South Cook News

Planned Parenthood’s recent shots at a new pregnancy counseling center, Aid for Women, in Flossmoor shows “how radical” the abortion provider has become, former State Rep. Peter Breen (R-Lombard), one of Illinois’ leading pro-life advocates, told South Cook News.

“Aid for Women is a long standing group with a history of offering pregnant women an alternative to abortion,” said Breen, vice president and general counsel of the Thomas More Society. “That used to be considered a good thing.”  

A May 7 Homewood-Flossmoor Patch article on the “reproductive rights controversy in Flossmoor’s backyard” said that abortion advocates are “spreading the word” about the "dangers" of facilities such as Aid for Women.

"Women, when they go there, quite frankly are duped," the Patch quoted Planned Parenthood (PP) spokesperson Paula Thornton Greear as saying.

Executive Director of Aid for Women, Susan Barrett, said that the PP comment was “so out there” she was unsure at first how to respond.

“We are entirely open and honest about the counseling services we provide,” said Barrett, who oversees five pregnancy centers and two maternity homes in the state. “We give hope to many women who feel pressured to have an abortion and are panicked because they are in survival mode. They feel they have no alternative. We offer one.”

Greear also said that “these fake health centers” have a pattern of moving next store to PP clinics. Barrett said they opened in Flossmoor because some residents were so alarmed by the opening of a PP clinic in their community that they reached out to establish a “life-affirming” alternative.

Aid for Women opened in February on Governors Highway. PP opened its clinic in January 2018 in a style so secretive that not even the Flossmoor mayor knew what was coming to his town until days before the clinic opened.

The Patch article called the Flossmoor PP “a reproductive health care center that also performs abortions.” But Breen said that abortion has been at the core of PP’s business since 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade declared that women have a constitutional right to an abortion.

“It’s the most profitable service they offer,” he said.

PP’s Flossmoor abortion clinic is helping to make Illinois the abortion capital of the Midwest. More than 5,500 women travelled from neighboring states with more restrictive abortion laws to Illinois for abortions in 2017, a November 2018 Chicago Tribune reported. The Flossmoor clinic is located just minutes from the Indiana border.

In 2017, then Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, signed legislation that authorized Medicaid funding for abortion at any point during a pregnancy.