Where they are fed the lie
Weirdly, the Daily Mail has a good piece on anti-abortion fanatics (their word) in the UK.
Vulnerable women suffering emotional trauma after an abortion have been referred by the NHS to an extremist pro-life group where they are fed the lie that termination can cause breast cancer.
Patients are left distraught by the devastating claim made by advisers at the Good Counsel Network – but which is dismissed by medical experts as untrue and ‘damaging’.
Yet one of Britain’s biggest NHS mental health trusts, South West London and St George’s, has been recommending patients to the London-based groups via leaflets and its website for five years.
Despite its misleading advice, GCN was described until recently on the NHS website as ‘a leading organisation in the field of mental health’.
GCN – which was censured for misleading advertising under its former name – pays some activists a salary to stand outside abortion clinics, forcing women to run a gauntlet of haranguing protesters as they enter and leave.
Women are handed leaflets referring them to ‘pregnancy crisis centres’, where a mixture of lies and half-truths is peddled, aimed at making them change their mind about the procedure.
The revelations will be exposed in an undercover investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches this week.
The Mail includes clips from the show.
One paid “activist” admitted telling a woman whose GP had advised her that to continue her pregnancy could put her life at risk, that the doctors could be wrong. Dispatches reporter Cathy Newman later asked her about it and she repeated that doctors can be wrong. Good point; let’s harangue everyone going in for surgery about it.
MPs fear the introduction of aggressive American-style anti-abortion tactics could lead to violence. At least 11 people have been murdered at US abortion clinics since 1990, and there have been scores of bombings and arson attacks.
Keir Starmer, the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service who is now Labour MP, believes that buffer zones outside abortion clinics might be necessary.
He said: ‘These are carefully constructed tactics that are intended to absolutely cause anxiety and concern. In America this has gone even further than we’ve seen in this country, and I think because of that we have to work on the basis that this conduct will escalate here.’
Separately, undercover investigators secretly filmed a London conference for pro-life extremists, run by pressure group Abort67. The group was set up by American lawyer Gregg Cunningham, a 69-year-old former Republican politician.
Another reason to be ashamed of my country.
There’s a lot more; read on.
I don’t think I have the strength.
One of the U.S. variants has been using TV ads for over a year to my knowledge that feature a young pregnant woman who is obviously concerned about pregnancy. It then features their number as a place to call for help, with the tagline, “Talk about all your options, including adoption.” I can guess how they ‘talk’ about the option of abortion.
I’ll interject a cheerful anecdote to help offset some of the shame that we americans bring upon ourselves.
A while back, a group of non-local religious extremists appeared in my city to picket the local Planned Parenthood. They stood outside the building holding up gruesome pictures and said hateful things to staff and patients that arrived or left.
The people who live here became so outraged over this that we organized a Support Planned Parenthood rally a few days later, and we managed to summon easily two to three times as many supporters as they had had protestors, even on the short notice that we had. Even the former mayor appeared. We lined the street with supporters holding signs, and everyone driving past was honking support and waving; we even managed to fund-raise a nice sum for PP that day, and were featured in a news article in the local paper. The owners of a local specialty doughnut shop showed up, unexpectedly, with box upon box of free doughnuts and gallons of hot coffee, and the PP staff were practically in tears at the level of support and thanks that they received after having endured such bitter vitriol just the week before.
It’s possible to make some things better.
James Garnett – when it was rumored in our town that there might (not would, but might, and not even a very high probability) be a Planned Parenthood opening its doors here, the populace showed up en masse to gripe and complain at open mic time in a City Council meeting. Our mayor made one of, if not the, only good moves he ever made. He simply shut off the open mic, and told them to go away (not in those exact words).