Bowling Green, OH -- Bowling Green Pregnancy Center
CV NEWS FEED // A 20-year old woman pleaded guilty last week to vandalizing in April a pro-life pregnancy center in Ohio.
HerChoice Medical is a pregnancy resource center located in Bowling Green, Ohio that does not offer abortions. Whitney Durant pleaded guilty on December 8 to vandalizing HerChoice in April.
Durant pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge filed under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice:
According to court documents and statements made in court, on April 15, Whitney M. Durant, aka Soren Monroe, 20, of Worthington, intentionally damaged the property of HerChoice, a pregnancy center located in Bowling Green, Ohio, by defacing the clinic’s building, spray painting the words, “LIARS,” “Fund Abortion,” “Abort God,” and “Jane’s Revenge.” Durant was a Bowling Green State University student at the time of the incident.
“The First Amendment provides a constitutional right to peacefully protest, but Ms. Durant’s actions of defacing a reproductive health care center crossed a line,” said Special Agent in Charge Greg Nelsen of the FBI Cleveland Field Office. “The FBI and our partners will continue to aggressively investigate FACE Act violations and protect every American’s access to reproductive health care services.”
U.S. Attorney Rebecca Lutzko for the Northern District of Ohio in the press release:
As reflected by today’s guilty plea, the United States will enforce federal laws that protect uninterrupted access to all clinics providing reproductive health services, whether they provide women with options that include abortion care or whether they solely encourage women to consider non-abortion alternatives. Here, the vandalized clinic did not provide abortion care, but that did not give the defendant license to deface the clinic’s property in protest, violating federal law in the process.
Durant faces a maximum penalty of one year in prison for the misdemeanor charge. The sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 9, 2024.
“Defacing facilities that provide reproductive health services will not be tolerated in our society,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The Justice Department is committed to enforcing the FACE Act to protect all patients who seek reproductive health services and all persons and facilities that provide such services.”
A CatholicVote violence tracker has documented more than 85 vandalism and attacks on crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life groups across the United States since May of 2022, when a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked in May of 2022.
The violence tracker also shows that President Joe Biden’s Justice Department has largely invested its resources in prosecuting alleged “attacks” on abortion clinics, despite the fact that pro-abortion vandalisms against pregnancy recourse centers are significantly higher in number.
