In Opposition and Intimidation, Alesha E. Doan focuses on the militant, confrontational, and sometimes violent tactics that constitute part of the repertoire of pro-life activists. Between 1998 and 2004, Doan conducted interviews in Texas with individuals on both sides of abortion clinic-related protests as well as with others, like police officers, who were drawn into protest-related conflict. Supplemented with historical and contemporary data about abortion and anti-abortion activism, the material from the author's interviews reveals the ideology and motivations of those who become involved in pro-life activism, as well as the emotions and motivations of those who find themselves targeted by pro-life activists. The subject matter of the strategies and tactics of the anti-abortion movement is important for many social scientists, not only those who have a specific interest in abortion politics or reproductive rights history.

Doan's key theoretical claim is that conventional concepts in sociology and politics are insufficient to enable us to understand contemporary anti-abortion movement politics, that there is a “gap in our knowledge” that constitutes an impediment to understanding pro-life activism in its complexity and consequences (p. xi). To repair this gap, Doan offers a new concept, “political harassment,” but this concept is more difficult to define and operationalize than the author suggests. For Doan, the features of anti-abortion activism that are key dimensions of the new analytic category are that nongovernmental actors are both targets of the movement's direct action and bear its costs (p. 24); that the ultimate goal of the movement is policy change, even though many activists devote themselves to goals that are not immediately political (p. 31–32); and, that the existence of violence in the movement creates a reasonable fear on the part of targets that they will be objects of violence, even when the direct actions they encounter are not violent (p. 108). At times, the author emphasizes the importance of “inflammatory rhetoric” on the part of anti-abortion protesters (p. 28), although the argument as a whole does not seem to require that women seeking abortions or clinic workers actually experience noxious or threatening rhetoric. Rather than clarify the parameters of political harassment, however, the definitions and illustrations expose problems with the concept's scope and application.

One problem associated with political harassment as a new conceptual category becomes plain when Doan pivots between two quite distinct uses of the notion of “reasonable fear.” One involves intentionality on the part of anti-abortion actors; political harassment occurs when activists set in motion “collective challenges intended to … create a reasonable fear” on the part of those they target (p. 131). The other does not require intentionality on the part of pro-life activists but refers to what clinic employees and women patients report—an “environment of fear”—as a result of knowing that some pro-life activists commit acts of violence (p. 108). Implicitly, throughout the analysis, this second, subjective, use of “reasonable fear” trumps the first.

By drawing attention to this distinction, I do not mean to suggest that what pregnant women and clinic employees actually experience as a result of their locations in the larger struggle over abortion is unimportant. Clearly, we have much to learn about the effects of various forms of political acts on those who become their targets.

However, the unexamined analytical distinction between, on the one hand, what anti-abortion protestors do (or intend to do) and, on the other hand, what vulnerable patients and clinic employees feel or experience does call into question the clarity and usefulness of the concept of political harassment as a way of explicating political formations. Pro-life violence has occurred and is likely to occur again. Given that context, if women who seek abortions feel threatened by the attentions of pro-life activists, we are bound by Doan's theory to judge that these women are being victimized by political harassment regardless of the nature of the acts under consideration. It is not obvious that such a move enhances our understanding of either the big picture or the micro-politics of pro-life activism.

The theoretical term that Doan considers and rejects as an alternative to political harassment is unconventional political tactics/participation, a broad analytic category that encompasses violence but also includes a wide range of other forms of direct action such as boycotts, blockades, demonstrations, and sit-ins. Previous scholars of abortion morality politics use this concept to account for pro-life activism, and a telling distinction between it and political harassment is that the concept of unconventional political tactics focuses our attention on the acts in which social movement actors engage. There is no denying that many of the tactics of anti-abortion activists—screaming at women outside clinics, blocking access, acquiring and publicizing personal information about clinic workers and women who seek abortion services, disseminating personalized wanted posters that target health care workers—constitute harassment. Whether they are executed by lone individuals or carefully choreographed by leaders of groups with an eye to national strategies and political agendas, these acts are consistent with our ordinary understanding of the term.

Setting aside the question of the psychological effects of particular kinds of harassment—a question that Doan's study is not set up to evaluate in spite of the inclusion of brief passages of personal testimony—it is not clear that our current political vocabulary is unable to account for, and help us understand, the evolving tactics of the anti-abortion movement, as well as their wider social context. These theoretical and empirical distinctions do not require a new vocabulary of political action. Instead, they require the kind of careful detective work and analysis in which the author engages in the most fruitful section of her book.

In chapters 4 and 5, Doan's quantitative analyses of the effects of anti-abortion activism demonstrate definitively what other scholars of the abortion wars have long known: that “harassment pays off.” Using survey data from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Doan shows that pro-life picketing outside clinics “exert[s] a consistently negative influence on the abortion rate” (p. 148). A somewhat wider variety of tactics influences the provision of abortion services. For clinic employees, whose contacts with anti-abortion activists are likely to be more frequent and varied, Doan shows that, of the many tactics in the pro-life repertoire, picketing of clinics and residences has the greatest effect on discouraging their participation in the provision of abortion services (p. 146–47). These important findings will no doubt be of interest to scholars as well as to those on both sides of the conflict over abortion rights.