Letters to the Editor
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Manipulation of women when they need it the very least
I worked as a counselor at an abortion clinic in a small city in Louisiana, and the local "Crisis Pregnancy Center" actually changed their phone number so that it was one digit off of ours. Because that's what Jesus would want, is to trick women into having children they don't want and/or can't afford.
This is the same "those silly women, they don't know what they want, they'll just run off and have an abortion on the way home from the grocery store if we don't hold their hands, the poor flighty things" logic that's bubbling just below the surface of these movements, underneath the gnashing of teeth about the poor, poor babies. Which by the way are on their own once the cord is cut, especially if they're brown and especially if they're in another country. Watch out for that land mine there, Ahmed, and tough shit, you should have caught us when you were attached to a placenta.
Women deserve all the information available about abortion and alternatives, not patronizing rhetoric. Factual information, without manipulation or shame. I can't speak for all clinics, but I know that the major focus of my job was to make sure these women were informed, top to bottom, and that every woman was in our clinic of her own free will and left with some form of birth control. We even had a patient confide that her boyfriend was bullying her into terminating her pregnancy, so we kept her in the clinic long enough to avoid suspicion from him, refunded her check, and sent her home to her mom in a cab. I guess we forgot to twirl our evil babykilling moustaches that day.
I will take these people seriously as members of a Culture of Life™ when they adopt 2 minority orphans each and use their grant money to say, feed actual living children, or take real, proven measures to prevent unwanted pregnancies, before they start tricking and/or scaring women into childbirth, which as we all know has no medical or psychological risks whatsoever.