A prominent Texas retailer has disassociated with a local pregnancy resource center after being threatened with protest by Austin abortion activists.

Earlier this year, the Kendra Scott jewelry store’s Domain location hosted a fundraiser for the Pflugerville Pregnancy Resource Center, as part of their philanthropic “Kendra Gives Back” program.

PPRC is a charity that works to reduce the number of abortions in Central Texas by providing vulnerable women with support, both during pregnancy and a baby’s early childhood.

While the program—which shares the profit of certain sales with charities who apply— is open to any organization, Kendra Scott’s partnership with the PPRC was intolerable to some of Austin’s abortion activists.

A group of them, the Texas Handmaids, organized a pressure campaign of letters and emails to intimidate the retailer into disassociating with the charity but those efforts were unsuccessful—leading the group to plan an in-person protest at the company’s North Austin location.

In doing so, they reached out to their allies in the media including the Austin Chronicle—a cosmopolitan publication that makes no attempt to hide its leftist bent—to bolster their campaign.

At the Chronicle they found an ally in writer Mary Tuma, who published an article detailing their efforts to pressure Kendra Scott to cut off charity to PPRC.

Tuma, whose biography states that she focuses on “politics, women’s health care, and social justice issues,” describes in the article how the Handmaids were unsuccessful in getting Kendra Scott to cut off fundraising aid for PPRC via digital advocacy and planned a protest at the company’s corporate headquarters on August 4.

At this point, Tuma decided to wield the Chronicle’s platform as a weapon to harangue Kendra Scott and ask why it hadn’t withdrawn its support of the Pflugerville PRC.

The company, likely fearing the social media mob that negative coverage from the Chronicle could cause, promptly withdrew its funding for PPRC.

“We have no plans to work with the Pflugerville Pregnancy Resource Center again and are committed to working with organizations that are fully transparent about their practices,” said a spokesman for the organization.

The Handmaids, their goal achieved, promptly cancelled their protest, writing in a statement, “Kendra Scott has agreed to stop fundraising for fake clinics so we are happy to cancel this protest! Woo hoo!.”

And this is just the latest decision the publication made in which it forsook merely reporting on the mob and instead acted as its ally.

Just recently, the newspaper came under heavy criticism for a misleading article relating to a video put out by conservative commentator Steven Crowder in which he confronted a far-left activist that threatened him with violence.

The Kendra Scott decision to kowtow to the mob and disassociate from the Pflugerville Pregnancy Resource Center is an unfortunate one, given the company’s founder’s dedication to women’s and children’s issues. Thankfully, most Texans oppose the far-left, pro-abortion stance of groups like the Handmaids while pregnancy resource centers continue to proliferate across the state.

Saurabh Sharma

Saurabh Sharma served as a Capitol Correspondent for Texas Scorecard. He was a Biochemistry and Government student at the University of Texas at Austin. He was also the State Chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas. In his free time, you can find him writing with fountain pens, learning graphic design, experimenting with unique nutrition regimens, and studying men’s fashion.

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