In a series of viral TikToks, a group of people can be seen milling around in front of a building with a towering cross. From off-camera, women can be heard shouting “Don’t go in there! It’s a den of lies!”, “You’ll have a lifetime of regret!”, “It’s not too late!” And when one man, who at first appears to be walking inside, ultimately turns away from the building, the women yell with relief and start pumping their fists. “We saved one!”
Posted in late June and viewed by more than half a million people, the TikToks initially appear to be nothing more than a clever joke: These women are weaponizing the language that often gets tossed around at protests of abortion clinics—you’ll regret this, you’re being fed lies, you’re only a dollar sign to the people inside—against the very people who likely use it. But beneath the surface, the TikToks are part of a growing and controversial push by abortion rights activists to aggressively confront abortion foes. And the people walking into the church weren’t exactly just regular churchgoers but rather members of a cadre of high-profile, hardcore anti-abortion activists.
Videos by VICE
The Arizona church was hosting the annual conference of Operation Save America, an anti-abortion group descended from Operation Rescue, a hardline organization that rose to infamy the 1980s and ’90s.
Operation Rescue had a straightforward motto: “If you believe abortion is murder, you must act like it is murder.” In 1991, when Operation Rescue adherents descended on the abortion clinics of Wichita, Kansas, the New York Times described them as “flinging themselves under cars, sitting by the hundreds at clinic doorways, and blocking women from entering as they read them Scripture.”
The woman behind the June TikToks is Kristin Williams, a married mother of three from Phoenix. When people who oppose abortion talk about people getting the procedure for the so-called “right” reasons, they’re talking about someone like Williams.
Williams got pregnant unexpectedly in November 2019, despite her IUD. She and her husband wanted to continue the pregnancy anyway—until they learned that the fetus had Trisomy 13, a genetic disorder caused by an extra chromosome. Most babies born with Trisomy 13 don’t live long after birth.
This, Williams told VICE News, was “devastating.” And it made her reconsider her entire position on abortion.
“I was of the mindset that I would never have an abortion. But then all of the sudden, I needed one,” she said. “I grew up Catholic. I was pretty conservative before I got introduced into this whole world [of abortion rights activism]. I would never have gone out and shamed someone for having an abortion, but it was just never an option.”
In March 2020, at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, Williams got an abortion. She was 16 weeks pregnant at the time.
At first, when Williams looked for TikToks that championed abortion rights, TikTok’s algorithm shunted Williams toward “pro-life” TikTokers. But through combing those TikTokers’ comments, she ultimately found her way into “pro-choice” TikTok.
Over the last year, “pro-choice TikTok” has exploded, largely thanks to a group of Gen-Z activists who film their exchanges with the hordes of protesters who gather outside an abortion clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina. The activists, who operate under the organization Charlotte for Choice, frequently mock and provoke the protesters, just as Williams and her comrades do in her video. In one TikTok from Charlotte, which has more than a million likes, a pink-haired woman reads the lyrics of “WAP” as a man tries to read from the Bible. Another blasts the 1990s song “Short, Short Man,” by Gillette—sample lyrics: “eenie weenie teenie weenie shriveled little short, short man”—and depicts a man holding a sign bearing the word “abortion.”
“Don’t worry, the volume was turned all the way up so he could hear,” the caption reads, with an added smiley face.
This kind of “clinic defense,” as it’s known among abortion rights circles, is controversial. It’s a tactic that’s been around since the 1980s; groups like the Pinkhouse Defenders, who work at the last abortion clinic in Mississippi, have been practicing it for years. But many abortion rights supporters have long held that antagonizing abortion protesters at best de-centers the patient and at worst risks their safety and mental health. Planned Parenthood, for example, has long asked clinic defenders to stay home.
Now, however, violence and harassment at abortion clinic is on the rise: The National Abortion Federation found that instances of trespassing, threats of harm, bomb threats, and picketing all spiked in 2019. Abortion providers are at their wits’ end.
“Quite honestly, at this point, I welcome anybody else to take five years of nonstop protests and tell me how they want to deal with it,” Calla Hales told VICE News in February.
Hales is the executive director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, a network of abortion clinics that includes the Charlotte location that Charlotte for Choice defends. When she spoke to VICE News, Hales said she’d recently received two bomb threats, on back-to-back weekends.
Williams has traveled to Charlotte to see its defenders in action. For her, watching TikTokers speak up about abortion, and speak out against anti-abortion rhetoric, was inspiring.
“I just got following all of these great and strong people talking about abortion, and I just started doing it myself—sharing my story,” Williams said. “They really made me feel normal. I never knew how many people would have an abortion in their life and how common it was.”
Williams’ TikTok is now littered with videos of her clapping back at anti-abortion talking points (often in the form of dancing and jokes). It’s mostly tongue-in-cheek, although last March, she posted a 26-part recounting of her own abortion, tearing up as she spoke about the hurdles she faced trying to get an abortion in Arizona, like the requirement that she wait 24 hours before her initial consultation at the abortion clinic and the procedure itself.
“I felt like I had nobody I could turn to for advice, because how dare I get an abortion,” Williams told the camera, recalling how she considered leaving Arizona because it would be easier to get an abortion in a more liberal state. (At another, she laughed at herself. “Part 97, I am so sorry. And I don’t know who I think I am, crying on TikTok like this.”)
TikTok also led to Williams showing up at the Operation Save America protest. Through mutuals on the platform, she got introduced to Abortion Access Front, the organization that helped coordinate the protest.
There are even some crossover appearances between Williams’ TikToks and those posted by the activists in Charlotte. In one of Williams’ TikToks, one off-camera speaker gives a sarcastic “hello!” to Flip Benham, the former head of Operation Save America, as he stands outside the church. (He waves back.) Benham is the man who had “WAP” read to him as he protested at the Charlotte abortion clinic.
The modern-day Operation Save America doesn’t have the reach or impact of its parent group. But that doesn’t mean its members have given up on taking to the streets: During its conference, Williams filmed dozens of anti-abortion protesters on the sidewalks of Arizona, carrying graphic signs that purport to depict aborted fetuses and wearing shirts that read, “Baby Lives Matter.”
This kind of rhetoric can have lethal consequences. Operation Rescue targeted Dr. George Tiller, a Wichita, Kansas abortion provider who was one of the few willing to perform the procedure late into pregnancy. In 2009, after years of rhetorical (and sometimes literal) attacks by abortion foes, Tiller was shot to death in church by a man who said he learned about Tiller’s security measures from Operation Rescue.
Operation Save America didn’t immediately respond to a VICE News request for comment. By the time of Tiller’s death, Operation Save America had already split off from Operation Rescue, although the organization is clearly keen to keep some of the latter group’s shine; on Operation Save America’s website, the organization often refers to itself as “Operation Rescue/Operation Save America.”
Shortly after Tiller’s assassination, the then-president of Operation Rescue told the New York Times, “Operation Rescue has worked tirelessly on peaceful, nonviolent measures to bring him to justice through the legal system, the legislative system.”
“We are pro-life, and this act was antithetical to what we believe,” he said, adding that Tiller’s killer “is not a friend, not a contributor, not a volunteer.”
Williams knows that her advocacy can only go so far. She argues with people who are opposed to abortion—but only to a point. That’s when she takes action.
“Some people, you’re just never going to convince them otherwise and that can be frustrating,” she said. “But I like to donate to abortion funds or Planned Parenthood in their name, and respond back with that. You can say these horrible things to me, but I’ll donate to somebody who needs an abortion.”
