An Indiana-based pregnancy center that saves thousands of lives every year won an award last week despite Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s effort to block it from expanding.
National Review reports the University of Notre Dame honored the Women’s Care Center with its Evangelium Vitae medal on Saturday. The award honors “individuals whose outstanding efforts have served to proclaim the Gospel of Life by steadfastly affirming and defending the sanctity of human life from its earliest stages.”
WCC began more than 30 years ago after a pregnant college student approached Notre Dame Professor Janet Smith, saying she did not want an abortion but was struggling to find resources, the report states.
Today, the pro-life pregnancy center has 32 facilities in 11 states and serves more than 25,000 women annually, according to the report. Like many pregnancy centers across the nation, WCC provides free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, diapers, clothing, parenting classes and more to pregnant and parenting moms.
Its leaders said 92 percent of its clients choose life for their unborn babies.
But the nonprofit has faced its share of adversities, including from rising pro-abortion Democrat Pete Buttigieg.
Last year, as mayor of South Bend, Buttigieg blocked WCC’s efforts to open a new facility next door to a proposed abortion facility. He vetoed a city council vote in favor of the pregnancy center, saying abortion activists expressed concerns about protests.
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Buttigieg now is running for president.
The pregnancy center persisted, despite abortion activists’ efforts. Last summer, a local business owner offered the pregnancy center another property across the street from the abortion facility.
Here’s more from National Review:
From its very first days, the group has always opened locations right next door to abortion clinics, in the hope that pregnant women will stop inside and realize there are other options besides ending the life of their child. And that model has proven immensely successful.
In South Bend, the abortion rate has plummeted by more than 70 percent since Smith started the first center several decades ago, and the only abortion clinic in the city was shuttered in 2016. In nearby Fort Wayne, where the WCC opened a facility in 2004, the city’s abortion rate has gone down 54 percent, and two local abortion clinics have closed. Similar patterns are evident in every city where the WCC has established a location.
It’s easy to see, then, why supporters of abortion — and especially those who profit when women choose abortion — oppose the WCC, and pregnancy-resource centers like it.
Whole Woman’s Health, a Texas-based abortion chain, also had its plans to open in South Bend delayed. In 2018, the state denied a license to the abortion facility, saying it provided “inaccurate statements and information” on its application; the abortion chain is appealing. It was a key group behind the effort to stop WCC from opening a new facility next door.
South Bend — the home to the University of Notre Dame — has not had an abortion facility since 2015 when abortionist Ulrich Klopfer was forced to close. He faced 1,833 allegations of violating the law, including failures to report the suspected rapes of several teen girls to authorities.
