The recent attack on a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, where suspect Robert Dear has admitted to murdering three people, was an event that the anti-choice movement is quickly hustling to portray as an anomaly. But the attack is part of a larger pattern of violence and harassment, going on not just in the United States but throughout the Americas, aimed at terrorizing and silencing those who fight for women to have sexual and reproductive autonomy.

It’s a campaign of abuse and intimidation whose goal is not, despite hyperbolic rhetoric to the contrary, about “babies,” but about crippling women’s ability to have sex without fear of punishment or retribution.

Dear, who was muttering stuff about “baby parts” during his initial interrogation this week, seems to have been inspired by a series of hoax videos released over the summer by anti-choice extremists going under the name the Center for Medical Progress. These videos used deceptively edited footage of Planned Parenthood workers to push an urban legend that’s been banging around Christian right circles since the days they were panicking about Dungeons and Dragons, that Planned Parenthood was using abortion to collect fetal parts to sell for profit. The accusations weren’t true, as many state and federal investigations found. Now the man behind the videos, David Daleiden, is caught up in a court battle as he desperately tries to hide the details behind his operation.

But while those videos, whose false accusations were widely promoted by nearly every politician in the Republican Party, did cause a noticeable uptick in the number of arsons and other attacks on Planned Parenthood clinics, the fact of the matter was that anti-choice intimidation campaigns have been an ongoing problem for abortion clinics generally. And even before those videos came out, it took a turn towards very personalized threats and intimidation techniques.

In January, the Feminist Majority Foundation published a survey that found that a whopping 1 in 5 clinics had experienced severe violence — blockades, stalking, death threats, physical assaults — in 2014. Even more disturbingly, there was a noticeable rise in personalized harassment of abortion providers. Nearly 28 percent of clinics reported that pamphlets personally targeting doctors and staff were being distributed in the community. Nearly 18 percent reported incidences of anti-choicers putting up personal information and photos of clinic staff on the internet. Over half of clinics reported targeted intimidation of doctors or staff members.

This kind of behavior is clearly a threat. It’s one with teeth, too. This kind of obsessive tracking of a doctor’s movement is why Scott Roeder knew where Dr. George Tiller, who had security at his house and clinic, would be easiest to get to at his church in Kansas. Which is where Roeder walked up and shot the good doctor in the head.

This December, Mother Jones published an article detailing exactly what lengths doctors have to go to stay safe: Driving to and from work in erratic ways to shake off tails, wearing disguises, flying in from another state so that following you is impossible, meeting staff members in an undisclosed location to be driven into work, often while hiding in the backseat. Being an abortion doctor is like being one of the spies on “The Americans,” except, you know, they didn’t sign up to live like this. They just want to provide necessary medical care.

Remember, this is all this was tracked before those hoax videos came out. Also before the hoax videos was the Republican campaign to defund Planned Parenthood. Republicans threatened governmrent shutdowns to defund Planned Parenthood both in 2011 and 2013 and multiple states, including Texas, hatched schemes to defund the group in the years before the videos.