Assholes.

I and a few other women systematically dismantled their arguments and corrected their errors. For example, I had to tell them that abortion was criminalized only toward the end of the 19th century (they thought it had always been illegal pre-Roe) and that Sarah Weddington, not Jane Roe, was the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade.

Not that it mattered. They still had giants pics, they didn’t change their minds, and I wasted 45 minutes of my life.

Luckily, through the support of my boyfriend, healthcare providers, and friends in whom I confided, I found the self-awareness to realize that termination was the right choice for me. Keeping that pregnancy would have been disastrous to me for a lot of reasons, and the fact that I even considered it speaks to me of how deeply I had internalized the anti-choice rhetoric, even though I was and am very pro-choice and usually smart enough to know better.

Long story short, this kind of thing matters, and it does have an effect.

I don’t worry about patients being influenced by the nutjobs, although I do worry about them being upset and traumatized by them. But in our state, patients have to get state-mandated “counseling” (designed by antis) before they can come in for their abortions, so they have already thought quite a lot about their decision.

It’s the poor frightened women and girls who fall into the hands of “crisis pregnancy clincs” or who are subjected to brainwashing attempts by their anti-choice “friends”. (Dang, sorry about all the quotation marks.) They will tell any lie, guilt trip these women up to their eyebrows, show them fake pictures and stories about how they regret their abortion blah blah, and we’ll give you whatever you want blah blah and really, going through the pregnancy so you can give the baby to someone like them is just like not being pregnant at all! Those places are dangerous.

Seriously though, I can see how someone young, unscientific and already pregnant could be convinced that their fetus is actually a life worth preserving. I heard a radio interview on NPR with a young woman in Queens I think, who was doing and excellent job of trying to keep her chit together while parenting, as a teen, a young child. She said that she was convinced to continue with her pregnancy becuase anti-choicers told her that his might he her only shot at motherhood.

It was unclear whether the implication was that the termination would fuck up her fertility, or whether the implication was that getting pregnant is so perilous and precious that one should treat every conception as though it might be their last and only chance.

Anyone else catch that interview?