In the ongoing battle over abortion, the issue of violence is a consistent theme.

Lost in all of this is the alarming level of abortion- related violence that takes place outside the public’s view. As just one example, in my 1996 book, Lime 5, I referenced more than 30 documented criminal cases in which abortion clinic doctors had been charged with raping or sexually assaulting their patients. In just these few cases, several hundred women were known to have been victimized.

A textbook illustration of this problem was seen in 2001. Arizona abortionist, Brian Leslie Finkel, was charged with sexually assaulting a patient who was undergoing an abortion at his Phoenix abortion clinic. When this incident was reported in the local media, more than 100 additional women made similar allegations against Finkel to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. He was eventually charged with over 60 counts of sexual misconduct involving 35 women. In 2004, he was convicted on 22 of those counts and sentenced to 34 years in prison.

Life Dynamics was peripherally involved in this case and a detective with the Phoenix Police Department sex-crimes unit told me that there was no doubt that the 100-plus women who came forward represented only a small fraction of Finkel’s victims. According to this detective, those in charge of the investigation had concluded that, during his 20 years in business, the actual number of women assaulted by him may have exceeded a thousand.

In Lime 5, I wrote that, “When we originally designed the outline for this book, a chapter on rape and sexual assault was never envisioned. Although we had often heard rumors that this sort of thing happened, we had no reason to believe it was widespread enough to deserve more than a passing mention. However, as more and more data came into our office, we began to see that rape and sexual assault in abortion clinics is not uncommon at all.”

The ensuing years have not only reinforced this view but they have also shown that the patterns seen in the Finkel case are typical. A woman comes forward; her accusations generate publicity; that publicity produces a flood of additional victims; the new accusations reveal that the assaults have been going on for years.

It is not possible to determine with any certainty how widespread this problem is.

Within the law enforcement community, it is known that the shame and stigma experienced by sexual assault victims results in only a small percentage of all sex-based crimes ever being reported. In the kind of instances being discussed here, that problem is compounded by the stigma associated with abortion.

Although early proponents of legalized abortion contended that its legality would eventually eradicate this stigma, in practice that never happened. What this means is that, in order for women who are sexually assaulted at abortion clinics to speak out, they must be willing to be identified with two highly disagreeable stigmas. Logically, this assures that these assaults are going to be reported to law enforcement at an even lower rate than are those committed in other venues.

A second factor contributing to this lower reporting problem is the victim’s desire for secrecy. When a woman is abortion-minded, there is usually at least one other person she does not want to know about her pregnancy. In fact, this is often her primary, if not sole, motivation for the abortion. Of course, in order to inform the authorities that she was sexually assaulted at an abortion clinic, she has to be prepared to give up that secrecy.

This pursuit of secrecy is common in all age groups but it is especially prevalent among the youngest abortion clients. Some are hiding their pregnancies from friends, relatives, classmates or fellow church members. Others are trying to keep their parents from finding out that they are sexually active. It should also be remembered that, among girls 15 and younger who get pregnant, studies show that the majority are impregnated by adults. Given that, it is logical to expect that many of these girls have abortions in order to keep their partners from going to jail. It is also known that men in adult-child sexual relationships often use intimidation and violence against their victims in order to keep them silent. For underage girls, these additional barriers are going to reduce even further the already low reporting rate for sex-based crimes.

In the final analysis, women and girls who are raped or sexually assaulted at abortion clinics are silenced by: (a) the stigma of having been sexually assaulted, (b) the stigma of having had an abortion and/or (c) a desire for secrecy that they often see as trumping every other consideration.

In effect, they face a decision comparable to the one faced by married men who are robbed while frequenting prostitutes. In both situations, if the victims report the crimes committed against them, information about their own behavior will be revealed that they do not want known. Under those circumstances, it easy to understand why they are rarely going to say anything. When that reality is considered in light of the number of instances that are reported, it is apparent that a startling number of women are being sexually assaulted inside American abortion clinics.

Beyond that, there are several other categories of subterranean abortion-related violence.