Democrats are losing it over abortion. Sure, they’ve long been bad on the issue, but they’re suddenly escalating the vitriol. And by “Democrats,” I’m referring to elected ones. You could always find unhinged “pro-choice” liberals doing vulgar things. Elected Democrats, however, have tended to show a little more restraint. Not anymore.
Look at Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York or Gov. Ralph Northam in Virginia, the latter of whom generously promises that an infant that survives an abortion will be “kept comfortable” amid final gasps without attempts at resuscitation. In Alabama, Democratic state rep. John Rogers accepts abortion with a shrug: “you kill them now or you kill them later.” Here in Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf is the nation’s first governor who was a Planned Parenthood escort — those macabre volunteers who ensure that distraught girls approaching an abortion facility walk in with cash and walk out without a baby. In fact, here in Pennsylvania, we have not only a governor who was a Planned Parenthood escort but a state rep., Brian Sims, which brings me to the focus of this article.
In a breathtaking spectacle, Sims proudly filmed himself outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Philadelphia — the Locust Street Surgical Center — verbally accosting an older woman who was praying the rosary. For eight painful minutes, this former college football player turned angry LGBTQ activist gives this woman an oral pouncing. He repeatedly tells her she is “shameful” and “disgusting.” “There is nothing Christian about what you’re doing,” he lectures. “There’s nothing loving or kind,” he says of her unlovingly and unkindly. He lambastes her “broken morality.” He asks for her address so people can “protest in front of her home,” as if hounding her there wasn’t sufficient. More must be done, with perhaps a larger and angrier mob.
Sims is a bully, with this woman not his only victim. Watch him in action as he heckles this woman who accepts his abuse stoically in silence. Truly, she turns the other cheek while he torments her.
I’m always amazed by the lack of charity and understanding by self-proclaimed “tolerant” liberals so intransigent that they can’t even concede that pro-lifers are motivated by a benevolent concern at least worthy of respect. They’re so hell-bent on the righteousness of their cause that they assume nothing but malice of their opponents — whose primary objective is simply to try to save defenseless unborn babies. They rage against them. There’s something diabolical about it.
And make no mistake, a spiritual battleground wages at these clinics. I’ve witnessed it. I’ve watched the escorts engage the people praying. A few months ago, on a bitterly cold day, I joined a group outside the Planned Parenthood abortion center in Pittsburgh. Sims’ caricature could not be more inaccurate and viciously unfair. One of those praying told me that the previous week he stood aside an elderly woman who kneeled on a frozen sidewalk on her aching legs while a dude inside strummed a ukulele and grinned at her. “We’re freezing outside in the snow, with 80-year-old women praying and kneeling on payment covered with ice,” he told me, “and they’re inside, staying warm, and mocking us. You could feel the evil.”
The pro-lifers, particularly those from churches, are almost always a model of charity, sacrifice, mortification. Moreover, it’s the pro-lifers, not the clinic workers or Planned Parenthood volunteers, that are there to comfort the crushed girl as she leaves the clinic and prepares for a life of emotional, spiritual, and possibly physical trauma because of what the abortion advocates did to her inside.
Sims’ nasty charges are wrong on so many fronts, but I want to underscore his most outrageous accusation against pro-lifers, namely: the “BLATANT RACISM they spew.” He leveled that surreal charge repeatedly in his video. This “old white lady,” he says of her dismissively, as if that label merits automatic denigration, is “extremely racist.” He accuses her of a “racist act of judgment.”
What in the world is Sims talking about?
If you’re looking to affix racism, you would be far more justified looking in the direction not of those defending the unborn babies but those terminating them. There’s far and away a disproportionate number of unborn African-American children killed by abortion. The escorts guide in and funnel their mothers. As Dan Flynn noted here, Sims’ wild claim has great irony given that Planned Parenthood is the spawn of Margaret Sanger, who I’ve written about frequently, including her work with the “Negro Project,” her gospel of “race improvement,” her May 1926 speech to the Silverlake, New Jersey chapter of the KKK.
The vast majority of Planned Parenthood clinics are located near African-American populations. The infamous Gosnell “House of Horrors,” a sick slaughterhouse of unborn black children, resided just down the street from where Sims engaged in his antics accusing pro-lifers of racism. It’s downright stunning that Sims either cannot see that or, in turn, casts the finger of racist shame in the complete opposite direction.
Well, given Sims’ claims to be worried about racism, and given that he’s a Pennsylvania legislator, I ask him this simple request as a fellow Pennsylvanian: Could he please ask that clinic for data on how many of its abortions have been of minority babies?
I asked that question of an analyst who does research on this issue in Pennsylvania.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have a breakdown for that particular clinic, or for just Planned Parenthood on how many patients are African-American,” she told me. “Here are some statistics we do have statewide.”
According to the latest abortion statistics from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, in 2017 there were 30,011 abortions performed in Pennsylvania. Among them, 14,726 were to white women, 12,865 were to African-American women (43%), and 3,038 were to Hispanic women (10%).
Thus, 53%, or a majority of abortions, were of minority women and unborn babies. Even more remarkable is the sheer disproportionately: only 11.9% of Pennsylvania women are black and 7.3% are Hispanic. Pennsylvania is 82% white. Abortion in Pennsylvania, like everywhere else in America, victimizes minorities by leaps and bounds.
If abortion was a person, it would wear a white hood as the deadliest klansman in this nation’s history.
And who’s leading the assault? Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood performs half of the abortions in the state of Pennsylvania. It operates nine of the 12 largest abortion clinics in the state. The facility where Sims harangued that woman is the largest in the city of Philadelphia. Philadelphia is the fifth largest city in America. (The state’s second largest city, Pittsburgh, is 65th. Philly is the epicenter of abortion in Pennsylvania.)
And who does Brian Sims finger as the bad actor in all this? The “racist”? He points to the likes of the woman outside the clinic praying to God that this industry of death will stop — that this “black genocide,” as Dr. Alveda King calls it, will end. He says “shame” on her. She’s the one he finds “disgusting.”
And finally, aside from the race issue, that particular clinic that Sims stood in solidarity with isn’t good for women of any ethnicity. That Locust Street facility is guilty of many violations against the women whose babies it has ripped from their wombs. It has been cited for numerous code violations, failing over half of its last 23 patient-safety inspections. And yet, it has never been shut down.
Now that’s shameful and disgusting, Rep. Sims.
In fact, maybe we should be grateful to Sims. In bringing national attention to himself, he’s bringing national attention to this clinic and this scandal of abortion racism.
