Angry about Roe? Then vote, don’t vandalize

I really wish activists wouldn’t target pro-life centers like the one vandalized on North Broad Street earlier this month.

Our fight isn’t with the women and volunteers who work there.

It’s with the politicians and governmental powers that actively seek to limit a woman’s right to make her own health-care decisions and have authority over her own body.

But sometime during the wee hours of June 10, vandals defaced Greater Exodus Baptist Hope Pregnancy Center on North Broad Street near Fairmount Avenue. As has been happening at pro-life centers around the country, activists broke windows and three glass doors and defaced the property with graffiti. Church officials estimate that they incurred more than $25,000 in damages.

They’re stunned. Greater Exodus Baptist has been quietly tending to the lives of Philadelphians for decades with not even a burglary. Now this.

“We all have a right to think what we think and do what we do,” said the Rev. Herb Lusk, the church’s pastor, who reached out recently to tell me what happened. But those rights don’t include vandalizing private property, he noted. “I’m feeling disappointed and I’m also feeling violated.”

Lusk alerted Philadelphia police and requested stepped-up surveillance of the property, which opened 15 years ago to provide free ultrasounds and pregnancy tests, and provide faith-based counseling for pregnant women. It makes no bones about being a Christian-oriented, pro-life operation.

Workers are understandably shaken about what happened.

“It looks like they took a baseball bat or like a pole to each window,” Latrice Booker, the center’s director, told me.

Facilities that offer safe and legal abortions have their place. But so do Christian-based, pro-life facilities such as the Hope Pregnancy Center. Women may seek them out even more in the dark days ahead, as access to abortion around the country becomes more limited.

I’m Catholic. I believe deeply in the sanctity of human life. But I, along with most Catholics, also support abortion access and believe in a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her body.

I’m mad as hell about the Supreme Court’s decision to move the country backward on an issue that had already been decided half a century ago. Even though we knew it was coming, I still hoped for a last-minute miracle before Friday’s announcement that the 1973 landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade had indeed been overturned, clearing the way for states to ban abortion.

This ruling is one of the court’s worst of all time. It’s right up there the Dred Scott decision that Black people were not citizens, and the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that upheld racial segregation.

So I understand why people are angry. But terrorizing pro-life workers and vandalizing church property isn’t the answer.

It’s a sad day when activists who support a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy adopt similar tactics that pro-lifers have used against abortion providers for decades.

The Catholic News Agency reported that an online group has claimed responsibility, writing online: “We smashed out all of the windows of the ‘Hope’ pregnancy center on Broad St. We are tired of your ‘family values’ and you forcing families, and your values onto our bodies. This fake clinic spread lies and is part of a broader attempt to strip away body autonomy from hundreds of women and people.”

The post referenced other incidents such as arson at pro-life centers in Wisconsin and Colorado, and predicted those are just the beginning. “If the attack on abortion does not stop our attacks will broaden.”

I tried to reach the online group via its website but was unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, Booker considers the attack a form of spiritual warfare. But she is undaunted.

“Even though this has happened, it does not deter or cause for us to find ourselves wanting to cower away and not to do any work,” she said. “For me, it just gave me the push forward and to know that the work needs to continue and that it needs to continue even more.”

She and the workers at Hope will continue doing what they think is best.

That should be the next step for all of us: Doing what we think is best.

And that’s to focus on ensuring that Pennsylvania and surrounding states continue to respect a woman’s right to make her own health-care decisions. You do that by voting at the ballot box in November — not by vandalizing private property.