In light weekend news, reports are coming from Milwaukee that young women without easy access to birth control may be doing what women the world over have always done when faced with an unwanted pregnancy: going to extraordinary lengths to terminate.
Wisconsin medical professionals say they are looking into rumors that teenage girls are taking livestock drugs to end unwanted pregnancies.
The executive director of Care Net Pregnancy Center of Green County in Monroe says she has identified 10 girls who admitted taking prostaglandins, which are drugs given to cows. Anna Anderson says the girls told her the drugs were a cheap way to end their pregnancies without their parents finding out.
But other officials are more skeptical about the reports.
Wisconsin Department of Health Services spokesman Seth Boffeli says the agency has no documented cases of teenage girls taking livestock drugs to end pregnancies.
Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin spokeswoman Pat Else says her group also is investigating the reports but has not confirmed them. (via the Chicago Tribune)
Now, these reports may very well be untrue. But if they are true, I can’t say my cold feminist heart is one goddamned bit surprised. Take three parts banning women’s access to safe, legal abortions, enact a “Fetal Homicide Law” that you actually enforce, stir with one part telling young women they will ruin their whole lives with a child but they should nonetheless enjoy motherhood because it is the most Divine Experience Ever Experienced By White Men Who Have Never Given Birth, Or So They’ve Heard, and what do you get? A big old cake of girls possibly taking drugs meant for 300-pound animals because it’s clearly the least shit-stained of all the smelly options before them.
Canada is looking more appealing every goddamned day.
Care Net, of course, is a nationwide network of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers. The director of a Care Net would have little reason to invent such a story — surely more women WANTING abortions is the last thing Care Net would desire to publicize, seeing as their whole mission is to convince women that abortions are never the best option? Unless I’m missing something here.