South Cook News

Illinois pro-life leaders spoke in Flossmoor yesterday at the ribbon cutting and open house of an Aid for Women pregnancy center located on Governors Highway next door to a Planned Parenthood (PP) abortion clinic that opened in January 2018. The new center will offer “life-affirming pregnancy support in the south suburbs and northwest Indiana,” organizers said in a statement released before the opening.

Speakers included Congressman Dan Lipinski (IL-3), one of the last remaining pro-life Democrats in the House, South Side Chicago Pastor Caesar LeFlore, Founder and Executive Director of the Beloved Community Development Coalition, and Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton), a former state representative who nearly defeated Bruce Rauner in last March’s Republican gubernatorial primary.

“Planned Parenthood knows they have a profit center in Illinois and that we are the abortion capital of the Midwest,” Ives said at the opening. “This new pro-life pregnancy center is a haven of hope next door to a Planned Parenthood that profits off desperate women with no hope.”

Organizers developed the idea for the new pregnancy center in the living room of Flossmoor residents Kris and Dennis Cortes just days after the opening of the PP abortion clinic. Kris is on the Aid for Women board and Dennis serves on the Illinois Right to Life board. They and other organizers also started the Southland Coalition for Life at the same time.

“We were deeply saddened to know that unborn children would now be killed in our own community, and that for many of these women, having an abortion would cause them emotional suffering while not resolving their underlying problems,” Kris Cortes, who led yesterday’s ceremony, told South Cook News. “We also know that abortions within Flossmoor will disproportionately affect minority women and families, as Flossmoor is a diverse community and our surrounding communities are heavily African American and Hispanic.”

Most of the funding needed to open the new center was raised locally in what Kris described as a “middle class community taking on big government and Planned Parenthood.”

Services provided by Aid for Women include free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, providing each client with compassionate counseling to help her develop a plan for life, an earn-while-you-learn program, peer support groups and referrals to community resources.

The center opened two weeks after legislation was filed in Springfield that would virtually remove all restrictions on abortion (HB 2495), and repeal the state’s parental notification act (HB 2467).

Peter Breen, counsel for the pro-life Thomas More Society, said in a statement that the “barbaric procedures promoted by this legislation are nothing short of infanticide. These bills go well beyond the recent New York law and would turn Illinois into a third-trimester abortion destination and an underage abortion haven.”

He added that “Pritzker and his Democratic supermajorities would convert the ‘Land of Lincoln’ into the ‘Abortion Capital of America.’”

Additional speakers at the opening ceremony included Susan Barrett, executive director at Aid for Women; Rayanna, a former Aid for Women client; Jason Jones, the president and founder of HERO Inc. and Movie to Movement, who produced the pro-life movie “Bella;” and Fr. Jack Jura, pastor at Infant Jesus of Prague Catholic Church in Flossmoor.