 1973, Tiller began a decades-long career as an abortion provider, eventually becoming Wichita’s lone abortion provider. 

((ONCAM))

While his father operated in secret, Dr. Tiller became perhaps the most famous public face of abortion. To the anti-abortion movement, he became a target.

In 1986, his clinic was bombed overnight. No one was hurt but there was extensive damage. Dr. Tiller hung a sign outside that said, "Hell no, we won't go." 

((VO))

In 1991, thousands of anti-abortion activists descended onto Dr. Tiller’s clinic in Wichita in what they dubbed the “Summer of Mercy” — weeks of protests and blockades designed to shut down the clinic and end abortion access. Protesters would block the entrance to the clinic and adjacent streets, screaming threats and prayers at patients. Over the course of six weeks, 2,600 people were arrested.

((FS))

In 1993, Tiller himself was shot five times by an anti-abortion extremist. And lived.

But Dr. Tiller was not the only one being terrorized by violent anti-abortion extremists. 

((ALI/OC))

Clinics across the country would be vandalized and blockaded. Doctors, nurses and volunteers would be stalked, harassed, and assassinated.

Between 1977 and 1988, there were 110 cases of arson or firebombing by anti-abortion extremists, according to researchers at USC’s medical school. 

((FS))

And in 1993, the same year Dr. Tiller walked away from that attempted assassination, an OBGYN in Pensacola, Florida named David Gunn was shot dead outside the abortion clinic where he worked. Dr. Gunn was the first known targeted killing of an abortion provider in America.

((FS))

The following year two receptionists were shot and killed and five others wounded at a pair of Boston area clinics. 

((ONCAM))

In all — at least 11 people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics since then.

((VO))

But this was the political climate in which President Bill Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances — or FACE — Act in 1994. It prohibits anyone from using “force, threat of force, intimidation or injury” to prevent someone from “obtaining or providing reproductive health services.”

((FS))

on Thursday night, President Trump announced he would pardon 23 anti-abortion extremists who had been convicted for violating the FACE Act. 

((VO))

One of them, Lauren Handy, was sentenced to 5 years in prison for essentially invading a Washington D.C. clinic. She posed as a patient with an appointment before eight of her allies barged into the building and blocked the doors with chains and ropes.

((VO))

When police searched her home, they found 5 fetuses she had stolen from that clinic. In an interview with New York Magazine, Handy said, quote,  “I’ve accepted the reality that my life will be in and out of jail.”

((ON CAM))

Not so. The president has pardoned her and her nine co-conspirators 

((FS))

And on Friday, Trump's Justice Department issued an order curtailing ALL prosecutions under the FACE Act save for “extraordinary circumstances.” 

((ON CAM))

So despite Donald Trump’s insistence on the campaign trail that states will do what they want with abortion, his pardon of people convicted for violating the FACE Act and his order that it largely no longer be enforced in the future sends a very clear signal to women and women's health providers: that the government will not protect abortion rights even in states where they are still guaranteed. 

And worse is the signal he's sending to extremists: that it is now acceptable to make use of threats, intimidation, and even violence to shut down abortion clinics. 

Our next guest knows as much anyone in the country about the very real consequences of anti-abortion extremism and violence. 

In 1991, she took a summer job answering phones for the Wichita Women’s Center, unaware of that mob that was descending on her city in the Summer of Mercy. Back then, she didn’t know Dr. Tiller personally. But eventually, Julie Burkhart came to work closely with Dr. Tiller, later becoming his clinic’s spokesperson. 

((FS))

That was until 2009, when George Tiller was shot to death at his own church by an anti-abortion extremist.

((VO))

The clinic closed, and with it, abortion access in Wichita vanished.

Burkhart worked hard to reopen Dr. Tiller’s clinic. She endured harassment and threats, she saw ‘WANTED’ posters with her face and address on them and saw protesters at her *home* where they stood outside carrying signs — one of which read, quote: "Prepare to Meet Thy God." 

((ON CAM))

And then she  went on to open more clinics in states that were hostile to abortion rights — even before the fall of Roe v. Wade — in Wyoming and Oklahoma. 

((LIVE RS))

Julie Burkhart joins me after the break.