Bodies on the Line by Lauren Rankin

Author:Lauren Rankin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

An Old Fight Made New

The Ohio Statehouse atrium’s front glass doors were foggy from dozens of warm breaths, smeared with fingerprints of anger and aggression. The doors were locked the morning of April 13, 2020—shuttered in response to a devastating pandemic—and a hundred vitriolic Trump supporters were demanding that they reopen.

Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine had become persona non grata for many conservatives after he imposed a strict “stay-at-home” order and ordered the closure of all nonessential businesses to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic.7 The protesters gathered in front of the statehouse, almost none of them wearing masks to prevent the spread of the virus, angrily demanding that he reverse course.

Michelle Davis decided to drive by the protest to see what was happening. She took a camera with her and sat in her car, photographing the event. She scanned the crowd, pointing and shooting, until she came across a middle-aged man with a long gray beard, wearing a saggy, white-collared shirt and black baseball cap, surrounded by a group of far-right extremists who called themselves the “Boogaloo Boys.”8 She knew his face instantly. It was John Brockhoeft, and he was no stranger to the far-right.

In the early morning hours of December 30, 1985, while many Cincinnatians were still sleeping off another night of a warm holiday season filled with loved ones, Brockhoeft was alone, covertly ping-ponging between two abortion clinics in downtown Cincinnati.9 Both would be in flames before the night was over. One of the clinics, a Planned Parenthood, burned to the ground.

Then mayor of Cincinnati Charles Luken called it “terrorism in our community.”10 It would be another two years until the Planned Parenthood would reopen. It wasn’t until 1991 that Brockhoeft was finally sentenced to seven years in prison for the firebombing, and only after he was sentenced to twenty-six months for another crime—planning to bomb the Ladies Center in Pensacola, the future site of three antiabortion murders.11

Brockhoeft was unapologetic in the aftermath of his own sentencing: “I put myself in the baby’s place, reminding myself that I had to love that baby as myself . . . If I, like the baby, was going to suffer so much and then die tomorrow morning, and I knew I was being killed unjustly, I would not be too afraid to go to the death chamber with gasoline and destroy it tonight.”12

Now, amid the most devastating pandemic in a century, this man was leading protesters, many of whom were armed, to the front steps of Ohio’s capitol, decrying the stay-at-home order as a violation of privacy and liberty. But just one year earlier, in April 2019, Governor DeWine became a bona fide hero to abortion opponents when he followed in the neighboring state of Kentucky’s footsteps, signing into law a ban on abortions at six weeks.13 That ban, the culmination of years of work to curtail abortion access in the state, was blocked by a federal judge. But it still signified a victory for abortion opponents—the more opportunities they could give the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v.

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