Guest post: The lies and condemnation never, ever stop
Originally a comment by Freemage on Forced childbearing.
Fuck, these guys just don’t quit, do they?
I do greeter volunteering at PP. Since we own the property the clinic is on, women are able to drive past protestors and park in the lot, so it’s a clear walk to the door, so our main job is 50/50 between giving the women someone to talk to on the way in so they don’t have to listen to the shouts, and standing near the edge of the property to give the protestors someone else to yell at instead of women seeking health care.
It veers between rage-inducing blather and low comedy (such as the guy who struggled to put on his custom-built harness for his 20-foot tall flagpole with that ‘Christian flag’ at the top of it). But the lies and condemnation never, ever stop. Of course they repeat the bogus abortion-breast cancer claim, and they’ll invent any tale to support their skewed view of reality. (More low comedy–one of the regulars routinely talks about how “Just a couple weeks ago, I held two babies who’d been saved when their mother turned away from this place.” Per some of the old hands at the clinic, these ‘babies’ would need to be about 7 years old at this point, since that’s how long she’s been making the claim.)
I actually heard one of the worst of the regulars (they’re all bad, but some are more ‘sad’ than ‘vile’–this asshat is definitely at the ‘vile’ end of the spectrum) declare to a guy who had stopped his car to tell them to fuck off that, and I quote, “No woman ever died because of pregnancy. They died because of complications from the pregnancy.” I don’t think you could get an angel to dance on the edge of the razor he tried to split that hair with.
I’ve got a whole slew of incidents and observations from a relatively short time on this particular front. It’s… dizzying, sometimes, how much subtext gets packed into a single Saturday morning.
Jeez…if you want to write them up here I’d be happy to post.
“No woman ever died from pregnancy, they died because of complications from the pregnancy.”*
“Guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people.”
Is there a playbook of limp excuses these people have access to?
*Yet don’t many ‘pro-lifers’ want abortions in circumstances involving complications banned as well?
Ophelia:
Well, some of the stories are merely amusing. For instance, there’s actually two groups of pro-lifers, and they do NOT like one another. The first are Angry White Male Evangelicals (and sometimes their wives). They’re the really obnoxious ones with the signs depicting aborted fetuses, or with bogus medical claims about breast cancer, and of course, adverts for the ‘pregnancy crisis center’ they are heavily affiliated with. They have a couple people with bullhorns, too. They often call for men in the parking lot to ‘go in there and rescue your baby’. My fellow volunteers and I think they actually expect the guys to perform some Rambo-esque raid, bursting into the room and dragging the woman out over their shoulders (never mind that this would require dashing past multiple locked doors, knowing the layout of the back rooms, etc, etc). For them, it’s just all about the man being a man (they also despise the male volunteers, because we wear ~GASP~ pink vests. Seriously, two of the regulars have a major hang-up over the pink vests.
The other group are the Catholics. Mostly, they’re ‘better’, in that they don’t go in for the shouting, signs or histrionics. They’re much more likely to be women on their own than the Evangelicals, too (Catholic men do come as well, of course, but virtually any time a woman arrives alone, she ends up with the Catholics). Typically, they just stand there, saying the rosary quietly. It’s obnoxious, but it wouldn’t really add stress the way the others do. And of course, they often bring a 1:3 scale statue of the Virgin Mary in a clear plastic box, setting it up on a card table and saying prayers around it. The Evangelicals, especially the regulars, really really hate that one, of course. We just snicker because sometimes they also bring a small wooden church and put it on the same table, and since Mary is about 2.5x larger, we started calling her “Kaiju Mary”. (For the folks who missed that reference, “Kaiju” refers to giant Japanese movie monsters, like Godzilla.) The Catholic’s biggest offense is that they are far more likely to drag their kids out there, for some reason. I always feel bad for the kids, especially on hot days.
The Catholic church also has a heavily Hispanic population (yet another thing that makes the Evangelicals upset–brown skin, speaking Spanish…). On mother’s day weekend, there were a dozen Hispanic Catholic women there, all praying quietly like I described above–until any woman who looked remotely Hispanic got out of a car. Then they would make a Zerg-rush to the edge of the property line, shouting and imploring in Spanish until the woman had gone inside–then they’d calmly turn and go back across the street to continue with the prayers.
But sadly, it isn’t all fun and games. A few weeks back, there was a patient who was there with two friends, a man and a woman. The woman was, as friends often do when there, running back and forth to her car, or coming outside to grab a smoke. At one point, though, she had a seizure of some sort, going stiff as a board and toppling over, hitting her head on the concrete. One of the volunteers happened to see her, and ran inside to get immediate medical attention–you know, the sort of thing that saves lives. The nurses came and did the basic first aid for her, getting her steady until the paramedics arrived.
That set the Evangelicals off. They started shouting about how the clinic “didn’t even have the expertise to treat the woman” (whom they also insisted HAD to be the patient, who was still inside for most of this, coming out in time to ride with her friend to the hospital ER). They also all whipped out their cameras, trying to get a shot of the action. Fortunately, a combination of where the paramedics parked, the hedges near the door, and we volunteers doing the ‘physically block line of sight’ duty kept any of the three from getting immortalized on Facebook. I don’t think I’ve ever had a harder time obeying the ‘don’t engage the protestors’ rule that day–I seriously wanted to share the bile that built up over such naked aggression and opportunism.
Oh, man. That is foul.
Yeah; the bit with the staff’s ‘expertise’ level was particularly galling–it’s a clinic, performing outpatient procedures. They don’t have the capacity for overnight stays, or extensive medical gear for anything more than the very predictable range of complications that might arise. There’s not a walk-in clinic in the country that wouldn’t have handled the issue the exact same way. But anything to distort and twist reality to make it try to come close to their hideous world-view.