Joe Scheidler, the influential anti-choice activist who helped pioneer “direct action” techniques meant to stop women from obtaining abortions, joined Catholic broadcaster Al Kresta on Wednesday to discuss the recent closing of a Chicago-area abortion clinic that hadfailed a safety inspection, which Scheidler attributed to the 27 years he spent targeting the clinic.
But Scheidler told Kresta that he had been going after this particular clinic for even longer because “they had a clinic on Irving Park Road in Chicago back in the ‘70s and we actually picketed there and we would have a priest come out and try to help us stop the girls,” until the clinic was ultimately shut down for operating without a license.
He then shared this anecdote of his “pro-life” purity:
And a strange thing happened, and this is just a quick little thing, but the woman running that clinic was a Catholic, Suzanna, and while she had nothing to do she went skydiving and her parachute didn’t open. And we had a scandal there because she was getting a Catholic funeral and, you know, abortion is an excommunicable sin, so we had to talk to the pastor and they had to cancel her funeral. That didn’t make me very popular with the family, but it had to be done. Otherwise people would think, ‘Well, you know, an abortion’s not that bad.’
