OPINION:
Everything you need to know about the abortion industry you can learn right now in Bristol, Virginia.
It’s an industry that has nothing to do with helping women and everything to do with making money. The fact that this cold, hard cash is soaked in the blood of innocents does not bother those who profit from taking human lives.
Bristol is actually two cities: one on the Tennessee side of the state line and the other in Virginia. There’s even a spot where you can stand in both states at once.
What separates the two, at least since Aug. 25, 2022, is abortion. That’s the day Tennessee’s trigger ban kicked in, making almost all abortion illegal there.
The abortion profiteer Diane Derzis closed up shop in Bristol, Tennessee, and opened in Bristol, Virginia, where it’s legal to kill unborn babies until the end of the second trimester, about 26 weeks.
If you’ve spent any time reading about the Mississippi case that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade last June, you might recognize her name. Ms. Derzis owned the infamous “pink house” abortuary in Jackson and was the defendant in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a lawsuit centered on Mississippi’s law protecting babies at 15 weeks. That was the case that broke Roe’s back.
What did Ms. Derzis do when she could no longer kill unborn babies in Mississippi? She put the pink house on the market and moved to Las Cruces in New Mexico, a lucrative state where abortion is concerned. There are few restrictions on the procedure. The governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, is so enthusiastic about abortion that she was seen on video dancing at a rally with the head honchos of Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Alabama residents might also remember Ms. Derzis’ killing center in Birmingham that was ordered closed by the state Health Department in 2012 after numerous safety violations were found — including allowing unlicensed workers to administer medication, sending at least two patients to the hospital.
Now it’s her Bristol business that’s attracting attention on a number of legal fronts.
The parents of a 15-year-old are suing for $15.4 million, claiming that their daughter was given an abortion over her objections and without their knowledge. Virginia enforces both parental notification and consent laws.
Another lawsuit claims that center operators “willfully concealed” the nature of their business. Property owners Chadwick and Chase King oppose abortion and say they would never have agreed to lease the property to Ms. Derzis and her partner, Dr. Wesley Adams, an abortion provider who killed unborn babies for 40 years across the state line in Tennessee. The Kings said they were told a family practice would open on their property.
Bristol, Virginia, was caught unaware that Ms. Derzis was planning to move there. So, a member of the City Council worked with the Family Foundation, a Richmond-based evangelical Christian organization, to pass a zoning ordinance that would prohibit other abortion facilities from opening.
The five-member council voted unanimously to pass the ordinance to prevent their city of 17,000 from becoming an abortion destination for women in states that have enacted protections for the unborn.
But Ms. Derzis’ facility would not be affected. She can keep killing.
That’s what the abortion industry is about. No matter how many times you read and hear that abortion helps women, please know that it’s a lie. If you don’t believe me, listen to the voices of the women of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. Every one of them says they could not have made a worse choice.
If abortion providers don’t care about the women they harm, you can be sure they don’t care about the babies they kill. What they care about is money. Abortion is a lucrative business whose practitioners stuff their political allies’ pockets with some of that blood money to keep their assembly lines of death rolling. It’s a vicious cycle.
Abortion profiteers will lie when it’s in their best interest and break the law rather than lose a sale. They don’t care that a 15-year-old wants to keep her baby or that cities might not roll out a welcome mat when they show up with their weapons of mass destruction.
The abortion industry is a well-oiled killing machine that won’t stop until abortion is unthinkable and illegal.
• Janet Morana is executive director of Priests for Life and co-founder of the Silent No More Awareness Campaign. She is the author of “Recall Abortion: Ending the Abortion Industry’s Exploitation of Women,” “Shockwaves: Abortion’s Wider Circle of Victims” and Everything You Need to Know About Abortion — for Teens.”
