Violent activism over abortion

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: pregnancy-care centers under fire.

It’s been six months since the landmark Dobbs decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Since then, pro-life pregnancy centers have been targets for violent pro-abortion activists.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Vandals damaged the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center in Washington, D.C. earlier this year when a draft of the Dobbs decision was leaked. The care center remained open but not absent from the public eye. WORLD Washington correspondent Carolina Lumetta has the story.

AUDIO: [PROTESTS AT BANQUET]

CAROLINA LUMETTA, REPORTER: That’s the moment protesters pretending to be guests at the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center banquet erupted in shouts. I attended the free event, hosted at a hotel in nearby Arlington, Virginia, on December 1st. After the three-course meal, director Janet Durig began a presentation about the center’s work. As soon as she began to speak about attacks on the building, four guests jumped up in succession and screamed obscenities about the center and pro-lifers. Roughly 30 minutes later, following a video message from Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Erin Hawley, four attendees at another table did the same:

AUDIO: [PROTESTS AT BANQUET]

I sat down with Janet Durig a few weeks later. If you lean out of her second-story office, you can see the dome of the United States Capitol down the street. Expectant mothers wait with strollers in the lobby, while staffers and volunteers look up community resources, fold onesies, and answer the phones.

DURIG: So for instance, today we have women coming to get clothes for their baby winter coats and things like that, diapers, we give away an emergency supply of diapers. But we feel like that when women and families are keeping their children, we're happy for them. And sometimes they need a little bit of help.

Durig told me they also coordinate with community programs to offer parenting classes and jobs training. While the center does have an ultrasound machine, they’re still looking for a sonographer to allow them to show mothers their unborn babies. Durig and other staffers also maintain two counseling rooms to talk with clients or just pray.

DURIG: We try to help people as much as we can. And a great deal of help is often emotional. And so we are faith based. And we do offer prayer with a– with people when they're meeting with us. And if they say no to the prayer, we don't force that on them. But we always disclose that we are faith based.

Nevertheless, stickers have popped up all over the district calling the center a “fake clinic.” And the scrutiny hasn’t stopped there. When a draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson leaked, protesters covered the door with red paint and spray painted the message “Jane says revenge” on the white brick wall. The militant group Jane’s Revenge claimed responsibility for several such vandalisms and even pipe bombs at other pregnancy centers across the country. Just a few weeks ago, a group of students from Georgetown University showed up on the sidewalk to protest.

DURIG: I did go out and invite them to come in and tour the building and listen to what, what we do. And I went out and tried to shake hands with people and a few people with two students shook my hand and one of the men shook my hand. And so I came back inside the building, frustrated that nobody would come and see. I mean, they're out there saying, it's all about women's health and shut them down. We are about women's health, women's health. And I guess my question that I was leading up to is when did someone choosing life caused so much controversy?

As Durig and her staff prepared for their Christmas banquet, she received communications from the Department of Homeland Security that they had tracked online chatter about protesting her event. She and the department coordinated with Arlington, Virginia, police and hotel security to manage a crowd of roughly 30 that gathered on the sidewalk outside, chanting “thank God for abortion.” What she didn’t know at the time was that she had received two fake rsvps from protesters. One of them shared a table with a young woman who kept her baby because of the pregnancy center.

DURIG: We seated him at the same table where our testimony, the young woman who chose life and has a beautiful little girl, and had a beautiful story to share with everybody. And he was seated right next to her. And then after he protested, she’d had to bear all that protest from him. Like, what was wrong with her for choosing life.

But also attending the banquet were members of a private security team the center has employed since the vandalism in May. Even the ones not on duty jumped into action to escort each protester out of the room. While the pro-abortion anger is nothing new to Durig, she says the focus on her organization is new.

DURIG: I don't think the rhetoric has changed. It's here now it's in front of our building. Now it was just never in front of our building before.

Protest activist organizations like ShutDownDC praised the vandalism in May and the banquet disruption earlier this month, calling it a “forced birther dessert.” But pregnancy centers aren’t the only areas still on the receiving end of pro-abortion vehemence. At a recent Federalist Society talk in Washington, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett responded to audience applause with, “It’s really nice to have a lot of noise not made by protesters outside of my house.”

For Durig, going on 20 years working at the pregnancy center, she doesn’t plan on her work slowing down in the new year. In response to protesters yelling “blood on your hands” at the banquet, she points out that their services are not only for the women keeping their babies.

DURIG: Sometimes they do come very abortion minded or abortion vulnerable. And they leave. And they still don't know what their decision’s going to be. We want her to know that if she does go through with that abortion, and if she has any negative reaction emotionally, in any way, this is a safe place to come back that we will not judge her. I don't know how more clear we can be of what that actually means. That doesn't mean we want her to abort the baby. We don't. But we do want her to be healthy mentally and physically.

As far as I know, the United States is still a place where people have choices. And that if someone chooses life, stop being angry about it.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Carolina Lumetta.

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