(Credit: Jezebel)
Taking the morning after
pill is equivalent to having an abortion. Emergency contraception typically
causes dangerous hemorrhaging, can damage the cervix, and often lands women in
the hospital. It’s not a good idea to buy emergency contraception over the
counter. Choosing abortion is emotionally damaging to women.
Those are just a few of the falsehoods that women receive from counselors at so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) — right-wing front groups that advocate an anti-abortion agenda. When 24-year-old activist
Katie Stack recently went undercover at a CPC in Cleveland, OH, she recorded an employee who told her all of that misleading information about
her options after she said she had recently had unprotected sex.
Posing as a 19-year-old who
was interested in information about “a pill you can take to not get pregnant”
because she had just had sex without a condom, the pro-choice activist
solicited advice from Cleveland’s Womakind, just one of approximately 2,500 of these right-wing
organizations across the country. She was
told that the morning after pill is “like having kind of an abortion” (it’s not) and it’s
very dangerous to her health (it isn’t).
Warning Katie against the
potential harm that could result from her decision to have sex outside of
marriage, the CPC employee told her, “Harming
yourself would be having an abortion. Or taking the pill after. Because
sometimes taking a pill like that could cause more bleeding than what you
think. It would only take you to the emergency room and you having to take care
of what’s happening. A lot of those things, you probably could read online, on
the Internet, the risks in taking something like that would be. There’s risks
in anything. It could leave damage to the cervix, it could mean hemorrhaging.”
Watch it, via Salon:
This isn’t an isolated
incident. Stack works to expose the tactics that CPCs use
to mislead vulnerable women across the country — and she was inspired to start
doing this undercover work after she experienced those tactics firsthand. As a
junior in college who found out she had unintentionally become pregnant, Stack sought counseling from a clinic
in Iowa that warned her about
abortion’s (false) link to
breast cancer and asked her about her relationship to Jesus Christ.
Other investigations into CPCs have revealed much of the same findings. Even though
these groups often present themselves as viable alternatives to women’s health
clinics like Planned Parenthood, they don’t actually provide the full range of
services — and theyemotionally manipulate
potentially vulnerable women who are seeking truthful
information about their reproductive health options. Nevertheless, some
anti-abortion lawmakers in states like Texas and Ohio have advocated to allocate state funds to CPCs instead of Planned
Parenthood.
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