Commentary: Differing beliefs are healthy.
Tricking vulnerable people into a situation where your beliefs have undue influence on them isn't.
Recently, a “pro-life” women's health center called The Turning Point (TP) put out, through columnist Jim Harbison, a very inaccurate portrayal of itself to encourage more women to patronize it. More pregnant young women full of angst and uncertainty.
Such women should gather as much information as they can, talk with good friends and family, and maybe meditate on what to do, then do what feels right.
According to “pro-life” folks, such women must exclude the option of abortion. They should, if that's how they feel; but what women don't need is to get tricked into visiting a “health center” that will mislead and even intimidate them to prevent an abortion, without regard for the pregnant woman's individual wishes and needs.
“Pro-life” is one of those misleading political phrases like calling a pro-logging bill “The Pristine Forests Act.” I'm incredibly pro-life. Thoroughly enjoy it. Nurture it when and where I can, among humans, animals, and plants. By contrast, some of the most vocal “pro-Lifers” are pursed-lipped judgmental sorts whose ideological view is rooted in an emotional fear that other people are having too much fun.
Harbison's plug for The Turning Point completely omits its strong anti-abortion mission.
There are numerous videos available in which similar “pregnancy crisis centers” draw in young women, often by misleading them, and then subject them to strong propaganda and even flat-out lies, such as that an abortion will leave a woman sterile or cause breast cancer. There's no evidence either statement is true. These places tend to be quiet, with comfortable furniture and many photographs of happy babies. In some, staff-members are not doctors or nurses, but untrained “counselors.” (As someone said, “Whom would you like to consult about a broken leg – a doctor who mends them or someone who merely has strong opinions about broken legs?”)
How precisely does TP follow that model? I can't know for sure; but in a recent Sound-off, one woman described her experience with TP as enduring pressure against abortion and being fed false and frightening information. Although Sound-offs are anonymous, her account certainly tallies with what others havedocumented about similar operations. (See my blog post for links.)
Many of TP's leaders or board-members are highly experienced anti-choice activists who must be well aware of this tactic. Both Gary Coppedge (notorious for his role in the recent municipal recall effort and for the loathing many folks in Oregon and Washington express toward him over a failed effort to sell a loading dock that people didn't want or need) and anti-abortion activist Dr. Anthony Levatino are on the the board. Levatino has said a doctor performing abortions is “a paid assassin.”
It's instructive that Harbison's promo never mentions the center's real purpose. He writes,
“Pro-lifers many times choose to disregard the life of the mother to give life to the baby. Turning Point seeks to value mother, child and father to the benefit of a healthier community.” That would seem to distinguish Turning Point from pro-lifers.
Who would guess from his column that the outfit has also called itself “The Turning Point Pro-Life Pregnancy and Medical Resource Clinic”?
It's also fair to add that this is a time for folks to take more than the usual care to be precise. Calling abortion “baby killing” and using fraudulently edited tapes to scream “selling body parts!” may be effective rhetoric; but neither is accurate, and a bozo like Robert Lewis Dear might believe you. And kill real and innocent people.
Peter Goodman is a local writer, photographer, and sometime lawyer. He initially moved to Las Cruces in 1969, holds two degrees from NMSU, and moved back here in 2011 with his wonderful wife. This is his most recent Sunday column in the Las Cruces Sun-News. His blog Views from Soledad Canyon contains further information on this subject, as well as other comments and photographs, and past newspaper columns.
[I haven't much else to add, except (below) several URL's in case anyone wants to see how blazenly some of these "centers" or "clinics" mislead pregnant young women. It's appalling; and sometimes they even locate near an actual clinic.
How closely The Turning Point follows that model is, as I say, unknown, although one Sound Off describing a patient's experience there sure contained similarities to the videos; but I'd urge anyone consulting the place to get a second opinion on any medical information received there.
[These are four of the websites I looked at for background, in writing this column. All, as I recall, contain footage shot inside these "crisis centers" or tapes of initial phone calls in which the "crisis centers" were misleading or evasive on what services they offered. Since it was a few weeks ago, I just refer to a couple of them by numbers. I've inserted a few notes I made at the time. None of these were taken inside The Turning Point or necessarily reflect what goes on there.
California abortion crisis center
New York Pregnancy Crisis Centers
According to my notes on the California-oriented video, it does include at least one pregnancy center alleging that abortions are linked to breast cancer, and we hear from a woman who consulted the place and says,"no matter what I said, the answer was always the same, 'Keep the Baby!'"; another was told, “stop whoring around.” A woman also says, "Most women I saw there were young like me, I wanted to tell them to run away, 'You're not going to get the help you need here.'”]