Exposing True Anti-Choicers

In Marcotte's article, she uses the "evil CPC" story as an introduction to a general condemnation of all CPCs. Even if the story were true, this generalization does not make sense. Haven't pro-choicers been excusing abortionists for the criminal actions of scum like Abu Hayat (warning: PDF file) because they were "just" bad apples? After all, every basket of apples has a few bad ones. Never mind the fact that there are more than a few "bad apples" in the abortion industry ... and never mind the fact that the theoretically-wicked CPC didn't actually kill anyone ... other than those inconvenient points, the cases are exactly the same! If the "bad apples" defense can excuse the actions of cannula-wielding butchers, then it can also excuse the actions of one mythical CPC which did something bad.

From there, the article only goes downhill. One fine example is the following passage:

If you're facing an unwanted pregnancy, one of the possible solutions would be getting un-pregnant -- still a legal, if sometimes difficult-to-find, option in America. But the "crisis pregnancy centers" these signs advertise seek to limit and, in some cases, prevent women from exploring their legal options for health care.

What? CPCs exist to provide women with choices. If a woman chooses Life after visiting a CPC, that's fantastic. However, if she chooses to abort, then the CPC cannot stop her from doing so. How exactly does a CPC limit a woman's options? All they can do is offer options and try to persuade a woman to choose life. What's "anti-choice" about giving a woman more choices? The abortion advocates' chosen language seems to be especially ironic here.

One other point: Abortion does not exactly make a woman "un-pregnant," in the sense that her pregnancy has been somehow erased. More accurately stated, abortion ends a pregnancy in the same way that birth does. Of course, the difference between abortion and birth is that the child usually survives birth. Abortion does not make a woman "un-pregnant"; it makes her the mother of a dead child. That will be an important point to remember later in the story....

More Marcotte foolishness:

Dishonest as these types of crisis pregnancy centers are, it's hard to argue against their right to exist, especially since most of their clients enter their doors willingly.

Of course, one could read the whole article as an argument against crisis pregnancy centers ... but that would require her to be capable of making an actual argument. Oh, and what's with the weasel words about "most" women entering CPCs willingly? Does Marcotte have any proof of forced or coerced CPC visits? I'll save you the trouble of looking for it; if there is any such proof, Marcotte didn't provide it in her article.

The next sentence is also good:

However, the aforementioned incident reported by Planned Parenthood of Indiana indicates that some groups are not above using more aggressive methods to stop women from aborting pregnancies.

Actually, all that "incident" indicates is that someone doesn't care enough about the truth (or good journalism) to validate the wild accusations of Planned Parenthood mouthpieces.

Moving on:

These tactics are even more troubling in light of the growing legislative support to direct taxpayer money towards crisis pregnancy centers and away from places that provide actual reproductive services to low-income women.

Y'know, describing abortion clinics as places which provide "actual reproductive services" is a nice bit of Orwellian doublespeak. I'm sure that Marcotte is referring to Planned Parenthood, which receives over a quarter-billion tax dollars per year, and they do indeed provide services other than abortion. However, much of those services could be more accurately described as "non-reproductive," since their purpose is to prevent reproduction. Meanwhile, CPCs provide resources and services to help women choose Life for their unborn children. To this humble blogger, that seems a lot more like "actual reproductive services" than most of what Planned Parenthood provides.

If preventing reproduction is an actual reproductive service, then the Boston Strangler was a respiratory technician.

Finally, Marcotte decides to get both sides of the story ... by interviewing another abortion-industry mouthpiece!

Peggy Romberg of the Women's Health and Family Planning Association of Texas estimates that 17,000 low-income women will lose access to affordable family planning as a result of the cuts....

"According to a spokesman for al-Qaeda, the Great Satan is doomed to total destruction."

(Touchy readers may take offense at my analogy comparing an abortion-rights advocate to a terrorist. It is true that there are many differences between the two. For example, al-Qaeda killed approximately 3000 Americans on 9/11, but the abortion industry manages to achieve the same death total day after day after day....)

So abortion-rights advocates are worried that they might get less public money? They're lucky I'm not in charge, because the only money that I'd give to Planned Parenthood would be enough to pay for nice, cozy prison cells. Meanwhile, if they're so hysterical that pro-life CPCs are going to be claiming some of "their" money (which really belongs to the taxpayers, anyway), then the answer seems obvious: pro-choice CPCs.

Seriously, as clever as pro-choicers are when it comes to figuring out how to avoid parental-notification laws, it's amazing that this idea hasn't occurred to them. If "anti-choice" CPCs are such a big problem, then start pro-choice CPCs. Pro-choice volunteers could run them, and pro-choice donations could support them. They could provide a full range of "actual reproductive services," including helping women who choose Life. Pro-choice CPCs could do everything that pro-life CPCs currently do, but they would be free of that pernicious pro-life bias that seems to bother pro-choicers. Pro-life critics may argue that pro-choice CPCs would invariably be biased toward abortion, but that might not be true. After all, it's all about "choice"! Why would pro-choicers want women to be trapped into abortion? Why would they want to deny women a choice?

In short, pro-choice CPCs would be a great opportunity for pro-choicers to demonstrate that they aren't actually pro-abortion.

Here's another piece of evidence to prove Marcotte's ignorance:

The TPCN [Texas Pregnancy Care Network] is associated with a group called Real Alternatives, an anti-choice organization that has put so little effort into their "educational" materials that the site goes so far as to have sections called "Telling Your Boyfriend" and "Telling Your Parents," seemingly ignorant of the fact that most abortions are performed on adult women, many of whom are married.

Wait, so the pro-choice stereotype of the poor minority teenager who was raped by her Daddy does not accurately reflect reality? You mean that most abortions are performed on adult married women? But ... that would make many of them "abortions of convenience"!

Anyway, Marcotte seems to have missed something in her breathtaking analysis of CPC educational materials. They are intended to help the average CPC visitor, not the average woman who aborts. Not every woman who is considering abortion will enter a CPC, more's the pity. Therefore, the women who go to CPCs are a subset of the total, and that subset might or might not share certain characteristics with the larger group. I don't actually know if most women who go to CPCs are minors, but it makes a certain amount of sense that they might be. More importantly, I think it's fair to trust that CPCs know who their clients are. After all, what possible purpose would it serve for a CPC to develop educational materials that would be useless to them?

And another fact-free statement from Marcotte:

Anti-choice activists openly regard family planning clinics like Planned Parenthood as primarily feminist organizations that just so happen to provide health care.

Actually, if she had bothered to ask any real "anti-choice" activists (other than the voices inside her own head), Marcotte would know that we openly regard Planned Parenthood as primarily a killing organization that provides just enough health care to give it a veneer of legitimacy.

Besides, abortion isn't feminist. Women deserve better than abortion.

Let's go back to the mouthpieces for another "fair & balanced" story about CPCs:

Peggy Romberg recollected that when she worked for Planned Parenthood in the '80s, crisis pregnancy centers would actually provide shelter to pregnant women right up until the eligible date for legal abortion had passed. They would then turn the women out, and it was Romberg's agency that was tasked with explaining to these desperate women that it was too late.

If it's true, this anecdote would be a horrible indictment of CPCs. If it's true. However, even then, it would only be a horrible indictment of CPCs in the 1980s. Are CPCs still doing such things today? If they were, this humble blogger suspects that Marcotte would have found a way to include it in her hit piece. Again, silence does not necessarily prove anything, but it sure makes me suspicious.

But then Marcotte herself finally decides to do some actual investigative journalism ... sort of:

A friend warned me to be careful when contacting crisis pregnancy centers, as they are known to give callers the runaround, refusing to give information over the phone and asking you to come in for an appointment. Curious, I called Austin Life Care, a prominent local crisis pregnancy center and grilled the unlucky receptionist about the services offered. She said they offered pregnancy tests and counseling. When I asked about the credentials of the counselors, she replied, "Well, we have all different levels of education and some of them are really academic."

Y'know, so far I'm not seeing any problems here. The clear implication that Marcotte is trying to make is that the CPC counselors are totally unqualified. So now I have to ask: What qualifies someone to be a counselor? Remember, we're not dealing with clinical psychiatry here. CPC counselors are not prescribing anti-psychotic drugs or dealing with paranoid schizophrenia. They're working with pregnant women who need help. It seems to me that the most important qualifications to do such work are: an open mind, a loving heart, and a little bit of training (which I'm sure the CPC provides). These are the same qualifications that other volunteer counseling programs require, including the pro-choicers' own beloved post-abortion counseling hotline: Exhale.

The investigation continues:

I followed up by asking what kind of medical staff they had on hand and she replied, "Well, we have sonographers."

When I asked her what a sonographer was, she was curt: "It's someone who can do your sonogram."

By the way, if I were that luckless receptionist, I would have been contemplating the caller ID display and considering how to take non-violent revenge on the idiot that was subjecting me to interrogation. This receptionist, whoever she was, deserves a frickin' medal.

Marcotte seems to think that a CPC is some kind of a medical facility. They usually aren't. As Marcotte notes elsewhere in her article, running a medical clinic costs a great deal of money. Even Planned Parenthood (usually) charges for their services, and PP receives a huge government handout to pay their bills. Pro-lifers are commonly reminded of this when we dare to object to public subsidies for abortions....

That exchange leads to one of Marcotte's real pet peeves:

Actually performing a sonogram on a client probably adds to the illusion that crisis pregnancy centers are providing care.

Sorry, but I have to interrupt for a moment. Sonograms are pictures made from sound waves. They are not pre-natal care, nor do they pretend to be. When my wife and I went to Baby Insight for our 4D ultrasound, we knew perfectly well that we weren't receiving any actual medical care. We were there to look at pictures of our son. An ultrasound can be a part of pre-natal care (and usually is), but so is being weighed. Neither one of these things is medical care all by itself.

In fact, this allure explains why there's a bill pending in Congress to grant crisis pregnancy centers ultrasound machines, despite the fact that having a sonogram performed by an unsupervised technician could be dangerous. Dr. Diana Kroi, the ob-gyn who authored "Take Control of Your Period," explained that ultrasounds need a trained physician to look for problems like ectopic pregnancies and other dangerous indications that a woman's health is imperiled.

First, the "allure" of ultrasound for CPCs has nothing whatsoever to do with trying to "fake" medical care. Studies have shown that viewing an ultrasound makes a woman much less likely to abort. We can argue back and forth about the reasons for this effect, but the effect itself is undeniable. Ultrasound is a great way to help convince a pregnant woman to choose Life for her child.

Second, the smear about "dangerous" ultrasounds is pure FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. There's nothing more dangerous about having an ultrasound than not having one. Think about it a moment! If there is a life-threatening condition, then an ultrasound will have a chance of detecting it, even if the ultrasound technician does not meet Dr. Kroi's high standards. (By the way, anyone who has actually experienced pre-natal care will probably know that the ultrasound techs are often better at their jobs than the actual doctors, so I don't believe Dr. Kroi for a moment.) The alternative that Marcotte seems to prefer, which is not having the ultrasound, will not be more effective at detecting possible problems. The very idea is ridiculous.

I may have made a mistake in the above paragraph. Actually, the alternative that Marcotte probably prefers is to herd all of these CPC clients into the nearest abortion clinic, vacuum out their wombs, and send them right back into whatever unfortunate circumstances drove them to the CPC in the first place. And to think that pro-choicers get offended when some of us prefer the term "pro-abortion" to refer to people like Marcotte....

If a woman who's had an ultrasound mistakenly thinks she has had actual prenatal care, she may not go elsewhere for real care.

What purpose would this serve? Seriously, what would CPCs (or pro-lifers, more generally) gain from discouraging women to get pre-natal care? In fact, one of the services that many CPCs provide is to help a pregnant woman get real pre-natal care, because pro-lifers really do care about pregnant women and their babies.

Anti-choicers are banking on the ultrasound's appeal as a pre-born snapshot machine, though it's an actual diagnostic tool, or as the Mayo Clinic puts it, "[Ultrasound] isn't meant primarily to provide parental thrills or souvenir snapshots," and it's irresponsible to treat it as if it were.

Well, at least Marcotte seems to have forgotten the moronic "ultrasounds are fake medical care" theory. Yes, pro-lifers like the "pre-born snapshot machine" for its ability to blow away thirty-plus years of pro-choice propaganda that has dehumanized the unborn. One look at an ultrasound, even an early-term ultrasound, totally disproves the "just a clump of cells" myth. That's why pro-abortion folks like Marcotte hate them so much. Ultrasound technology exposes the lies that they've been spreading....

By the way, the taken-out-of-context line from the Mayo Clinic is more FUD. There's no harm in using an ultrasound for "souvenir snapshots," and the Mayo Clinic article doesn't claim that there is. On the other hand, if the "souvenir snapshot" convinces a woman to allow her unborn child to live, then that snapshot just saved a life. Not a bad use for a diagnostic tool, huh?

This is especially irresponsible in a setting where clients are told that Planned Parenthood and other affordable clinics are nothing but abortion mills who want to hurt the woman and the expected baby.

Language alert: A pro-abortion article just used the forbidden "B" word! As you read this, you can be confident that our crack "Choice Commandos" are even now subjecting Marcotte to painful reminders that "ZEF," "fetus," or "alien invader" are the only acceptable terms. Fear not, citizen!

Sarcasm aside, I think it's fair to conclude that Planned Parenthood, as the nation's "leading" abortion provider, might not be a safe place for unborn children.

Now that she has satisfied her burning hatred of ultrasounds, Marcotte moves along to another pro-abortion pet peeve:

And from what I could gather on the website, most of the "counseling" available is for the only syndrome that crisis pregnancy centers show any interest in treating; one they call "post-abortion stress syndrome." The problem with this syndrome is anti-choice activists made it up. Unlike, say, post-natal depression, neither the American Psychiatric Association nor the American Psychological Association recognizes "post-abortion stress syndrome." So add proper mental health services to the list of services not rendered.

First, Marcotte doesn't seem to understand that the primary mission of a CPC would not be served if the only counseling they provided was post-abortion. Post-abortion counseling might be an effective way to address repeat abortions, but that's like closing the barn door after the horses have already escaped. Wouldn't it be better to prevent the first abortion? Indeed, CPCs offer career counseling, life-skills help, emotional counseling, and other pre-abortion help for the express purpose of helping women to escape the trap of an unwanted abortion. Meanwhile, Marcotte's beloved abortion clinics will take a woman who is being abused by her father/boyfriend/husband, vacuum out her unborn child (whose DNA could be used to prosecute, by the way), and send her right back for more abuse. If we're going to compare who offers more for women, any fair comparison would score the CPCs above the abortionists....

Second, proving the existence of post-abortion PTSD is unfortunately all-too-easy. All we have to do is to find one woman who is suffering from it. How about this woman, or maybe this woman, or these women over here? Nobody has ever claimed that every single post-abortive woman suffers from post-abortion PTSD. That would be ridiculous. However, it's equally ridiculous to claim that no women are suffering. As for the "appeal to authority" of citing the the American Psychiatric Association nor the American Psychological Association as "proof" that post-abortion PTSD does not exist, well, Emily & Annie at AfterAbortion did some nice research a while ago about why those associations changed their tunes on this subject. To summarize: It was all about politics, not medicine.

Even the pro-choice founders of Exhale recognize that having an abortion can cause emotional damage, although they shy away from scary clinical terms to define the problem. I figure that Marcotte will finally get around to acknowledging reality by about 2050....

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I could keep going, but I think you get the point by now. The entire article is one wild accusation after another, and the only "evidence" to support any of Marcotte's claims is provided by spokespeople for the abortion industry or by her own foolish interrogations of CPC staff. It's a shallow, unscrupulous, one-sided attempt to condemn all CPCs as some kind of evil brainwashing scheme.

I am amazed that someone who has so little opinion of women's free will can dare to call herself a feminist. My three-year-old daughter knows her own mind better than the hypothetical women who are being misled by Marcotte's wicked CPCs. Apparently, being a feminist now requires one to believe that the average pregnant woman has the same capacity for rational decision-making as one of Pavlov's dogs. What is so wrong with giving women choices other than abortion? Why is that so dangerous? And if the real problem is the pro-life bias of CPCs, then why not propose pro-choice CPCs?

Truthfully, the only people reading AlterNet are likely to be the same folks who read Pandagon. In other words, Marcotte's article won't reach the middle ground, but only those people who are already convinced that anything pro-life is evil. (And a handful of pro-lifers like me, who just like to know what the opposition is saying.) The comments on her article only reinforce my point. So any damage that she does should be minimal.

That doesn't excuse her.

(cross-posted to Naaman the Ex-Leper)