In the past two weeks, more than 150 anthrax threats have been delivered to Planned Parenthood clinics around the country, demonstrating the longstanding radical and paradoxical forces at play within the "Pro-Life" movement, including assassinations, bombings, arsons, stalkings, kidnappings, and assaults. Terrorism is terrorism. The bombings and anthrax threats directed at American citizens are unequivocally parallel to the bombings and anthrax threats directed at abortion providers, their patients, and their proponents. All such acts must be stopped.

While such acts are certainly heinous, anti-choice terrorism comes in other, more insidious forms. For one, an infamous anti-choice website compiles the personal information of abortion providers and their families. The site"s denotation of names speaks to its frightening aim: Working health care providers are listed in black, those who have been murdered have a line struck through their names, and the names of the wounded are gray.

Further, such violent action and terrorism is often justified by members of the religious right, such as Jerry Falwell, who remarked of the Sept. 11 attacks, "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way all of them who have tried to secularize America I point the finger in their face and say, "You helped this happen.""

Another means of arousing fear around abortion is the anti-choice movement"s brazen connection of abortion to an increased risk of breast cancer. I recently attended a campus health fair in which a "pregnancy counselor" claimed that abortion increases your risk of breast cancer by 50 percent! Yet the American Cancer Society notes: "A large, recent study from Denmark has provided very strong data that induced abortions have no overall effect on the risk of breast cancer."

The notorious billboards of purportedly aborted fetuses are yet another of the spurious attempts to arouse anti-choice fear and disgust. The problem here is that the images depicted are typically third-trimester fetuses, the cause of their deaths attributable to a number of lamentable possibilities: miscarriages, accidents or assaults, (already) illegal third trimester abortions, or third trimester exceptions performed for the health and/or survival of the mother.

These images both falsely represent abortion and the pro-choice movement and also serve to erase the presence of the mother. In the anti-choice platform, the mother completely drops out of both discourse and imagery, her mental and physical health apparently of no consequence. It is their own exclusive ideology and imagery, then, that makes abortion an either/or proposition: Either the mother or the fetus. While, on the other hand, the number of Planned Parenthood"s patients receiving pre-natal care double those seeking abortion.

The anthrax threats and various other forms of anti-choice violence terrorize all women and men who may visit or work at a gynecological or Planned Parenthood clinic, most probably for reasons not related to abortion. Will we allow this terrorism against American citizens, couched in the terms of anti-choice jingoism and fear-garnering propaganda, to steer us from our commitment to gender equality and personal integrity for all citizens? Terrorism operates on both physical and mental planes, and can be combated on both disciplinary and educational terrainswe must not allow it the opportunity to thrive.

Katrina Mann, a Rackham graduate student, is an executive board member of Students for Choice/Vox.