Elderly pro-life advocates beaten amid calls for violence

Two elderly pro-life advocates Friday were beaten while demonstrating outside a Planned Parenthood facility in Baltimore, Maryland, leaving one hospitalized.

Witnesses say the assailant engaged in a heated debate with Dick Schafer, 80, and Mark Crosby, 73, who were protesting feticide outside the facility. According to police who reviewed footage of the attack, the suspect at one point asked a Planned Parenthood volunteer to hold his drink and then “tackled” Schaefer from behind over a flower pot. When Crosby came to Schafer’s aid, the assailant hit the 73-year-old in the face and knocked him against the building’s glass. Crosby fell, knocking over a ceramic planter, and the assailant began punching him in the face and kicking him in the head.

Crosby was admitted to University of Baltimore’s shock trauma center with a fully fractured plate bone in his upper right cheek and bleeding behind his eye. His bone eye orbit was completely shattered and will have to be replaced with metal, reports Life SIte News.

Schafer is convalescing at home.

Planned Parenthood released a statement following the incident, taking an unveiled jab at pro-life advocates:

This past Friday there was an unfortunate incident on the sidewalk outside of our Baltimore health center between a pedestrian and anti-choice protestors. We at Planned Parenthood of Maryland condemn all violence. When abortion care is under attack across the country, we cannot tolerate violent acts from anywhere—especially when it gets in the way of patients' receiving proper health care.

The attack comes as violent rhetoric against pro-life Americans has intensified in recent months. In September, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) urged abortion sympathizers to take up arms against pro-life Americans. 

“When I hear my colleagues talking about how, you know, it should be states’ rights, or government should not be telling us what to do, the word ‘hypocrites,’ it doesn’t even go far enough to call them out on what they’re doing,” she claimed on the Senate floor. “This is an outright attack on women in this country. That is how I see it.”   

“That is how more and more women and those who support our right to make decisions about our own bodies, that is how we see it,” she continued. “And why? Because that’s what’s happening.”  

“Madam president, I yield the floor, but clearly, you know, this is a literally [sic] call to arms in our country, I yield the floor,” she concluded. 

Days later, an 84-year-old pro-life activist was shot while distributing pamphlets door-to-door in Lake Odessa, Michigan.

The same month, a 41-year-old North Dakota man killed a teenager with his car after complaining the teen was a “Republican extremist” though it is unclear whether the two discussed the right to commit feticide. The driver’s charges have been downgraded to manslaughter.

Mark Houck, a father of seven who was harassed with his son outside a Planned Parenthood facility last year and was subsequently raided by the FBI, told Congress last week that the federal government aims “to instill fear in pro-life America”.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) agreed with Houck that the federal government targets Americans with certain political views.

“So if you’re pro-family, pro-life, and you want a border, you’re a target — and your family fit all of them,” Jordan told Houck. “You’re a pro-life, pro-family Catholic, for goodness’ sake — they’re going to come after you. You’ve got seven kids. You’re not allowed to have seven kids today, you know, we’re trying to save the planet. You can’t do that in America today."