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A hand holding a sign supporting pro-choice abortion laws during a planned parenthood rally for abortion justice.
Humanize From Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism
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Jane’s Revenge Threats against Pro-Lifers Presage a New ‘Bleeding Kansas’

Originally published at National Review

I worry that the country is entering a violent time akin to “Bleeding Kansas,” an era during the 1850s when pro- and anti-slavery partisans — most famously, the abolitionist terrorist John Brown — violently contested with each other for political control of the then-territory.

The alleged attempted assassination of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh by a pro-choice fanatic is the most extreme of such recent actions. But partisans on both sides of the political and cultural divides have been pursuing increasingly violent means of promoting their ideological desires. We have seen violence from Antifa, the Capitol rioters of January 6, BLM “protests” in which cities burned and people died, the violence at Charlottesville, the attempted mass assassinations of congressional Republicans that almost took the life of Representative Stephen Scalise, and in years past, the murders of abortionists.

Now, as Kathryn noted earlier, a radical pro-abortion group called Jane’s Revenge — which claims to have burned and vandalized pro-life offices and crisis pregnancy centers, threatening at some locales: ““If abortion isn’t safe, neither are you!” — has just issued a communique threatening worse to come. From “Jane’s Revenge: Another Communique,” addressed to pro-life organizations:

Your thirty days expired yesterday. We offered an honourable way out. You could have walked away. Now the leash is off. And we will make it as hard as possible for your campaign of oppression to continue. We have demonstrated in the past month how easy and fun it is to attack. We are versatile, we are mercurial, and we answer to no one but ourselves. We promised to take increasingly drastic measures against oppressive infrastructures.

Rest assured that we will, and those measures may not come in the form of something so easily cleaned up as fire and graffiti. Sometimes you will see what we do, and you will know that it is us. Sometimes you will think you merely are unlucky, because you cannot see the ways which we interfere in your affairs. But your pointless attempts to control others, and make life more difficult, will not be met passively. Eventually your insurance companies, and your financial backers will realize you are a bad investment.

From here forward, any anti-choice group who closes their doors, and stops operating will no longer be a target. But until you do, it’s open season, and we know where your operations are. The infrastructure of the enslavers will not survive. . . . Through attacking, we find joy, courage, and strip the veneer of impenetrability held by these violent institutions.

Enslavers?” No one forces women to seek help at crisis pregnancy centers, which offer help for mothers both before and after birth — but then, logic and true compassion have nothing to do with any of this.

Hello, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI, and President Biden: Are you going to do something about this or keep pretending the biggest threats to peaceability and comity in this country are white supremacists?

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.