Imagine you just had unprotected sex and, worried about becoming pregnant but believing (correctly) from your internet research that there's still time to prevent it, you go to a "maternal and prenatal care" center and ask about Plan B, and:
After some confusion, the counselor replies inaccurately, “It sounds like the morning after pill. If you have intercourse and then take this pill and it causes a period to come on or something, or bleeding. It’s like having kind of an abortion.” She adds, “That could harm you. It really could harm you … You could hemorrhage from anything like that.”Also, she tells you, "sometimes taking a pill like that could cause more bleeding than what you think" and "It could leave damage to the cervix, it could mean hemorrhaging." Scary, huh?
That's all on a secret video filmed by activist and patients' advocate Katie Stack as she went undercover as a patient at an Ohio crisis pregnancy center, and it raises a question. What's scarier: the fake side effects the "counselor" lists, or the fact that many women and girls are being denied actual medical care, care that could safely keep them from becoming pregnant, by fake advice like this?
Stack founded the Crisis Project to document the lies women are told at crisis pregnancy centers, the anti-abortion offices set up to trick women out of having abortions with whatever combination of misinformation and fear-mongering necessary. We're talking serious, intentional deception here:
Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood employee turned antiabortion activist, gave a workshop at Heartbeat International’s 2012 conference titled “Competing With the Abortion Industry.” According to audio of the event, Johnson told participants, ”We want to look professional. We want to look businesslike. And yeah, we do kind of want to look medical.” She discouraged them from foregrounding their religious affiliation, so as to better trick women: “We want to appear neutral on the outside. The best call, the best client you ever get is one that thinks they’re walking into an abortion clinic. Those are the best clients that could ever walk in your door or call your center, the ones that think you provide abortions.”It almost makes you wonder if all those heavily edited James O'Keefe and Lila Rose videos originally came about because they assumed that when they walked into places like ACORN and Planned Parenthood, they'd find the kind of routine lying their own allies specialize in.