Yesterday morning, two Catholic priests (along with two additional pro-life activists) were arrested for praying inside of a Washington, D.C. abortion facility.
The “Red Rose Rescue”--where pro-life individuals peacefully enter an abortuary, distribute red roses to mothers as a symbol of life, and quietly speak with and pray for them--was intentionally scheduled for the same day as the sentencing hearing of two different pro-life activists, arrested in December 2017 for participating in a rescue at the same clinic.
Those arrested yesterday were named as Father Dave Nix of the Archdiocese of Denver, Father Fidelis Moscinski of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, Will Goodman, and a woman who goes only by the name of “Baby Jane Doe”. Additional pro-life activists stood outside in the rain, praying, as the four were handcuffed by police and taken to jail.
The rescue took place in D.C.’s Capital Women’s Services, where the notorious Dr. Stephen Chase Brigham works as a late-term abortionist.
According to Operation Rescue (a pro-life activist organization and watchdog), Dr. Brigham is considered to be “the worst abortionist in America.” He is so bad, in fact, that the National Abortion Federation (certainly no pillar of virtue itself) allegedly revoked his membership years ago.
Even the New Yorker reports that Brigham has a long history of performing botched abortions, and operating filthy clinics--where in 2002 a former employee described “a suction machine accident, in which a second trimester procedure was sprayed all over me and got in my eyes and mouth.”
Furthermore, Dr. Brigham is reported to no longer have a current license to practice medicine. Yet as of 2017, he continued to operate 13 abortion facilities, spread across a number of states: Maryland, New Jersey, Florida, Virginia, and then Washington, D.C., where Capital Women’s Services shares a building with a DC Department of Health office.
Yesterday’s rescuers were inside Dr. Stephen Chase Brigham’s clinic for roughly two hours prior to their arrest. They were eventually taken to jail for not cooperating with police, who had to carry them out. Dr. Brigham was reportedly not at the clinic at the time.
Although President Bill Clinton signed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) in 1994, prohibiting pro-life activists from obstructing or interfering with women attempting to obtain abortions, not one participant in any of the eight Red Rose Rescues to date has ever been formally charged with violating the law.
While the rescue was nothing new for three of the four arrested yesterday, it was the first for Father Dave Nix. A priest serving in his native Archdiocese of Denver (though as of March, reportedly on loan to a diocese in Florida), Nix has a website where his listed passions include “the end of abortion and child-trafficking.” Ordained in 2010, he was recently featured on a Catholic blog for his unique approach to ministry on a college campus.
Even in the face of multiple arrests, it doesn’t appear the rescues will be stopping anytime soon. According to Father Stephen Imbarrato of Priests for Life, who was praying outside the clinic yesterday, Red Rose Rescues will continue “until the end of pre-born child killing. That’s without a doubt.”