New Videos Highlight Lies, Harassment by Anti-Choicers

Through the magic of Youtube, two new short videos regarding anti-choice attempts to keep women from having abortions have popped up online recently. One is a documentary film of sidewalk bullies harassing women outside a regular reproductive health clinic; the other shares the many lies pushed upon women by Crisis Pregnancy Centers.

Some of the anti-choice protesters outside the reproductive health clinic stick to simply pressuring women to turn aside and not kill their babies. We have some more inventive disturbing moments though -- like the man who calls out, "Mommy please, don't let them pull off my arms and legs." Or the woman who cries, "Whenever you see roadkill, think of your grandchild." My personal favorite is the old man shouting, in the vindictive voice of a village elder, "SHAME! Shame! You're not a woman -- you're a baby-killer! You're a murderer!" On the scale from effective to ridiculous and anger-inducing, I'd say this leans heavily to the later. It's hard to imagine that some gray-haired male, completely lacking in the ability to getting pregnant, calling a woman a baby-killer would be the best way to convince her to change her mind. Maybe he just gets his kicks from harassing women.

In the second video, by NARAL Pro-Choice America, we look at the opposite of actual reproductive health clinics: lying Crisis Pregnancy Centers. A series of young women relate some pretty standard CPC lies that a Virginia center feeds pregnant women looking for accurate information so they can make choices about safe sex and abortion. My personal favorite for all-out nonsense is, "Because the doctor can't see what he's doing [during an abortion], he could accidentally suck out your bowels." But, on the making up things about the dangers of sex side, "STDs can hide in the vagina, crawl up into the fallopian tubes, and make you infertile," comes in at a close second.