By Ben Johnson

An anti-Christian, anti-life terrorist detonated a car bomb outside a California fertility clinic, blowing up the media narrative that pro-life Christians have been waging a “war on IVF.” His actions reveal the blind eye the Biden-Harris administration turned to violent leftists. Yet his actions and the media response, especially the triumphant announcement that no embryos had been harmed, can teach us all a great deal about the value of every life.

The tragedy began around 11 a.m. local time last Saturday, May 17, when police say 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus detonated his 2010 silver Ford Fusion outside the American Reproductive Centers in Palm Springs. The FBI called the explosion “probably the largest bombing scene that we’ve had in Southern California.” The blast, which injured four others and damaged buildings as far as 250 feet away, left only one casualty: Bartkus.

Those seeking answers heard FBI Assistant Director Akil Davis of the Los Angeles Field Office say Sunday that Bartkus expressed “nihilistic ideations” while carrying out “an intentional act of terrorism.” In fact, Bartkus expounded an all-encompassing anti-life philosophy known as Efilism, longed to initiate “a war against pro-lifers,” and once vowed “I’d choose Satan” over Jesus Christ.

Bomber: ‘I’d Choose Satan’ over the Christian God

Bartkus reportedly left behind recordings and a manifesto on a website describing himself as a “pro-mortalist”: He believed life brings pain and should be ended as quickly as possible. To further his philosophy, Bartkus wanted to start “a war against pro-lifers” and “begin the process of sterilizing this planet of the disease of life.”

When someone raised the possibility of his spending eternity in Hell, Bartkus responded: “Your [G]od definitely doesn’t exist, but if [H]e did, I’d choose [S]atan over your evil [G]od. Did you ever think that maybe the [B]ible is just slander against [S]atan, and that [S]atan just realized what a f****** creep your [G]od is?”

“[R]eligion is retarded,” he concluded.

At a minimum, the fact that a pro-Satanic, anti-life radical perpetrated the first IVF facility bombing (of which we’re aware) should quell Democratic claims that pro-life Christians are waging a “war on IVF.”

Democrats: Pro-life Republicans Waging ‘War on IVF’

Ever since an Alabama Supreme Court ruled that a couple could sue for the loss of an embryo, the Left has fear-mongered about a purported war on IVF. Joe Biden fibbed in his 2024 State of the Union Address, “The Alabama Supreme Court shut down IVF treatments across the state, unleashed by a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.” Kamala Harris repeatedly tried to insert the issue into the 2024 presidential campaign. The Democrat-to-legacy-media pipeline fed the narrative all year:

• “Remember the war on IVF, abortion, reproductive care is really a war on women’s rights,” lectured Ohio State Rep. Anita Somani (D-8) last February.
• Arwa Mahdawi, a columnist for the far-Left U.K. website The Guardian, wrote about “the holy war on IVF” last February.
• “The Conservative War on IVF Means More Stigma for People Like Me,” claimed Natalie Albaran in Cosmopolitan last December.
• “As someone who went through nine rounds of IVF, saw 10 fertility doctors and underwent treatment in both the U.S. and Israel over four years to create embryos that resulted in our daughter in 2015, I have been sounding the alarm bells for years about the religious right’s war on IVF,” wrote Amy Klein, condemning a position taken by the Southern Baptist Convention and the Roman Catholic Magisterium, in a column for The Forward last June.
• “Katie Britt Keeps Trying to Distance the GOP From Its War on IVF,” asseverated Kylie Cheung of the website Jezebel.

In reality, the IVF facility bombing was the work of another odd, left-wing movement espousing violence which the Biden administration apparently left untroubled — much like the murder of Border Patrol Agent David “Chris” Maland on January 20, allegedly by members of a transgender cult known as the “Zizians.”

Rather than investigate them, during the Biden-Harris-autopen administration, “the FBI singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists,” explained a 17,019-page report from the House subcommittee on weaponization of the government. Biden’s DHS awarded federal grants to organizations that linked Christian broadcasters to neo-Nazis. Biden’s targets were pro-life counselors, “violent extremists in radical-traditionalist Catholic” churches, alleged Russian infiltration of the growing Eastern Orthodox Church, and January 6 suspects. “Terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today,” said Biden. (Ditto Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray.) For all his myopic emphasis, we still know remarkably little, publicly, about President Trump’s two would-be assassins (although the second, Ryan Routh, spouted Trump-hating clichés while repeatedly claiming he visited Ukraine to recruit soldiers for its military). “He believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it,” said President Trump of Routh.

The Democrats, in turn, have internalized the broader points of anti-natalism and evangelized for the cause at every opportunity.

Liberals Worried America Will ‘Return to Being a Christian Nation’ and ‘Producing a Lot of Children’

In a recently aired video from May 1, Hillary Clinton warned darkly that the second Trump administration wants America to “return to the family — the nuclear family — return to being a Christian nation, return to producing a lot of children.” (The horrors.) Nor is her view an outlier in her party, deeply mired in environmental pessimism bleeding over into Malthusianism. In 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) cited an elusive “scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult,” which allegedly raised a “basic moral question” for every U.S. citizen: “Is it okay to still have children?” Similarly, Bernie Sanders promised Democratic primary voters in 2019 that reducing the number of babies born, “especially in poor countries,” is “something I very, very strongly support.” (At roughly the same time, Elon Musk forecast more accurately, “The biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse.”)

The climate-driven anti-natalist hysteria got so bad that a leading United Nations climate scientist lamented, “The atmosphere created by the media has been provoking anxiety. The latest idea is that children are a negative thing.” Petteri Taalas, then-secretary-general of the U.N.‘s special agency on weather and climate, the World Meteorological Organization, asked liberals to stop reading climate change statements “in a similar way to the Bible” (good advice!), seeking to “try to find certain pieces or sections from which you try to justify your extreme views.” He encouraged young people, in essence, to stop worrying and have babies.

The greatest threat to safety is palpable disregard for the sanctity of human life ingrained in federal law since January 1973 and embraced as the only meaningful policy articulated in the Democrats’ last presidential campaign. The second greatest threat is the decision to ignore a growing terrorist threat on the Left while weaponizing the government against every politically disfavored segment of the American Right. U.S. citizens should rejoice they now have a government seeking their physical safety, not the president’s political advantage. The ultimate end of President Trump’s alleged “revenge tour” has stanched the Left’s instrumentalization of the federal police force in a four-year cycle of vengeance.

Sadly, IVF Clinics Kill More Embryos than Bartkus

It is not at all clear Republicans will rise to the challenge of defending life. The GOP, always eager to flee the Democrats’ evolving calumnies, have positioned themselves as inventors of IVF. The president issued an executive order asking for policy proposals within 90 days — which elapsed Monday. IVF carries deep, ethical challenges.

Ironically, had Bartkus waited, the IVF facility would have done most of his work for him. There are a panoply of ethical and moral issues with IVF, not least the fact that parents intentionally end the lives of most embryos and stand at high risk of miscarriage. Even the media response reveals some of this.

What a Life-Hating Bomber, First Responders, and the Bible Can Teach Us about Life

One silver lining shone through all the coverage of the IVF bombing: “We were able to save all of the embryos at this facility,” beamed Davis. “Good guys: one. Bad guys: zero.”

Why announce this if embryos hold no value in themselves? The legacy media’s (usually) unspoken assumption holds that unborn babies’ worth is entirely contingent on the value imputed by their parents (read: mother). If their parents (read: mother) wants the child to live, the embryo’s loss represents a tragedy; if their parents (read: mother) do not want the child to live, the child’s death or abandonment is a neutral, or positive, development. 

The people who teach the most about the value of life may well be the first responders and the perpetrator himself.

Local media reported that the moment Deputy Fire Chief Greg Lyle arrived at the site of the blast, he began “saying saving the embryos was non-negotiable.” He rushed into the facility, although it had suffered structural damage, and realized he had to restore the power to maintain the temperature of the tanks that stored the frozen embryos at -321 degrees Fahrenheit. KQED reported Lyle and his team “put their lives on the line to make sure the embryos survived.” In the process, they won a public commendation from Palm Springs Fire Chief Paul Alvarado, who said, “Despite the building suffering structural collapse, this was nothing short of heroic, and I’m so proud of our firefighters.”

No one asked why the force should risk multiple lives to rescue so many “clumps of cells.”

Ironically, Bartkus’s immediate motivation apparently came from the pain death inflicts. In his online manifesto, Bartkus wrote that 27-year-old Sophie Tinney of Fox Island, Washington, apparently convinced her boyfriend (29-year-old Lars Eugene Nelson) to “shoot her in her sleep.” “Recently my best friend Sophie killed herself (she got the guy she was living with to shoot her while she was sleeping, her preferred method),” he wrote. “I’ve never related to someone so much, and can’t imagine I ever would again. It’s just too much of a loss when there’s nobody else you really relate to significantly.” One personality trait that bound them was their shared borderline personality disorder.

Even Bartkus, in his grief-ridden (and likely demon-possessed) state, recognized the value and impact of a human life. For Christians, the thoughts that should guide us include:

• “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them” (Psalm 127:3-5).
• “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you” (Jeremiah 1:5).
• “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).
• “I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works” (Psalm 139:14).
• “There is no God besides Me; I kill, and I make alive” (Deuteronomy 32:39).
• “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

We must take every legislative and administrative means to save unborn children. And one day, like the first responders in Palm Springs, justly go down in history as the heroes and champions of life.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.