Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson plans to criminally charge pro-life sidewalk counselors with disorderly conduct, according to a transition report posted to the city’s official website this morning.
The misdemeanor charge carries a $500 fine for first-time offenders and $1,000 for all subsequent “offenses.”
The 223-page report, “A Blueprint for Creating a More Just and Vibrant City for All,” outlines the mayor’s goal to “establish Chicago as a premier city for gender justice.”
In addition to pro-abortion publicity campaigns, lobbying, and allocating taxpayer funds to pay for drug-induced abortions, the “gender justice” section states that the city should “work to enforce Chicago’s ‘bubble zone’ ordinance, which bars individuals from approaching within eight feet of a person within 50 feet of an abortion clinic if their purpose is to engage in counseling, education, leafleting, hand billing, or protest.”
Sub-section (j) of Chicago’s “Disorderly Conduct” ordinance has been on the books since 2009, though enforcement has not been a top priority for the Chicago Police Department in the past. Johnson’s blueprint seems to indicate that it will move up in the list of priorities very soon.
“Mayor Johnson’s plan to treat volunteers who simply want to support women and their future children as criminals is outright wrong,” Jerwyn Castillo, chairman of Young Americans for Freedom at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told the New Guard.
Madeleine Tate, a Young America’s Foundation team member who formerly worked with the pro-life Hope Clinic in Northern Virginia, emphasized the importance of sidewalk counseling work: “Sidewalk counselors make a massive difference in the lives of the women they support outside abortion facilities. The idea that they are not only ‘not allowed’ to continue their valuable work, but that they will face criminal penalties, proves that what they are doing works; saving women and their children from the violence of abortion. Abortion facilities don’t like that, because every mother who chooses life hurts the bottom line.”
