Vandalism and violent threats, including one leveled by a man wielding a machete last week, have forced a California-based pregnancy center to spend $150,000 on securing the premises and defending the staff from harm, the director of the center testified Tuesday.
Heidi Matzke, director of Alternatives Pregnancy Center, described the intimidation and danger her workplace has faced during her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee .
“Pregnancy care centers from coast to coast are being targeted for violent assaults of vandalism and hateful attacks online and in the media,” she told the senators. “Just last week, a man approached our care center with an armed machete.”
Matzke did not specify how the threat was neutralized and did not say whether the man had been charged. National Review has reached out to the Alternatives Pregnancy Center for further details.
In response to the threats, Matzke said her team has hired 24-hour onsite security, reinforced doors, bulletproofed walls, painted the building with anti-graffiti coating, installed cameras, and armed the staff with pepper spray. The center has suspended mobile-clinic service due to threats, she claimed.
“We have been forced to expend valuable resources, resources for women, of up to $150,000 just to protect ourselves. Why? Because we offer free care to women,” she lamented. This sum of money would have gone to supporting vulnerable women with unplanned pregnancies, she said.
“What, we do, though, is worth the risk,” she added.
The California facility’s predicament is one that many pro-life pregnancy centers nationwide have found themselves facing after the release of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
In the weeks between the leak of the draft opinion and the final ruling, Jane’s Revenge, a rogue pro-abortion group, claimed to have perpetrated over a dozen attacks on such facilities nationwide. In many of the cases, the terrorists firebombed offices and left menacing warnings spray-painted on the ruins like, “If abortion isn’t safe than neither are you.”
While the FBI has since announced that it is investigating these incidents, there have been no major updates as to whether any culprits have been identified or future plots have been foiled.
Later into the hearing Tuesday, Khiara Bridges, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley and a pro-abortion activist, accused Republican Senator Josh Hawley of being transphobic when he questioned why she insisted on using gender-neutral language to refer to pregnant women.
“You referred to people with a capacity for pregnancy, would that be women?,” Hawley asked.
“Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy, many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as non-binary people who are capable of pregnancy,” she clarified.
“So this isn’t really a women’s rights issue…so your view is that the core of this right then is about what?,” Hawley asked.
“Your line of questioning is transphobic and opens trans people to violence,” she declared.
“You’re saying I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women can have pregnancies?,” Hawley shot back.