Back to the April 2004 Newsletter Index

2 D.C. Abortion Mills Closed

Dick Retta, who has been sidewalk counseling at Hillcrest Northwest abortion mill on Georgia Avenue in Washington, D.C., since January 2001, got on a first-name basis with a gray-bearded “deathscort” regular named Jim.

One day in mid-February, Jim needled Dick, “Why do you keep coming here?  These women only ignore you.”

Dick shot back, “I’m going to come here until this place closes down!”

“I wasn’t prophesying, I was just being smart,” Retta recalled with a wry grin a month later.

By March 13 veteran Hillcrest sidewalk counselors and Rosary prayers were figuratively blinking their eyes in shock and awe:  phone calls and closed doors confirmed that not only Hillcrest Northwest, but Hillcrest Southeast, on Pennsylvania Avenue, had closed down for good.

Signs that all was not well at Hillcrest NW first surfaced at 8 a.m. on Saturday, February 21, when Dick happened to talk to a young man of about 20 who had gone into the building with an older woman, then come out by himself.

The youth told Retta that his mother, a nurse, had been called in as a “temp” for that morning.

“Do you know that your mother will be helping them to kill babies in there?” Dick asked.

Apparently, he didn’t.  He immediately went back into the building, coming out a few minutes later with his mother, both of whom left.

Shortly afterwards, a staffer with whom Dick was friendly came out and said they were going to close early because they didn’t have a nurse to assist the doctor.

Sure enough, a sign was posted on the door that the clinic was closing due to a “medical emergency.”

Hillcrest opened the following Saturday, admitted about five women, then sent them packing and closed at 10 a.m., “probably for the continued lack of a nurse,” Dick surmised in his weekly e-mail report.

The next Saturday, March 6, the doors did not open at all, and no clients appeared.  Six “deathscorts” appeared for duty; apparently Hillcrest hadn’t informed them of the closing.

Recalling that the National Abortion Federation has admitted that abortionists are having problems staffing their clinics, pro-lifer Missy Smith began to smell victory.

She placed two calls to Hillcrest, posing as a pregnant woman trying to get an abortion.

The people she spoke to confirmed that both Hillcrest clinics were closed indefinitely.  Missy burst into tears and begged for a referral.

“They referred me to a doctor’s office on Benning Road.  They said I could only have an appointment on a Saturday at 1:00 p.m.

“They’re like a bunch of cockroaches, all running for the hills; you only have the bottom-feeders who are doing abortions now,” she concluded.

Locked doors at the two abortion mills on Saturday, March 13, convinced pro-lifers that the closings were a fact.

“It’s amazing!” says long-time sidewalk counselor Janet Baker.

When she was finally sure that both clinics were closed for good, says Missy, “I was, like, levitating--off the ground!”

“Our Lady closed them down,” says Retta.

The pro-life regulars at Hillcrest Northwest plan to move operations to the Planned Parenthood clinic in Silver Spring, which, they learned recently, is doing abortions.

Says Dick a little wistfully, “I’d like to see Jim one more time and say, ‘Now do you understand that you’re on the wrong side?’”