LOS ANGELES — Shortly after signing a bill allowing assisted suicide in California, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown signed another measure that forces pregnancy crisis centers to “offer information about affordable contraception, abortion and prenatal care.”
The information is to be displayed in the form of a sign tacked to the crisis center’s door and must include a phone number to the nearest county services office where family free or low-cost family planning services can be obtained.
Deceptively labeled the Reproductive FACT Act, the measure requires women seeking help with an unplanned pregnancy to be informed of alternatives, including abortions, which the pregnancy crisis centers do not perform.
Republican Assemblyman Brian Jones tells me the law is a “one-way street.” He says the law does not require signs advising the availability of alternatives to abortion in facilities that perform the procedure. Jones, who voted against the bill, says he showed some of his Democratic colleagues the videos from the Planned Parenthood “sting” that revealed employees discussing the sale of fetal body parts from aborted babies. Jones says his colleagues claimed not to have seen the videos and were “shocked.” Not shocked enough, though, to vote against the bill. Jones blames the Democratic leadership for pressuring its members to vote for the measure.
A Los Angeles Times editorial said the law will “counteract the troubling and deceptive practices employed by some ‘crisis pregnancy’ centers to deter women from considering abortion.”
The real deceivers are the ones who promote abortion as a woman’s “right.”
Carol Everett, a former abortion provider, had an abortion herself, then wrote a book revealing how women are pressured into having abortions and denied information that might lead them to reconsider. The title tells the story: “Blood Money: Getting Rich Off a Woman’s Right to Choose.”
At Priestsforlife.org, she writes about abortion clinics: “They don’t sell keeping the baby. They don’t sell giving the baby up for adoption. They don’t sell delivering that baby in any form. They only sell abortions.”
For more than three decades I have spoken at fundraising events for these pregnancy crisis centers. I have met the dedicated and compassionate women who run them and many of the clients who have received free counseling and services that include baby clothes, help in finding a job and spiritual counseling about different lifestyle choices. Not once has any of these women told me they regret their decision to give birth.
I have also met many women who have had abortions and who have gone through a program called Post-Abortion Counseling and Education (PACE), a program that helps women come to terms with their decision to end a pregnancy, where they can experience healing and forgiveness without judgment. Often these women have told me that if the abortion provider had given them information about abortion alternatives they would have made a different choice. Many were not allowed to see the sonogram. According to PolitiFact, “Research indicates that some women seeking an abortion change their mind after having an ultrasound.”
Carol Everett says abortion providers deceive women by telling them their “fetus” is not human, or merely tissue, and that their lives will be better after they get rid of the “burden.” Anything, she says, to get their money. When these women suffer depression or turn to drinking and other self-destructive behavior, the abortionist doesn’t help them. Pregnancy crisis centers do.
With the number of U.S. unborn baby deaths approaching 60 million since the Supreme Court made abortions legal in 1973, and with assisted suicide and probably other threats to human life on the horizon as the population ages and “replacements” are killed in the womb, the notion slowly takes hold that the unwanted and inconvenient stand in the way of one’s personal peace and affluence. What inhumanity is next in this “brave new world” environment?
Who, or what, will stop the carnage?
Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.