Last year, Dr. Stacy De-Lin told me about the time an antiabortion protester followed her down an isolated Manhattan street as she left work at Planned Parenthood one snowy evening, after he saw her duck out at lunchtime and come back to the clinic with groceries. He concluded that she must be an abortion provider, which she is — and so he stuck around for the afternoon, then trailed her in a thwarted attempt at intimidation. De-Lin turned around and asked what the hell he was doing, and he turned and walked away.

De-Lin’s experience might seem mild in the context of the threats posed to other abortion providers across the country. In 2009, Dr. George Tiller, a well-known provider who specialized in late-term abortions, was murdered at his church in Kansas; eleven years before that, a sniper killed Dr. Barnett Slepian while he was making soup in his kitchen. No, a stranger following you down the street after work isn’t the same as being shot in your own home or house of worship. But tell me this: How often do you leave your office and assume that there’s someone outside waiting, who might want to follow you and cause you harm? How many times have you been shadowed on your daily commute, because of where you work or what you do?

Dealing with threats to personal safety has effectively become part of the job for abortion providers across the country, whether they live in New York City or rural Kansas. It’s what I’ve found speaking with providers myself, but David Cohen and Krysten Connon, two Philadelphia-based attorneys, know even better than I do: They just wrote the book on antiabortion terrorism.

After representing the director of an abortion clinic that had been sued by anti-choice protesters, Cohen and Connon decided to interview abortion providers across the country, to gain a new perspective on the dangers associated with offering basic, legal medical care. Their new book, “Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism,” chronicles the range of intimidation and abuse as recounted by dozens and dozens of providers, whether they serve as physicians, nurses, aides or clinic administrators.

Cohen and Connon talked with Salon by phone last month about the types of individualized harassment abortion providers often face, the manner in which anti-choice extremism seems to know no cultural or geographic boundaries, and what law enforcement and the public can do to stop antiabortion terrorism. Our interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

I’m curious about how you came to this project and started doing this research, and what you found so far?

KC: The project actually came to be when I was in law school. David taught constitutional law at Drexel and was representing an abortion clinic that had several legal issues — one of which was that they were sued by protesters. I was one of the students who got to help on the case, and I was lucky enough to meet the client, the director of the clinic. Talking with her about the case, I learned that she wears a bulletproof vest to work every day. After having this experience and realizing what her life is like, I realized that this terror and fear that she lived in is sort of missing from the national conversation surrounding abortion and abortion providers.

DC: When we first started talking about doing a study, we thought we might talk to five or 10 providers. But really, once we started talking to a few, we thought we could expand it, and we wound up being fortunate enough to talk to almost 90 providers across the country about their experiences of being individually targeted.

One of the things I’ve found as I’ve interviewed providers is that they do face similar stigma across the country. But given that the laws and local culture are so different from place to place, I imagine that the level of harassment would vary. Have you found that from talking to people from different states or cities?

DC: It definitely varies, but it didn’t vary in the way we expected. We expected — being the Northeastern liberals that we are — that things would be better in the blue states and worse in the red states. But that was just not the case. We found horrible harassment all over the country, not just in conservative areas, but also in some of the most liberal places in the country. We found good stories of law enforcement response in some of the worst places, and some horrible law enforcement in some of the most conservative places, and then horrible law enforcement responses in some of the more liberal places. What we found was that we could not make broad generalizations. But we could say that harassment, severe harassment, happens everywhere and is not isolated to the more conservative parts of the country.

Because abortion is such a polarized issue, and the people who are most likely to be protesting outside a clinic occupy one extreme in the first place, do you think that almost serves as a control from area to area?