On the 5th of October, so-called “Progressive Anti Abortion Uprisng” (PAAU) held a press conference at the Dept of Justice to decry the Federal prison time they may get for storming abortion clinics. Two pro-choice counterprotesters called out their hypocrisy, one responding to their whining about Jane’s Revenge with “Jane is watching!” The entire event was livestreamed so this is certainly true.

PAAU is infamous as the group that burglarized a DC area clinic and stole five fetuses, and whose operators may have stolen hundreds more to baptize and bury. Baptism does not sound like the sort of thing progressives would take personal risks to bring about. These are religious extremists like the rest of the anti-choice movement. The keynote speaker at their Oct 5 presser was the infamous Randall Terry, formerly of Operation Rescue and a notorious terrorist.

The reality of the situation is that cops are cops, and if they were able to find Jane’s Revenge’s operators they would likely face far more prison time than anyone ever would for clinic blockades or vandalism. Cops tend well to the right politically, and no doubt there are many cops and sheriff’s deputies just chomping at the bit to arrest women at highway checkpoints for going out of state to get abortions. These sort of cops and prosecutors will do as little to those who attack clinics as they can get away with.

PAAU screamed about being prosecuted while nobody has been caught and thus nobody prosecuted for Jane’s Revenge’s guerilla strikes. Janes Revenge however is an underground movement whose skilled operators have not given cops opportunities to catch them. The Department of “Justice” cannot prosecute people who cannot be identified or found, so PAAU’s whining about the lack of such prosecutions is meaningless. PAAU by comparison attacks clinics and harasses patients right out in the open, so naturally their identities are known. Doubtful they will face much prison time: there were a number of cases where far-right bombings of abortion clinics netted five year sentences. That is less than some in the SHAC 6 case got for running an anti-vivisection website targetting Huntingdon Life Sciences. PAAU had a lot of nerve comparing themselves to those who had to stand up to the FBI’s Green Scare.