For a short time, Puritanism was the dominant religion in America. But the need to populate a large continent led to lots of immigration of lots of people from different religions. Since then, we Americans have developed a sardonic definition of Puritan: a person with the nagging feeling that, somewhere, someone is having fun and must be stopped.
The new orthodoxy, the state religion, is that abortion is a positive good. Thus, a pro-choice Puritan is a person with the nagging feeling that, somewhere, a woman doesn’t choose abortion. California seems to be full of pro-choice Puritans. The legislature passed a bill regulating what pro-life pregnancy care centers may say, and how loudly they may say it. Pregnancy care centers in California are required to post the fact that abortion is available elsewhere. The state regulates where such signage must be located and how large the typeface must be.
The Big “Lie”
Evidently, the Big Abortion Industry feels threatened by these centers. Even liberal California has 167 privately financed and run pregnancy care centers. This is according to a NARAL Pro-Choice America “report” dispassionately titled “Crisis Pregnancy Centers Lie.” Nationwide, according to this “report,” there were 2,460 pregnancy care centers, 438 abortion clinics, 839 “Guttmacher clinics” (a term for which I could find no definition) and 1,720 “Guttmacher providers” (again, an undefined term).
(The Guttmacher Institute is “a leading research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States and globally.” It originated as the research arm of Planned Parenthood then in the late 1970s became an independent entity, but it is in lock-step with fiercest of abortion advocacy groups, such as Planned Parenthood and NARAL.)
The idea that pregnancy care centers are “tricking” or “misleading” women into having their babies is preposterous on its face. The decision to abort can be carried out in a single afternoon, but the decision to carry a child to term has to be reaffirmed every day throughout the pregnancy. The woman may change her mind one morning, walk into the abortion clinic, and her baby will be gone forever.
The pregnancy care center model is to accompany the mother throughout her pregnancy. I know of centers that help mothers find work or housing. I know of centers that provide the mothers with material assistance through the child’s first year. Many centers provide classes on childcare and healthy relationships. Is there something wrong with that?
Shame and judge
The Big Abortion Industry’s claim that crisis pregnancy centers “lie” doesn’t hold water. In a section of the “report” purporting to show how pregnancy care centers “shame and judge” pregnant women, we find these items:
• “69 percent of CPCs [crisis pregnancy centers] investigated in Montana displayed or presented fetal “dolls”—models that are often developmentally incorrect and used to shame and dissuade women from abortion.” (What exactly do “often” and “incorrect” mean?)
• “61 percent of CPCs investigated in North Carolina pressured women not to have abortions by providing baby items.” (Unconscionable!)
• “In the New York City investigation, 73 percent of the CPC staffers referred to the fetus as a ‘baby’ or ‘unborn child’ and to abortion as ‘killing,’ and 89 percent of CPCs did so in their written materials.”
Every state in America has some kind of regulation against consumer fraud. The fact is, these “lies” do not come anywhere near meeting the legal standard for “consumer fraud.” Unless the pro-choice Puritans get their friends in the legislature to redefine fraud to mean “failing to use politically correct euphemisms.”
Let’s be clear: pro-life pregnancy centers are in business to provide alternatives to abortion. They do not want to refer people for abortions. The Big Abortion Industry insists on enlisting its competitors in promoting its business, because its business is not simply providing abortions.
Members of the Big Abortion Industry are creating the fantasy ideology of the Sexual Revolution. They want to convince people that everyone has the right to act as if sex were a casual activity with no moral or social consequences. Since this is patently untrue, the pro-choice Puritans must suppress those who dissent from their orthodoxy.
Sex and babies
If you leave people alone to follow the trail of their experience and the evidence, most people come to realize that sex does in fact make babies. Even contracepted sex sometimes makes babies. The only way to make the fantasy ideology appear to be true is to downplay contraceptive failure and the medical risks, psychological problems, or plain unhappiness that sometimes arise from abortion.
A pregnancy care center tells women that contraception sometimes fails. (Most of them have already learned this. Roughly half of women who come for abortions say they were using contraception the month they got pregnant. In this study, it was 54 percent. Not a typo. Look at Table 1.) A pregnancy care center tells women that abortion sometimes has negative consequences. Most of all, pregnancy care centers tell women that having their babies and being good mothers is a realistic possibility.
The true believers can’t allow heresies like these to go unchallenged. That is why I say that the pro-choice Puritans are haunted by the thought that some woman, somewhere, wants to keep her baby.
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This article first appeared at The Blaze.