Group whose anti-abortion ad Amy Barrett signed accused of promoting harassment of doctors

An Indiana group whose anti-abortion campaign was endorsed in a signed advertisement by Amy Coney Barrett before she became a supreme court justice, keeps a published list of abortion providers and their place of work on its website, in what some experts say is an invitation to harass and intimidate the doctors and their staff.

In one case, court records show, a doctor whose name was published by the group, which is called Right to Life Michiana, was warned by the FBI of a kidnapping threat that had been made online against her daughter.

The advertisement, which was published in the South Bend Tribune and signed by hundreds of people, was sponsored by a group called St Joseph County Right to Life, which merged with another anti-abortion group in 2020 and is now called Right to Life Michiana.

During her 2020 confirmation hearing, Barrett said she had signed the advertisement as a private citizen, while she was making her way out of church, and had not recalled signing it until it became public following a report in the Guardian.

The group has also previously stated that it supports the criminalization of doctors who perform abortions and the criminalization of procedures that routinely occur in the in vitro fertilization process, including the discarding of frozen embryos or selective reduction of embryos.

The practice gained attention in the 1990s and early 2000s because of a legal battle over a website called the Nuremberg Files, which was supported by radical abortion opponents and published the names, photos, home addresses and licence plate numbers of abortion providers. In some cases, spouses and children were also identified. Doctors who had been murdered had a line crossed through their names.

One of the most high-profile cases of violence against abortion providers surrounded the case of George Tiller, who was one of the few doctors who performed late-term abortions when he was killed while attending church in 2009.

WWHA has been frustrated in part, she said, by what appeared to be a reluctance by local prosecutors to charge protesters who it said were violating trespassing rules.

Mira Shah, a doctor who travels in order to performs abortions in underserved communities, including in South Bend, who is listed on the Michiana website, said such groups aimed to instill fear in medical professionals and try to get them to stop doing their work.