home!

You know folks, only some really intense love could make me endure a thirteen hour Amtrak ride to get to a red state. It was a lovely vacation, even with conservative undertones. At one point, we got a flat tire and had to pull into the parking lot of a crisis pregnancy center to change it. In 108 degree heat. I had never seen one before-- which is not to say that in these more northern liberal regions they are merely lore; I know I've seen ads for them on the subway. Always headed with something like "PREGNANT?" in big, contrasting text. Always featuring a young woman of color. The horror stories you hear about these places are so incredibly screwed up.
I'm currently reading Cristina Page's "How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America", which makes the hard-to-refute claim that the right-to-life movement is more interested in changing the way we think about sex than the way we think about babies or life. Not a single supposedly anti-abortion organization in this country publicly supports the usage of contraception (other than natural family planning), and many are outwardly opposed to it. The enthusiasm for this movement is perpetuated by a fantastic amount of misinformation (birth control pills actually cause abortions, rather than prevent pregnancy-- the same patently untrue claim that kept [and keeps] emergency contraception on a hard to reach shelf) and snarky moralism (sex should be purely pro-creative; leave the number of children you have in God's hands).
The same could be said about these Crisis Centers, of which there are allegedly twice as many in the U.S. as abortion-performing clinics. It is based upon a moral agenda fueled by fervent sexual conservatism, and it is held so passionately by so many that the health and wellbeing of woman is manipulated and jeopardized.