Posted on April 23,
2023
How Not To Pretend
To Kill Babies
by
Daniel
Clark
Pro-life crisis pregnancy centers are being criticized,
and even legislated against, as "fake clinics," which attract pregnant women
under false pretenses by suggesting that they provide abortions when they
don't. We must assume this to be true,
because it is being told to us by the same sources that, in the past, have said
that human fetuses are literally the same things as fish, that abortionists
themselves want abortions to be rare, that babies killed in late-term abortions
die peacefully, that nobody is really pro-abortion, that RU-486 is safer than
Tylenol, and that abortion is only 3 percent of what abortion clinics actually
do. Why would anyone doubt them?
One
must conclude, then, that these crisis pregnancy centers are badly in need of a
few good consultants, because the manner in which they're operating would never
fool anybody. In fact, they're so easy
to detect that a pro-abortion website called Expose Fake Clinics has compiled a
list of thousands of them. The following
is just a sampling of the fake clinics it has exposed here in Pennsylvania
alone: A Baby's Breath, ABC Life Center,
Bethany Christian Services, Birthright, Every Life Matters, Free Abortion
Alternatives, Life-Way Pregnancy Center, Lifeline Pregnancy Care Center, New
Life Options, Precious Life, Pro-Life Union of Greater Philadelphia, and the TryLife Center. For
entities masquerading as abortion clinics, the manner in which they name
themselves is often a dead giveaway, so to speak. It's little wonder their true identities have
been so easily sniffed out by the opposition.
To be fair, there are also quite a few CPCs that
employ the word "choice" in their titles.
Then again, we've always been told that "choice" does not mean abortion. In fact, when that term is taken out of its
political context, it more aptly describes the multiple options that are
offered by the CPCs than the one that is pushed by the abortion clinics to the
exclusion of all others. Nevertheless,
the word has been a recognizable part of the pro-abortion lexicon for decades,
and thus is inextricably identified with that cause. Those centers that have co-opted it have at
least gotten that much right.
Once you see one of them in person, however, you'll
see that they always do something to give themselves away. Take, for instance, the HerChoice
pregnancy center that was vandalized last weekend in Bowling Green, Ohio. The operators of this facility made the
fundamental tactical error of listing the services they provide on their front
window, including pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and STI testing. One thing that is conspicuously missing is abortion.
If you're serious about pretending to be an abortion clinic, why not just say
that you provide abortions? Other CPCs
with ambiguous titles make the mistake of adorning their facades with phrases
like "Abortion alternatives," or worse yet, "We care about you and your
baby." Such unforced errors are what an
inside-the-beltway political analyst might describe as "not helpful."
An even more serious blunder is that this same Bowling
Green facility openly advertises, in all caps, the fact that "ALL SERVICES ARE
FREE." It's difficult to draw a starker
contrast with an abortion clinic than that.
On one side, there are charitable institutions that provide temporary
housing, diapers and formula, baby clothes, post-abortion counseling, and
assistance in arranging adoptions, among other things. On the other are clinics that offer nothing
but a dead baby, and that for a significant cost. No middle ground exists in which to confuse
the two.
Perhaps
the most conspicuous of these fake clinics are the ones that are oblivious
enough to adopt names that suggest an affiliation with a Christian church. If they really want to appear to be abortion
clinics, they should go in the exact opposite direction. For example, the Samuel Alito's Mom's Satanic
Abortion Clinic opened in New Mexico this February. Its website features a cartoon of an old
woman, presumably Mrs. Alito, saying, "If only abortion was legal when I was
pregnant." Because then, Samuel Alito
would be dead! Get it? Bad jokes aside, this is an actual abortion
facility, insofar as it provides prescriptions for abortion pills, and it is
actually operated by the Satanic Temple.
So, instead of including a word like "Saint" in its title, an effective
fake clinic would more likely call itself something like "Mephisto
Full of Dollars."
There's more to an abortion clinic than just a name,
of course. For the subterfuge to hold up
once the intended targets have been lured inside, the CPCs cannot look like Romper
Room, as they tend to do. To make
the deception complete, they need to study and mimic the violations for which
abortion clinics are often cited. It
would help to leave rusty and unsterile medical instruments lying around,
speckle surfaces with dried blood, and scatter evidence of vermin, just for
starters. A really good fake clinic
might even go so far as to stock its refrigerator with drugs that are years
past their expiration dates.
Until they begin taking measures like these, the most
that CPCs will be able to accomplish is to get the attention of ambivalent women
on their way to the abortion clinics, and persuade them to carry their children
to term. They will never succeed in
tricking women who have already decided to abort into entering their building
instead, thus angering them and making them all the more determined to go
through with the act.
Why they should wish to do this is not abundantly
clear, but this must be their aim, because we have been told as much by the abortionists. You know: the people who have repeatedly
claimed they provide mammograms when not a single one of them has ever done so;
who habitually administer abortion pills as inserts through the birth canal,
when FDA guidance says they are to be taken orally; who are frequently cited
for staffing their facilities with unlicensed and unqualified personnel; who commonly
refer to the deliberately lethal act they commit as "health care"; and who
consider a procedure to have been "botched" if all parties involved have come
out alive.
Who else but they could possibly be so knowledgeable
about fake clinics?
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press