Washington, DC Newsroom, August 23, 2024 / 6:37 p.m.
A Catholic pregnancy center in Chicago called Aid for Women was vandalized in the early hours of the morning after the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention.
No one was present at the center at the time of the incident. Police were contacted and are investigating the incident as a violation of the Freedom of Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, according to Mary FioRito, staff attorney at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and spokesperson for Aid for Women.
Aid for Women is a nonprofit organization that, according to its website, is “founded on the faith and teachings of the Catholic Church.”
The nonprofit operates five pregnancy centers and two maternity homes in the Chicago metropolitan area. The group partners with the Archdiocese of Chicago and offers a range of services, including ultrasounds, abortion pill reversal medications, counseling and material assistance.
FioRito, who has been a regular volunteer for Aid for Women for more than two decades, told CNA the incident occurred at 3 a.m. Friday morning in the Edgewater neighborhood of north Chicago, hours after the DNC finally closed.
The vandalism was recorded by the center’s surveillance camera. The footage has now been handed over to the police.
According to FioRito, four vandals sprayed red paint on the entrance to the center and painted the words “fake clinic” and “The dead babies are in Gaza.” FioRito said the vandals also cemented the center’s doors shut, forcing staff to cancel all appointments on Friday – which she said involved about a dozen women.
As of Friday afternoon, the center’s doors were still bricked shut and there is no timetable for when it will reopen. FioRito said that means the Aid for Women pregnancy center may have to cancel its appointments or ask women to go elsewhere on Saturday, which FioRito said is its busiest day.
FioRito said she was “horrified” when she saw pictures of the damage at the center.
Addressing the vandals, she said: “You are not hurting us; you are hurting these women.”
“These are working-class women. A lot of things are a struggle for them. Why do they do this to women who already face so many obstacles? It’s a mystery to me,” she said.
The vandalism was recorded by the center’s surveillance camera. The footage has now been handed over to the police.
According to FioRito, there was an unusually low police presence in the neighborhood at the time of the incident because the DNC was taking place in another part of the city.
FioRito lamented that pregnancy centers have had to bear the brunt of anti-abortion anger since the Roe v. Wade ruling was overturned in 2022.
“It’s so strange to me that pregnancy centers are somehow the collateral damage of all this anger over the overturning of Roe, because pregnancy centers had nothing to do with it,” she said. “Pregnancy centers are largely apolitical… they don’t represent political or legal interests, they just help women.”
Edgewater is a neighborhood that FioRito describes as culturally diverse and “not an affluent neighborhood.”
“Many of the women we serve are not wealthy,” she said. “Pregnancy is hard enough. You can’t have something like this added to make your life even harder.”
“If the people who did this intended to harm the pro-life movement or to get revenge on it for Dobbs, then what they are really doing is harming poor women,” FioRito said.
The DNC took place this week from August 19-22 at the United Center in Chicago. Several of the Democratic speakers, including Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, highlighted abortion as a central issue in the 2024 elections and condemned pro-life efforts to restrict abortion.
A local Planned Parenthood operated a free mobile abortion clinic right in front of Congress. Planned Parenthood Great Rivers reported Thursday that the mobile clinic performed nine vasectomies and eight chemical abortions.
