Two women in New York City were arrested for standing outside an abortion clinic in protest and praying aloud, ostensibly because they violated the city’s temporary prohibition against public gatherings, in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic.
While they were standing outside the clinic, there were still other women going into the building to get abortions.
Apparently New York considers getting abortions an “essential” activity, while standing right outside a clinic to protest or try to dissuade women from getting abortions is not an “essential activity”.
Further ironic is that the state has temporarily suspended all “non-essential” surgical procedures (like knee replacement surgery, for example), but has still given the green light for abortions to continue going on.
This was also the same week that the George Floyd protests went on in the city, and the city maintained a policy of not intervening or arresting those protesters for violating social distancing orders.
Pro-life advocates Bevelyn Beatty and Edmee Chavannes, co-founders of At the Well Ministries, were handcuffed May 30 on the sidewalk outside the Margaret Sanger Planned Parenthood Center in Manhattan for allegedly violating Mayor Bill de Blasio’s coronavirus-related social distancing guidelines.
Planned Parenthood called the police on the two women, who were issued citations for failure to disperse and given a September court date.
“We’re black women but we do not support Black Lives Matter because they’re hand-in-hand with Planned Parenthood that kills African-American babies,” Beatty told a reporter. “They’re fraudulent hypocrites… and I believe all lives matter,” she said. “There are thousands of George Floyds that die every day in their mother’s womb and it’s just as injust as when he died at the hands of that police officer.”
Beatty called it ironic that the legal order they were arrested under was supposedly put in place to try to save lives, and said Mayor Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo were pushing an agenda and didn’t really care about saving lives.
“The reality is this: How is abortion essential? How are stores closing and we can’t have Red Lobster and we can’t go to church but you can still go and kill a baby?”
“Let me tell you something, Christians get it the worst,” Beatty said in a Facebook live video moments before she was handcuffed. “I have not been so harassed by the police until I started doing this!”
“Planned Parenthood is not following social distancing, mind you - the person I’m standing with I actually live with so we don’t need to follow social distancing. But the police were saying we were violating social distancing and the only ones that are supposed to be there are the ones that work there,” Beatty told Live Action News.
“And we told them we’re not moving because it’s a public sidewalk and we have a right to be there.”
While it is illegal in New York to block the entry of abortion businesses, neither woman was doing so in this case, as can be seen in the video. Beatty said they weren’t protesting or picketing, but were there to try to counsel women.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/nyc-protest-abortion-clinic-george-floyd-handcuffed
It looks like the city saw this as an opportunity to use the Coronavirus as an excuse to prevent pro-life activists from standing outside clinics. Especially because it was inconvenient and embarrassing when these two particular activists were black, at the same time the George Floyd protests are going on and being encouraged.
So many double standards going on here.
