Rai Rojas
A few weeks ago a friend asked me to appear on NPR to discuss Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs). She noted that the conversation would be about CPCs in general but more specifically about the anti-CPC law in New York City.
I agreed immediately, not just because CPCs serve such a life-saving link in the pro-life chain, but also because delivering diapers and formula on behalf of a CPC to new moms was one of the first things I did in the right to life movement. I know firsthand what great work these centers do.
It was also a timely discussion. Days before the taping of the program, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a lower court’s decision that most of the anti-crisis pregnancy law passed by the NYC council against CPCs was unconstitutional. The NYC council had passed the law by a vote of 39 to 9 in March of 2011 in the hopes of shutting down CPCs across the city.
In the opening NPR segment we heard from a “field reporter” (a woman’s whose name I’ve forgotten or clearly blocked) who expounded on the “horrors” of the CPCs and how disingenuous they are. Then the pro-abortion guest spoke and stated how CPCs hurt women.
That’s at about the point I lost my mind. My response:
“Women don’t die at Crisis Pregnancy Centers. The most invasive procedure to take place there is a blood test and doctors with suspended licenses don’t go from room to room wielding unhygienic and unsterilized instruments perforating uterus and sucking out intestines. Would that Tonya Reeves or Maria Santiago or Jennifer Morbelli or Karnamaya Mongar had gone to a Crisis Pregnancy Center instead of Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics they’d be alive today.”
There was a pause as I composed myself and the producer stopped shaking his head–yet they still followed up with, “but wearing lab coats is misleading.” I responded by letting them know that the women who work behind the Estée Lauder counter at Macy’s wear lab coats and no one is mistaking them for plastic surgeons.
The rest of the show was spent discussing the number of abortions Latina women have. I commented about how high and disparate the ratio of abortions for women of color is and reminded them that the most dangerous place for a Latino in the United States is in her mother’s womb.
Needless to say by the time I took off my headphones and stepped away from the mic, the folks at the other end were not the least bit amused. I had also said that the biggest issue the abortion industry takes with CPCs has little to do with women’s health – it has to do with their bottom line. It really is all about money for them.
One of the authors of the anti-CPC bill and rabid pro-abortion advocate Christine C. Quinn, formerly the Speaker of the New York City Council, said, “Women need to know, they have a right to know, whether they are consulting with a licensed medical provider.”
Really Christine? Remember Karnamaya Mongar? She was administered lethal doses of anesthesia by a woman with an 8th grade education at Kermit Gosnell’s “House of Horrors” abortion clinic. Gosnell was convicted of second-degree manslaughter in Mrs. Mongar’s death.
Maria Santiago died because no one at the abortion clinic where she had been butchered knew or had been trained on how to perform CPR. Planned Parenthood has been ordered to pay Tonya Reaves’s family $2 million because the “highly trained staff” at one of their Chicago clinics didn’t have the wherewithal to call paramedics as Ms. Reaves bled to death.
If they really cared about women, the folks on the NYC Council would train that laser-like focus they have on the very real horrors that take place in shoddy and dirty abortion mills at times run by people with suspended medical licenses.
But they won’t (to their great shame). There’s no money to be made in providing women alternatives to abortion and as a result, in NYC – and the rest of the nation – the single most dangerous place for a Latina continues to be in her mother’s womb.
By Rai Rojas, NRL News
