OSA is one of many anti-abortion groups that engage in protests at clinics, harassing supporters, providers and people seeking medical care. The group is a rebrand of Operation Rescue, a militant anti-abortion organization that, in the 1980s and 1990s, spearheaded the use of “rescues” at abortion clinics. Operation Rescue was unrelenting. It hosted training camps around the country to prepare anti-abortion activists and targeted specific cities for weeks with protests. By the mid-1990s, some 60,000 people had been arrested at its demonstrations. During a “rescue,” anti-abortion activists carpeted the outsides of clinics with their bodies in an attempt to block patients and workers from entering. At some of these demonstrations, protesters would forcibly enter a clinic, oftentimes barricading themselves inside, locking themselves in patient rooms, chaining themselves to equipment or each other, and damaging equipment. Between 1977 and 1993, there were 345 such clinic invasions, according to data published by the National Abortion Federation.

Rescue-type demonstrations declined dramatically after President Bill Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which made it a federal crime to obstruct access to a reproductive health care clinic, in May 1994. From 1990 to 1993, clinic invasions averaged 24.5 per year, while protesters engaged in an average of 56 blockades. From 1994 to 1999, those numbers fell to just over three and 10 per year, respectively.

While invasions fell out of favor among anti-abortion activists after the FACE Act, they have trended upward so far this decade, reaching 20 in 2022 (the most recent year for which NAF has statistics). OSA members have participated in numerous blockades and invasions in recent years, including a 2022 action against a Tennessee clinic in which one participant told police, “We got men out here who are willing to do what needs to be done. …We are going to be obedient to God’s law, not man’s.”[11] After a group of 11 anti-abortion activists associated with OSA were charged with FACE Act violations in October 2022 for a blockade of the clinic the previous year, 10 were eventually convicted and found guilty in the first half of 2024 following two separate trials. Other anti-abortion groups have praised Operation Rescue’s earlier wave of activism and cited it as a template for their own actions. “This has been such a huge inspiration for me,” Terrisa Bukovinac, the founder of the group Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), said on a 2022 podcast. “I’ve had the honor of meeting and working alongside Randall Terry, who was the founder of Operation Rescue, and I have come to the conclusion that it’s time to bring the rescue movement back.”

In a photo from April 5, 2022, Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry joins Terrisa Bukovinac and Lauren Handy of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising during a news conference in Washington, D.C., to address reports of fetuses recovered by police in Handy's apartment. (Credit: Zach Roberts/NurPhoto/Alamy)

Terry, who, by his own count, has been arrested 49 times for his activism, has recently appeared at PAAU events and seems to be attempting to capitalize on the recent wave of anti-abortion organizing. He is currently raising money on a Christian crowdfunding site to fund a documentary about Operation Rescue’s activism, which he describes as “the largest peaceful civil disobedience movement in American history.” He also reportedly plans on running a longshot presidential campaign as a nominee for the Constitution Party. He has raised just over $15,000 despite raising money for more than a year.

PAAU, an organization comprised mostly of women, cloaks itself in the language of progressivism and feminism while supporting “direct action” aimed at denying people the ability to make choices about their own reproduction and health care. The group has ties not only to Terry, but to Joan Andrews Bell, a longtime militant anti-abortion activist and member of Operation Rescue who has been arrested more than 120 times for harassing clinics. As a keynote speaker at a 1999 conference, Bell said she could consider the murder of an abortion provider “justifiable homicide.” “If you shoot them at home, it’s not. If they’re shot as they’re walking into an abortion mill, I will accept whatever the church teaches on that,” she said. Bell and her husband employed James Charles Kopp at their crisis pregnancy clinic shortly before he murdered Dr. Barnett Slepian, an obstetrician who provided abortions, by shooting him in his Buffalo, New York, home in 1998.

In 2020, Bell participated in a clinic invasion organized by PAAU Director of Activism and Mutual Aid Lauren Handy at the Washington Surgi-Clinic, an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C. Handy largely relied on Facebook to reach out to activists and coordinate the action. On the day of the invasion, Handy and her co-conspirators forced their way into the clinic, injuring a nurse in the process. Part of the group who entered the clinic, including Bell, quickly used chairs to block the entrance of the procedure area and chains and bike locks to link themselves together. One of the clinic invaders, Herb Geraghty, told a woman who came up the elevator, and who was in the midst of a multiday abortion she sought after learning her fetus had a fatal defect and would not survive birth, that there were no abortions being performed today. She collapsed in the hallway in pain. Other invaders yelled at patients, telling them, “We just want you to know that if you die during your abortion procedure, you might wake up in a place you don’t want to be!”

When police arrived, several anti-abortion activists left. The remaining went limp and had to be carried out by law enforcement. More than three years after the invasion, nine of the participants, including Handy, Geraghty and Bell, were convicted on two charges: conspiracy to obstruct civil rights and violating the FACE Act.[12]

In May 2024, Handy was sentenced to nearly five years in prison. “Your views took precedence over, frankly, their human needs,” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly told her during sentencing. Bell and Geraghty both received 27-month sentences.

In addition to criminal charges under the FACE Act, anti-abortion activists currently face civil penalties. In New York, Attorney General Leticia James is pursuing a lawsuit against Red Rose Rescue, an anti-abortion group that has repeatedly obstructed and invaded reproductive health clinics in the state. In December 2023, a judge granted a preliminary injunction against the group, ordering that they stay 15 feet from clinics in 13 New York counties.

The actions of PAAU and other militant anti-abortion groups have, if anything, brought them closer to the far-right wing of the Republican Party. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently hosted a hearing titled “Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting” – a long-running anti-abortion conspiracy – where PAAU’s Bukovinac detailed how the group allegedly came to possess 115 fetuses, five of which, they claim without evidence, were the result of illegal abortion procedures (police found the fetuses in Handy’s home). Former President Donald Trump has also expressed his support for members of the group. At the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit hosted by the Family Research Council, Trump said that if he were elected to a second term as president, he would commute the sentences of the clinic invaders and “appoint a special task force to rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who’s been unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration.”[13]

Activist groups like PAAU, along with Republican elected officials, are now targeting the FACE Act. Even though it is doubtful the law will be overturned, it signals that GOP officials are now increasingly comfortable with the tactics deployed by militant anti-abortion groups.