By Donald Jeffries
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade last June, pro-abortion activists have committed an alarming number of violent crimes. Unofficial estimates have them responsible for 77 acts of vandalism and eight fire bombings, targeting 55 pregnancy centers, 21 churches, and six other pro-life organizations. There have been only five arrests recorded.
In most of these cases, graffiti left behind indicated that the group Jane’s Revenge was claiming credit. Finally, two persons have actually been indicted for targeting pregnancy resource centers in Florida. They were also charged with using threats of force against employees at a reproductive health services facility. Caleb Freestone, 27, and Amber Smith-Stewart, 23, face up to 12 years in prison if convicted. They acted under what has become the motto of Jane’s Revenge: “If abortion isn’t safe, you aren’t either.”
Jane’s Revenge seems to be associated with Antifa. In their initial communiqué, they claimed to be victims of a “war” who had been “shot, bombed, and forced into childbirth without consent.” The outfit clearly derived its name from the Jane Roe (real name Norma McCorvey) in the divisive 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. McCorvey would later become an evangelical Christian, and then a Roman Catholic, while supporting the pro-life movement, including Operation Rescue.
They are also following in the wake of the Jane Collaborative, an illegal abortion procurement ring operating out of Chicago in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An HBO documentary titled “The Janes,” portrayed the group pretty innocuously, describing the group as “defying the state legislature that outlawed abortion, the Catholic Church that condemned it, and the Chicago Mob that was profiting from it.” It is estimated that the Jane Collaborative performed abortions on some 11,000 women, which resulted in the deaths of their babies.
The federal government, while obsessed with “white supremacist” organizations that are almost entirely imaginary, takes far more high profile and violent left-wing groups much less seriously. Kyle Shideler, a senior analyst for Homeland Security and Terrorism at the Center for Security Policy, elucidated the official government policy by maintaining that the government doesn’t see organizations like Jane’s Revenge as engaging in criminal conspiracies, but instead as “a bunch of looney individuals operating separately.” They do, however, see the Proud Boys, for example, in a completely different way.
Shideler declared that the acts of groups like Jane’s Revenge should be viewed as terroristic, with the aim “to intimidate an arm of the government,” in this case the Supreme Court, and “to intimidate the public, members of the pro-life movement, and to disrupt their ability to organize at the state and local level.”
Shideler blamed the federal government for their “very poor” response to such groups, stating that federal officials treat anarchist individuals as “primarily a local law enforcement problem.” He also criticized the “mainstream tolerance for this kind of behavior,” referencing all the violent BLM and Antifa led protests in 2020.
In response to the fact that there had been zero arrests in all the Jane’s Revenge attacks until very recently, the FBI claimed that “the incidents are being investigated as potential acts of domestic violent extremism, FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act violations or violent crime matters, depending on the facts of each case.”
The FBI went on to note, apparently with a straight face, that it “takes all violence and threats of violence very seriously,” and that it is “working closely with our law enforcement partners at the national, state and local levels to investigate these incidents.”
As conservative critics pointed out, not only were there no arrests, but in most cases, no persons of interest were even questioned. This failure to hold anyone accountable rekindled memories of all the BLM riots, where property was destroyed, buildings burned, and people were injured or killed.
While it is claimed that more than 10,000 protesters were arrested at those riots, the videotape all too often showed police standing idly by, and even in a few cases kneeling down in solidarity with those protesting the death of George Floyd. Historical statues were toppled all across the country, without a single law enforcement official doing anything to prevent it.
While the media routinely labels all Trump voters, let alone outfits like the Proud Boys, as “racist” or “white supremacist” with constant invocations of the “Nazis,” BLM, Antifa, and Jane’s Revenge are never going to be called “communist” or “anarchist” or “terrorist.”
There is little question that if the same number of abortion clinics had been fire bombed, or even just vandalized with angry graffiti, then it would garner blanket coverage from an outraged media.
When frustrated Donald Trump voters were waved inside the Capitol by friendly police officers, and mostly just took selfies, it was quickly labeled an “insurrection” by the entire press and political class. But deaths, burning buildings, and massive looting during 2020 were viewed much more sympathetically. Those protesters were merely “activists” for “racial justice.”
