On Friday, June 3, assailants vandalized the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center, not far from Cockburn’s Washington home. An unknown party splashed a gallon of red paint on the center’s front door and doormat, as well as egging the place and spraying graffiti on the walls that said, “JANE SAYS REVENGE.”
“As the day unfolded, there was a lot of positive outreach,” Janet Durig, the pregnancy center’s executive director, told Cockburn. “We’ve had people asking from all over the area asking if anything is damaged or needs to be replaced.” She also said, “The police were extremely helpful.”
The website for the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center states:
Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center is a Faith based 501(c)3 non-profit organization offering help and support to women, men and their families who are in a crisis pregnancy… In addition to the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center offering free pregnancy testing, we provide counseling, mentoring, childbirth classes and parenting classes… While we do not perform or refer for abortions, we provide women and men with complete, medically-accurate information about abortion. We believe it is everyone’s right to have this information in order to make a fully informed decision.
This is not the first time a pregnancy center has been targeted by pro-abortion vandalism. A group called Jane’s Revenge threw a Molotov cocktail into a family action office in Wisconsin, as well as spray-painting the words, “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either.”
A crisis pregnancy center in Manassas, Virginia, was also defaced a month earlier, with spray-painted messages that said, “Abortion is a right” and “Liars.”
In Cockburn’s view, vandalism is not an effective form of protest. Crisis pregnancy centers provide vital supplies and information for those who will be raising a child (which is a bit different than aborting it). Such disruptive acts only justify the need for such a place, rather than serving as a deterrent.
Cockburn sees this as a rare instance when people should take a lesson from the trends in gun control. Every time new anti-gun legislation is announced, firearm sales skyrocket. Likewise, when agitators are defacing pregnancy centers, do they really expect that the centers will fold up and close? Quite the opposite, which just makes a pointless act all the more pointless.
