Two years ago, I noted The Washington Post couldn’t find any staffers or any space to cover the closing of Amethyst Health Center for Women, the abortion clinic near my home in Manassas, Virginia. And now, the Post again could not find space when this former abortion clinic was blessed by the local Catholic bishop Michael Burbidge as the new Mother of Mercy Free Clinic. To pro-lifers, it felt like a modern miracle, decades of prayer answered.
Zoey Maraist at the Arlington Catholic Herald offered the report from the religious perspective:
For 27 years, the pro-lifers who faithfully prayed outside the Manassas abortion clinic were forced to keep their distance. “This was a very dark place and a place that we were all kind of scared of. We were warned if we got too close that the police would come,” said Kelly McGinn, a parishioner of All Saints Church in Manassas.
On World Day of the Poor, Nov. 19, Bishop Michael F. Burbidge blessed the building as the new Mother of Mercy Free Clinic.
Some 80 Catholics, many of whom had stood vigil outside the abortion clinic, gathered in the building and spilled out onto the sidewalk for the event. “It’s just an amazing thing to cross the threshold,” said McGinn. “It’s really crossing the threshold of hope because now this is a place where people who don't have access to medical care are going to be nurtured.”
But "modern miracle" would not be the way The Washington Post sees it. They laud activists who, in their lingo, “protect women’s health clinics that offer abortions.”
Ultraliberal Post columnist Petula Dvorak did complain about all the pro-life "deception" in Manassas in between the clinic closing and reopening, on February 4, 2016:
Pat Lohman’s most powerful weapon in her long war on abortion has been deception.
It’s a tactic she has embraced for nearly three decades to disrupt one of Northern Virginia’s few abortion clinics. Lohman operates her Manassas crisis pregnancy center right next door.
Same brick building, same sign, same generic office decor. The abortion clinic, Amethyst Health Center for Women, was on the right. The pregnancy center, AAA Women for Choice, is on the left.
Confused women seeking abortions would wind up in Lohman’s place, where she threw all she had at them — pamphlets, pleas, prayers, promises of help, used baby gear, bloody imagery, God — to change their minds.
“Deceptive? People say we’re deceptive? Okay,” Lohman told me. “But what the other guys are doing? That’s deceptive, too. Those girls have no idea what abortion really is. When I hear ‘pro-choice,’ that is a deception. And this country has forgotten about God.”
Here’s the part that’s really astonishing. Several months ago, the abortion provider retired and the Amethyst Health Center closed. That’s when Lohman, 69, and her supporters swooped in, orchestrating their grandest deception yet.
Nothing indicates that the abortion clinic is closed except a locked door. The clinic’s Google ads still pop up, and the phone number still works. When women dial the closed abortion clinic, the call is forwarded straight to the pregnancy center. Everything remains in place to lure women to the clinic and hope they try the door, figure they made a mistake, then go right next door to the carefully named AAA Women for Choice.
Petula Dvorak and the Post really hate anyone messing with “choice.” They don’t want a woman persuaded out of an abortion. Lohman closed her crisis pregnancy center and retired as the abortion clinic was transformed.
