Trey Paul, FISM News
Pro-life pregnancy centers were designed to provide hope and help women and mothers feel safe and secure at every stage of their pregnancies. However, these centers continue to face violent threats from pro-abortion activists in post-Roe v. Wade America.
At least one center is fighting back, though, this time against the police.
CompassCare, a pro-life medical clinic just outside of Buffalo, NY, was targeted and severely damaged by a firebombing arsonist in June.
This month, Reverend Jim Harden, the CEO of CompassCare, told the Catholic News Agency that he gave investigators video-surveillance footage of the attack along with a “mountain of other evidence.”
Now, three months later, no arrests have been made and he says he wants the footage back.
“It’s Day 106. There have been no arrests,” the head of the CompassCare clinic says, adding, “our patience is at an end.” https://t.co/VRxHkfnJXa
— Catholic News Agency (@cnalive) September 21, 2022
“It’s Day 106. There have been no arrests. There have been over 50 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers. And our patience is at an end,” Rev. Harden said.
After asking both the FBI and local police for access to the footage so he could make a copy of it, Rev. Harden says police showed him still images taken from the video, but didn’t give him access to the footage itself.
As a result, attorneys for CompassCare filed a special proceeding in the Supreme Court of New York in hopes that the Amherst Police Department would return the footage. So far, that hasn’t happened.
“The Amherst Police are withholding evidence, barring CompassCare and its attorneys from taking appropriate legal action that justice may be done and the violence can stop,” Rev. Harden said.
According to a report in the Christian Post, when an attorney reached out to Amherst Town Attorney Stanley Sliwa earlier this month, CompassCare said Sliwa “relayed the Amherst Police department’s obstinance.”
Sliwa told a local Buffalo-area news outlet the reason the footage hasn’t been returned is because “we’re still investigating it.”
“If four days are enough for federal law enforcement to arrest a perpetrator of attempted arson against a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, 105 days ought to have been enough to locate arsonists causing a half-million dollars in damage to CompassCare’s pro-life medical office in Buffalo,” said Rev. Harden.
This month the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI) is shining a light on religious pro-life Americans who are under attack by giving this eye-opening threat assessment:
‘If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you!’ A range of dangerous actors in the United States today are making good on this threat, often marking their acts of violence against pro-life institutions with this and similarly menacing warnings. As a result, these institutions are facing an increasingly perilous reality in post-Dobbs America: some of the most fervent opponents of pro-life Americans and their institutions have become more malicious, even violently so, in their attacks.
FISM news has reported on the attacks at pregnancy centers in the wake of the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, highlighting not only the vandalism, but the violence.
According to new data shared by the RFI, as of late August, perpetrators have attacked at least 63 pro-life organizations, across 26 states and the District of Columbia, since a news outlet published a leaked drafter of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on May 2, 2022.
Of those 63 pro-life organizations, 28 are religious. In the majority of organizations attacked, most of the staff and volunteers are motivated by religious convictions to do this work.
“Many religious Americans hold convictions that lead them to defend unborn life, natural marriage, and innate male-female difference, among other weighty matters. For more than a decade, hostile actors have targeted these people and their institutions with litigation, legislation, government administrative action, and public smear campaigns with increasing intensity. Crimes against pro-life institutions are part of this broader assault on religious freedom,” said researchers with the RFI.