I remember what I was doing when I learned that Dr. George Tiller had been murdered six years ago. It was the weekend of my college graduation and I was about to spend six weeks in my hometown of Sydney, Australia before moving to New York City. But Tiller's death—he'd been shot in the head, point blank, by an anti-abortion extremist in his Kansas church on a Sunday morning—gave me pause. What was I getting myself into? Could I stay in a country that murders its doctors? In Australia, abortion is rarely controversial, and while our laws are not as liberal as I’d like, abortion providers don’t live in fear. Gun laws are tight, so that even the people who wanted to shoot abortion doctors would have a hard time doing it.

When Tiller was killed, in 2009, a rush of anti-abortion legislation was just beginning. And violence against abortion providers, those few who remain, was and remains a daily reality no matter where they live. A continual threat, part of the buzzing background noise that is American violence.

Six years later nearly to the day, I’m still here in the U.S., and though no abortion provider has been murdered since 2009, harassment of these doctors continues. And not just the doctors; anti-choice extremists will target almost anyone who is associated with the provision of abortion: nurses, receptionists, the men and women who run clinic networks, clinic escorts, clinic security guards, landlords, and the neighbors and families of all those people. In their new book Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism, David S. Cohen and Krysten Connon describe the scope and severity of attacks on abortion providers; they interviewed 87 of them about their experiences of anti-abortion violence, one of the largest studies of this group ever undertaken. Between early 2011 and mid-2014 Cohen and Connon interviewed people who work at all stages of abortion provision, from clinic volunteers to the doctors who perform terminations. Some were newcomers to the field, some had been providing abortions for decades.Cohen, a former abortion rights lawyer, is now a law professor, and Connon is an attorney in private practice in Philadelphia.

The harassment takes a breathtaking range of forms, and has serious effects on the providers’ lives, personal and professional. These people, in order to provide a medical procedure that is entirely legal, endure treatment that most of us would never imagine tolerating in the name of our jobs. “In almost every interview, a different type of targeted anti-abortion harassment emerged,” Cohen and Connon write, distinguishing between what they call general clinic protest—such as picketing outside a clinic in protest of abortion writ large—and targeted acts focused on individuals, such as death threats, stalking, and harassment of the provider’s family. Cohen and Connon explore the threats, and also the ways that providers respond to them.

The first chapter tells the stories of just seven of the 87, but cumulatively, they have faced “arson, murder, assault, stalking, talking, home picketing, business loss, death threats, community protest, religious and racial attacks, hate mail, and targeted internet postings.” While Tiller’s murder made headlines—and made me wonder if staying in the States was for me—Cohen and Connon spend much of their book describing the harassment that flies largely under the radar of the press and of many pro-choice people, but that has an enormous effect on abortion providers. Since 1993, eight people have been victims of fatal anti-choice violence, four of them abortion doctors—but thousands more have suffered in less dramatic and less talked-about ways.