Pro Life Abortion Lies
I have always tended to trust people. Don’t ask me why – it’s just part of my genetic makeup. But when you are in the middle of the abortion “wars,” as I was for many years, trusting people can get you into a lot of trouble.
Sometime in the early part of 1993, I was at my desk in the offices of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers when I got a call from one of our doctors in Nevada. “Hey Pat, what the hell is this Project Choice survey? Should I respond?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but soon learned how most of our doctors had received a “confidential” survey from a group called “Project Choice.” The cover letter indicated that this group had been contacted by a foundation that was interested in helping protect abortion providers from violence and harassment, but before they would commit they wanted “evidence” that the violence and/or harassment was real. So, the folks at Project Choice compiled an extensive mailing list of clinics and mailed out 961 surveys. Ultimately, almost 285 were completed, a very high return rate of 30 percent.
Pro Life Abortion Life Dynamics' Lies
After talking to the doctor, I called the phone number listed on the survey. I was immediately connected to a woman named Lisa Nelson. She was very personable, thrilled that a person from a pro-choice national organization had called because, as she put it, “some of the pro-choice groups we’ve talked to are very suspicious of who we are.” Ah, but I was different. I was thrilled that someone wanted to help our abortion doctors. Lisa told me about the foundation and I told her I would love to help her out by urging our doctors to participate.
The survey was impressive. It came in a package came with a self-addressed stamped envelope and when it was received, the participant received a call and a thank you note. The survey was divided into four parts: Doctor’s Profile, Motivation, Social Environment, and Harassment and Violence. Of course, we all focused on the “Harassment and Violence” section, anxious to provide them with a comprehensive picture of the terrorism that was taking place against abortion providers at the time. While I was promoting the project, staff people at the National Abortion Federation were more suspect and, indeed, encouraged their members to not participate in the survey. Always at loggerheads with NAF, I took the opposite course and told our members that I saw no problems with their filling out the survey. Indeed, I visualized Project Choice getting that big foundation grant to help stem the violence and my being part of that press conference.
Pro Life Abortion Life Dynamics' Lies
Lisa and I kept in touch over the next few weeks. She was very personable, a spry young pro-choice lass who was anxious to help out her “heroes” in the field of abortion. We talked enthusiastically about the results she was getting that documented the violence and harassment against our doctors. Meanwhile, I never paid any attention to the “Social Environment” section of the survey.
One day, when Lisa and I were just chatting it up, I asked her where she was going to college and she mentioned some university in Denton, Texas. The name of the town sounded familiar and I asked my staff person if she had ever heard of it and she casually said “yeah, that’s where Life Dynamics is located.” Life Dynamics was a notorious, super aggressive anti-abortion group headed up by a wacko named Mark Crutcher. My stomach started to churn a bit.
I let it go for a few days, but ultimately picked up the phone and called the Life Dynamics office.
“Hello, Life Dynamics, can I help you?”
“Uh, yes, this is Pat Richards. Could I speak to Lisa Nelson please?”
I found myself begging that she would say “I’m sorry, there is no one here by that name.” Instead, she asked if she could put me on hold. My blood pressure started to creep up.
“Well, hello, Pat. So, you found me.”
I had to do everything to keep my lunch down. Instead of the perky college student voice I had become familiar with, the voice was now downright sinister. I had caught her to some extent (she could have ignored me but she took the call because the survey was already done). But we both knew that I had been a totally idiot and you could tell she relished the moment.
I was at a loss for words but lamely spit out “Well, Lisa, I hope you’re happy. You must be very proud of yourself.”
“Pat, this is a war and I’m a soldier of the Lord.”
I hung up, ran outside and, yes, lost my lunch. When I got back to the office, we sent out an emergency fax telling our members that we had “exposed” Project Choice, hoping folks would forget that we had originally encouraged them to participate in the survey. But, by that time, the surveys had been completed and mailed back. Still, we didn’t panic because we couldn’t imagine what they would do with “evidence” that our doctors were being terrorized.
Within a few weeks, Life Dynamics had a press conference, reveling in the fact that they had pulled off this scam and, more important to them, revealing the answers to the questions. They hardly said a work about harassment. Instead, they focused on the Social Environment section of the survey.
The cited how sixty-five percent of the doctors said they felt ostracized because of their work. Half of the doctors reported having problems keeping or recruiting staff because they did abortions. Almost 40% of the doctors said that certain aspects of the abortion procedure caused then “concern.” The strategy was to use the words of the abortion doctors themselves to prove how they were pariahs in the medical community. From this, they concluded that “the moral concerns abortion providers have about performing abortions is an internal phenomenon brought on by the nature of the act itself, and are not directly related to anti-abortion activity.”
In addition, however, the answers to the “Harassment and Violence” section gave groups like Operation Rescue encouragement. Even among providers who had not personally experienced harassment, over 20 percent said that such activity caused them to consider quitting. Many of them said that this type of activity has had a negative impact on their family. Then, they reported how the doctors reported feeling everything from anger to thoughts of suicide. Some even admitted to drug use. It was a green light for more terrorism and, indeed, the next few years were hell.
Cleverly, Life Dynamics used the “self-portrait” to paint an ugly picture of the world of abortion providers, to demonstrate that they were the “bottom feeders” of the medical world and that many of them did not feel good about their life and work. Meanwhile, they sent a signal to other anti-abortion zealots that the harassment was working.
In the long run, who knows what the survey and the subsequent pronouncements actually accomplished? Sure, it must have been a blast that day at the Life Dynamics office, the conversations and the high fives around the water cooler probably lasted for weeks. The terrorism increased, but it’s impossible to say if it was a result of this project.
What did change, however, was this ugly episode only made me more cynical, more suspicious.
That’s the saddest part of this whole story.
Related Articles
- The “Project Choice” Survey (abortion.ws)
- Bill says no abortion if there’s a heartbeat (dispatch.com)
- Fetus Set To Testify In Favor Of Anti-Abortion Bill (huffingtonpost.com)
- Anti-Abortion Groups Adopt In-Your-Face Tactics (huffingtonpost.com)
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 
March 9, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Linda, first I’d like to offer my condolences for all the vituperation being dumped on you and aquagirl. The people who are doing it clearly haven’t learned much about aborticentrism. If they do, they’ll understand much better where you’re coming from and how to communicate with you rather than just vent their own frustrations.
I’m glad to hear that you are in favor of contraception and birth control. As a single father, I share your resentment of the attitude a lot of men have towards paternity. I was once the program director of a non-custodial fathers’ group I called the Men’s Room (behind their back), and the only thing all but two of them were interest in on a list of topics was “How to Avoid Child Support” or something like that.
As you’ve said, life is a continuum, but why concentrate on the implausible specter of a 39 6/7ths weeks fetus being aborted? It simply doesn’t happen? Why not accept that no child will ever be even near fully human unless there is a primary caretaker dedicated to that proposition? In Rumania, orphan staff were the primary caretakers for tens of thousands of babies, most of whom are finishing their life on the street, begging, hustling, prostituting, stealing and huffing. To become human, a child needs someone who will sacrifice– and I’m not ready to take on another 1.5 million kids.
Neither are you, but you want other women to go where you won’t. What does it say about you that you won’t care for a child that you insist be born?
Aborticentrism posits that one’s own fear of death (we are the only beings known to be able to contemplate our death and imagine becoming nothing, unremembered, unremarked, unkown– and we can’t handle it by ourselves) paralyzes us, unless we come up with a coping strategy. We find it in religion or philosophy for the most part, but some of us can’t rely on those, and we try to repress our knowledge.
However, that can take so much of our energy that we wouldn’t have enough left to do anything else; hence, the paralysis. In order to deal with our fear without being able to rely on God, Buddha or some other avenue, we seek to earn perpetual remembrance by becoming a hero. We seek to be as remembered as Jesus, Napoleon, or Edmund Booth, etc.
But some of us take a shortcut– rather than actually working to be a hero, we invent a heroic role. We create the perfect victim, define the evil villain in the most horrific terms, and then let the public know how important our rescue work is.
What we are actually doing is acting out an allegory in which the victim is us, the villain is our mortality, and we are God, the rescuer.
And that’s what the so-called “pro-life” movement is really about. I have asked several times what it says about you that you would walk away from a child that you insisted be born, and you’ve stayed focused on abortion. That’s aborticentrism. I’d think about it long and hard in relation to your chosen field of work.
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March 9, 2011 at 5:40 pm
Linda,
How can you be a real prolifer when hormonal contraception contraception can abort the fertilized cell baby?
Are you really pro Life?
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March 11, 2011 at 7:14 am
Well, Linda’s left, and she never did answer the question of what it says about her that she would walk away from a child she insisted be born. . . .
I think she left because she knows the answer, and it’s too unpleasant to have to face.
It’s the same sort of thing you will find with alcoholics in denial– who, ironically enough, are going to be some of her clients in her chosen field!
It makes me wonder if one can be a good therapist when one isn’t honest with oneself.
On the other hand, if she’s a counselor for a “Crisis Pregnancy Center,” she’ll fit right in. The one we had working with our local CPC got busted for having sex with a client. He went off to become a Sufi. . . .I feel sorry for the Sufis.
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March 11, 2011 at 9:46 am
It’s interesting how these folks come and go. While I dont blame them for getting irritated at some of the silly questions posed by some of the pro-choicers, I really do thing they run out of answers. If that’s the case, how come we pro-choicers aint winning? Oh well…
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March 11, 2011 at 11:41 am
Responsible is soooo right! They never answer any easy or hard questions.
Also, that was funny about the CPC.
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February 8, 2014 at 6:29 pm
Administrator:Thank you for your comment, I am plnaning on writing an article on this subject so I don’t want to address all your points at this time, I will shortly.The one thing that does intrigue me is your comment that the cleansing nature of the profit motive tends (over time) to weed out software that performs poorly or is poorly supported. IMHO, overall this mechanism operates less effectively in the open source community. While I agree that paying customers can put tremendous pressure on a company to correct deficiencies, an individual company is limited by the number of resources it can afford to assign to bug fixes. Witness Oracle 6.0 or Windows Vista, both companies made radical improvements but it took significant time.While in the open source community the resources available to tackle a problem are a magnitude greater by comparison. No single company could ever afford that many resources to throw at a issue.So while profit does drive behaviour resource pool can also drive quicker results.
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March 11, 2011 at 3:45 pm
“Pro-choicers” are not winning because they refuse to take the battle to the enemy!! You guys are always fixating on your rights, when you should be attacking their neurosis. You never challenge them on their disdain for the next human born!!! If you understood how their aborticentrism has them vote for terrible Congressional representation, you’d do something about it.
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March 14, 2011 at 10:13 am
With limited time and resources, the battle needs to be at the voting both. If they are pro-choice, vote ’em in. We dont have time, money, etc. to start playing around with making the antis look bad…it just aint gonna happen, cg
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March 14, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Until “pro-choicers” are willing to expend as much energy stripping the facade off so-called “pro-lifers,” there will never be enough resources to get a majority of “pro-choice” legislators elected.
Furthermore, if ALL candidates are aware that so-called “pro-lifers” are the uterine equivalent of teabaggers, they’re not going to be looking very avidly to identify themselves as advocates for the scpl’s.
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March 14, 2011 at 4:07 pm
“off so-called ‘pro-lifers’ [as the scpl’s are at working out their issues about Death]. . . .”
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May 4, 2011 at 5:14 pm
No wonder it’s been two months since someone last commented here. Wanna know how to stop a conversation? Read #’s 25 & 26. Sometimes I almost think our adolescent illiterates talk better than Chuckles. (almost, not really)
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July 13, 2011 at 11:37 am
I would just like to understand why you guys call yourself “pro-choice” if you’re anti “pro-life”? Shouldn’t you be called something like “pro-abortion”?
And my question may seem very naive to you, but when an abortion is performed, how can you be sure that the baby (I’m just going to reunite embryo and fetus under the same name) doesn’t suffer?
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July 13, 2011 at 1:04 pm
A number of people in our movement say they are for the woman’s right to “choose,” not necessarily in favor of them getting an abortion. But I personally think if you support their right to have an abortion then aren’t you somewhat “pro-abortion?” It’s all semantics….
As for the baby “suffering,” there are a thousand studies on one side and a thousand on the other. You choose. As for me, I’d be sad if there was some “suffering” but I still support the mother over the life she is crrying but does not want to give birth do….
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July 13, 2011 at 1:14 pm
R, “pro-lifers” pledge to raise to adulthood every “unborn human” they want “rescued” (i.e., their own fetus, because they intend to have and to raise a baby). If they were “pro-abortion,” they would insist that a lot of other people they didn’t know, didn’t like or didn’t approve of shuld have to have an abortion, the same way so-called “pro-lifers” insist that people they don’t know, don’t like and don’t approve of should have to bear a child. So, since the so-called “pro-lifers” as a class refuse to raise to adulthood every “unborn human” they want “rescued, it then follows that the “pro-choicers” are actually the truly pro-life people.
As for the matter of pain, the definitive study was done on whether the fetus feels pain. You can google to find the study. The answer was no. You have to be aware that because YOU understand pain, it’s easy to think something is feeling pain when actually it is doing no more than exhibiting an autonomic response to an external stimulus. An earthword being pierced by a hook does not feel pain, but to the observer it looks as though it does. What is seen is the organizm’s response to a stimulus which, left ignored, would result in its death and subsequent inability to pass its genetic traits on to the next generation. In other words, it wriggles in response not because it feels pain but because wriggling is a survival response for the species.
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