Early Monday morning, an unidentified vandal used a hammer to smash a dozen glass windows and four glass doors of The Lennon Center, a crisis pregnancy center in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Every window was damaged except for the two under a security camera.
The responsible party marked the brick building with red words that read, “If abortion isn’t safe, neither are you” and “Fake clinic.”
“They are trying to shut us down,” said Gary Hillebrand, president, board of directors at the Lennon Pregnancy Center. “It’s not going to work. We’re going to keep serving our clients, but it’s a disappointing thing to have to deal with.”
Hillebrand says that he and other members of the board spent the day cleaning up glass and doing whatever was necessary to make the inside ready to open again.
“We’re pretty much just missing today,” he says, “but Thursday and Friday we expect to be fully back in business.”
The Lennon Center incident is only one of many acts of violence and vandalism by pro-abortionists who fear that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade sometime soon.
Hillebrand, the staff and volunteers at The Lennon Center offer free pregnancy tests, free ultrasound appointments and free life skill classes, and they also distribute food, clothes and other necessities to women and families in need.
“Basically, anything that our clients tell us they need, we’ll find ways to provide it,” Hillebrand says. “As long as they are coming to classes, then we will provide them with physical needs.”
Everything the center provides for women is free. They operate on donations and volunteer help, and in a typical month they help 100 new women.
One of the members of The Lennon Center’s board of directors is a woman who needed help about 10 years ago. She now has a 10-year-old son. She joined the board as a way to give back and help other women.
When comparing The Lennon Center to Planned Parenthood, Hillebrand says, “Our mindset is totally different than theirs. They’re selling abortions. They do ultrasounds to make sure there’s something there to abort.
“We want the woman to see, ‘OK, I’ve conceived a child,’ and be moved by that experience—to want to give birth and raise that child, be a good parent. That’s what we’re there for. We want to empower them to be good parents.”
Hillebrand gets frustrated when he hears people say that pro-lifers just care about babies not being aborted and not about the mothers’ and babies’ lives after birth.
“I think pregnancy centers like ours are the absolute proof that that’s nonsense,” he says. “We don’t just care about that. … We’ll keep supporting them until the child is 5. It’s not like we just want to keep the child alive, then you’re on your own. Pregnancy centers are the proof that that is totally untrue.”
While Hillebrand and his team are sad and concerned about the attack, they also have seen donations pouring in from people they’ve never contacted. Less than 48 hours after the attack, people who had read about the attack on the news or Facebook showed up to their building with checks. They’ve also received electronic donations and many encouraging emails.
Jane’s Revenge and other groups claiming responsibility for similar attacks around the nation have said they want to make crisis pregnancy centers uninsurable—to make the cost of doing business so high for them that they can no longer afford it.
Hillebrand is concerned about that, but he says, “We’re not going to be discouraged and give up ever. We’re doing the right thing. It’s so right that they’re getting really desperate in attempts to stop us.”
If you’d like to help The Lennon Center help more women, please visit their website, support-lennoncenter.org/. {eoa}
Rob Vischer is a freelance writer for Charisma Media.
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