A History of Pro-Abortion Violence

8 Comments

1. Comment by Bill Bekkenhuis

   I don’t have enough “firepower” on dial-up to watch this. But I am a volunteer escort at the Allentown Womens’ Center, a clinic which provides – amongst other things – abortion services. I can attest that I have been personally shoved by a protester (caught on videotape) and have, along with others, heard death threats about which the US Marshals Service and FBI saw fit to interview me (and others). But let’s bracket that at least temporarily and look at one (well, two basic statistic(s).

   How many abortion protesters have been murdered by pro-choice people since, say, 1990 and how many pro-life facilities (churches, non-profits, etc.) have been bombed by pro-choice people?

2. Comment by Adam Graham

   Get thee to a broadband connection.

   I’m sorry that you’re involved in this ghastly business, and also sorry that you’ve been the recipient of violence. Violence is wrong whoever does it.

   My point is not to show you who has had more violence committed against them. The point of the video is to show that pro-abortion violence is covered. In the past two weeks, there have been two assaults with a deadly weapon incidents happen outside of abortion clinics against pro-life protestors. Yet, there is no media coverage. “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

   I protested outside of an abortion clinic and we had multiple people throw things at us, and many acts of rudeness and incivility including a 1-fingered salute and shouting out the car window.

3. Comment by Bill Bekkenhuis

   To be honest, I don’t see it as a ghastly business. The clinic has a private parking lot and the protesters can’t enter. To enter the clinic, the patient and her support person must cross an alley with a narrow crosswalk which the protesters are not supposed to enter. When a patient crosses, the protesters scream at them not to murder their babies and reach their arms (and literature) into the crosswalk such that physical contact is almost a certainty. I see my job as a simple matter of helping someone enter a place of business (in this case, a clinic) in the face of monumental harassment.

   I know I could not stand outside our local hospital and yell at people entering just because I’m (hypothetically) a Christian Scientist and believe it’s immoral. Nor could the protesters stand outside of a CVS pharmacy and yell at people entering because they sell condoms or morning after pills inside. But the Allentown police have been told, “hands off” when it comes to the clinic. (At least until the Federal Marshals got involved and reminded them that death threats in front of a abortion clinic are federal crimes – that seemed to stiffen the politico’s spines a bit.)

   I simply want one thing – I want the police to treat behavior (no matter WHO does it) at the Allentown Womens’ Center the way they would treat similar behavior in front of any other legal business or health care provider.

   This is NOT Nazi Germany – if the protesters don’t like the law they can organize, support political candidates who share their views, buy ad space and engage in other appropriate expressions of their First Amendment rights (including peaceful protests at clinics, if they insist, so long as they don’t engage in behavior that would be tolerated nowhere else).

   Personally, every women who enters that clinic and determines NOT to have an abortion or who decides to bring the fetus to term and give the baby up for adoption (and the clinic works with an adoption agency) makes me very happy.

   But my job is to help get them into the clinic where they can get the medical information they need (there is a separate counseling session required that the clinic engaged in before such counseling became law in PA) to make that decision in consultation with their doctor, their family, their friends and their religious communities.

   Bill Bekkenhuis
   Bethlehem, PA

4. Comment by BillH

   Bill, there is no moral equivalence between a condom and an abortion, or between going into a hospital and going into an abortion clinic. There is no moral equivalence between having a breast cancer removed and having a “fetus” removed. It is disingenuous at best to imply that your job of getting a woman into your clinic so they can receive the medical information they need is somehow a higher calling than the person across the street (esp when you state yourself it is a BUSINESS!). And to ignore Adam’s point about abortion violence from the pro-abort side and take the holier than thou stance that you are taking is exactly the type of problem Adam is trying to call attention to in the whole abortion debate.

   “To be honest, I don’t see it as a ghastly business”

   Bill, it’s a baby. It’s a human being. May God open your eyes, and soften your heart.

5. Comment by Bill Bekkenhuis

   BillH –

   There must be some moral equivalence between a condom and an abortion as the anti-choice people I deal with have not accepted my offer to go out on Union Blvd. and hand out condoms to young people. I told them I’d help and that, between us, they’d make more “saves” in a morning then they’ve made in the last six months.

   And I did not say I had a “higher calling”. I merely said what I did and why I did it.

   And I did not ignore Adam’s point about abortion violence from the pro-choice side, I asked him to give me examples of pro-life leaders or protesters who had been murdered or pro-life establishments (churches, non-profit orgs) who have had their facilities bombed.

   Can you give me some?

   If there is no moral equivalent between an abortion and a condom then surely you’d agree that there is no moral equivalent between a bloody nose a protester receives from an irate boyfriend and Dr. Tiller’s murder in his church or the bombing of abortion clinic.

   If you believe a fertilized egg of very few cells is a “baby” then you have the option, in this society, of having the law changed to recognize that.

   I believe that very suggestion is underway in some state legislatures at this point.

   I don’t know if that would get anywhere while Roe vs. Wade is intact but, should it be overturned, that (as I understand it) would reserve the decision on the beginning of personhood to the states.

   May God open both our eyes and soften both are hearts. Amen.

   Thanks for your reply,
   Bill Bekkenhuis
   Bethlehem, PA

6. Comment by Adam Graham

   Bill, 54% of women who get abortions were use Birth Control or contraception in the month before they got the abortion.

   As for a request for an example. How about this:

   http://abortionviolence.com/AL.HTM#KILLER%20JANEZIC

   In 1993, pro-abortion activist Eileen Orstein Janezic murdered 51-year old pro-life activist minister and radio talk show host Jerry Simon. After killing Simon, she held police at bay with a pistol for six hours while spouting quotes from Anton LaVey’s “Satanic Bible.” On October 27, 1994, a jury found her guilty of murder and sentenced her to life in prison. During trial, she admitted that she had shot Simon to prove her love of Satan.

7. Comment by Bill Bekkenhuis

   I was able to find a local newspaper reference in The Huntsville Times

   (see http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=HUTB&p_theme=hutb&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&s_dispstring=%22Eileen%20Orstein%20Janezic%22%20AND%20date(all)&p_field_advanced-0=&p_text_advanced-0=(%22Eileen%20Orstein%20Janezic%22)&xcal_numdocs=20&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&xcal_useweights=no ).

   I’ll point out that killing a minister to demonstrate her “love of Satan’ is hardly standard pro-choice verbiage.

   Also, per The Huntsville Times, the gun used to kill the minister was the same gun used (by her, presumably) to shoot “a Decatur clinic patient” some 11 days later.

   How does THAT tie in to being pro-choice?

   Lastly, you describe her as “a pro-choice activist”.

   I have to ask on what grounds?

   Did she visit radical pro-choice media sites in the same way that Roeder (the alleged murderer of Dr. Tiller) frequented Operation Rescue web sites and the way he, to this day, in prison, keeps in touch with Army of God contacts (which, unlike Operation Rescue, advocates the use of force)?

   In any sort of tit-for-tat calculus, I’m pretty sure that the use of violence, especially lethal violence, against abortion clinic doctors, staff and volunteer escorts dwarfs the use of violence against pro-choice leaders and volunteers.

   And where the violence goes, the media follows… The more violence and the more serious the violence, the more likely the story is to go national – especially if the story seems to have legs in the connection of the wacko to some advocacy institution. (Witness the sudden interest in The Family in wake of the Sanford and the senator from Nevada’s story.)

   As far as pro-choice violence, I mean, is there a pro-choice equivalent of Army of God? Those are the folks that Roeder is encouraging from prison – one representative of which, who already has a federal terrorism conviction to his credit (for having a web site which, amongst other things, helpfully instructed the interested in the building of bombs), comes within inches of me when I escort.

   There is a peaceful Roman Catholic community that shows up once a month and prays and sings hymns and stands on the other side of the parking lot. I’d almost be inclined to applaud the peaceableness and respect towards the patient’s privacy, but then I see the priest with the group walk around into the alley and shake hands with the man.

   I mean, what the heck? What lesson is one supposed to take from that?

   ALL folks who wish to be taken seriously in the abortion discussion need to renounce violence – no matter what side of the issue they’re on.

   And ALL folks who wish to be taken seriously in the abortion discussion need to stop using language (such as “baby killers” and “death camps”, etc.) that, if believed by the unhinged (the Roeders and, if you will, the Janezic’s of this world) will incite them to violence.

   At any rate, Adam, it seems the major point of your original post was media bias rather than abortion per se, so I will either continue along in that vein or check to see if you have a more recent thread that deals with that.

   Bill Bekkenhuis
   Bethlehem, PA

8. Comment by Adam Graham

   Dismissing the murder in Huntsville would require also dismissing many of the abortion murders. John Salvi was clearly mentally disturbed when he committed the Brookline killings. As for the Army of God, you find that other than (perhaps) the Eric Rudolph bombing, they have not been tied to the actual acts of violence. In almost all cases, they’ve been lone nuts.

   For recent pro-abortion violence, I’d refer these two cases of Assault with a Deadly Weapon which very well could have ended in death.

   http://www.lifenews.com/state4279.html

   The national media ignores violence against pro-lifers because it doesn’t suit their political purposes.

   Threats against pro-life leaders have come in great numbers. I had a friend who ran for the City Council and was a known pro-life activist and she received a rape/death threat. She had to take different routes as she drove through the city for her protection.

   I interviewed a pro-life college student from Georgia Tech. who experienced the same.

   Finally, in insisting that pro-lifers deny that children are being killed, you demand that we deny the humanity of the unborn. It is baby being killed. This is fact and it’s not a stance I will back away from in the name of political correctness.

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