In 2015 a 'pro-life' terrorist, citing a hoax video circulated by conservative abortion opponents, killed three people and injured nine others in an attack on a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic.

In the past year, National Abortion Federation interim president Hancock Ragsdale told CBS News, violence against abortion providers and clinics is "beyond anything we've ever seen before." Violent acts ranging from terrorist threats and assaults to stalkings and illegal trespassing "more than doubled" between 2016 and 2017, and increased again last year.

There is no mystery as to why. It is the result of increasingly extremist rhetoric from Republican elected officials, including the heavy promotion of conspiracy theories claiming that abortion providers were killing already-born babies, and the introduction of actual legislation based on those conspiracies. Whole Women's Health president Amy Hagstrom Miller was blunt about the connection:

"These aggressive bills that keep getting introduced have a tone to them that's incredibly fringe and introduces violent language," Miller said, noting that in Alabama's legislation for a near total ban on abortion, lawmakers compared the procedure to the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge "killing fields," and other modern genocides. [...] In April, her clinic in McAllen, Texas, was the target of an arson attack, something Miller believed to be directly related to President Trump's comments on the Senate's failed "Born-Alive" bill, legislation that would require doctors to resuscitate infants born after a "botched abortion."

Conservative leaders have been playing at this particular game for decades. Outlandish claims and charges are put forward; individual abortion providers are, as Fox News did in a relentless campaign against Kansas doctor George Tiller in 2009, individually singled out for demonization. Violence inevitably follows. Those that promoted that violence, such as then-Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, claim no connection between their attacks and the terrorism that follows—and move on to other targets.

Now that national Republican leaders are echoing the violence-promoting conspiracies, it is certain that more violence will follow.