I remember from my own clinic years that when a woman came to our front desk crying and shaking I always knew she had been waylaid by the Fake Clinic directly across the hall.

Now that South Dakota has actually passed legislation requiring every woman seeking an abortion to be ‘counseled’ by a Fake Clinic, it’s obvious that, in all fairness, every pregnant woman who is considering having a baby has to be counseled at an abortion clinic. Of course that wouldn’t make any sense because, unlike the Fake Clinics, abortion clinics don’t have an agenda for the patient except that she make the best decision for herself!

What would happen if a woman who wanted a baby were counseled at an abortion clinic? The counselor or advocate would ask a few questions and then probably say something like “It sounds as though you know what you want. Congratulations. Can I help you find any community resources to help?”

What will happen when a woman who wants an abortion is counseled at a Fake Clinic? The monstrous deception that occurs in the Fake Clinics has been exposed in films such as the HBO Special 12th and Delaware. Because the Fakes have a well-hidden agenda, everything they do is designed to frighten and shame a woman who knows it is not the right time for her to have a baby. This fraudulence is clearly set out in the instructions given by the diabolical Robert Pearson, who came up with this brilliant and evil plan way back in 1967 when abortion was first legal in Hawaii. Pearson himself acknowledged and defended the deception in a 1994 speech: “obviously, we’re fighting Satan… A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby. Therefore, when she calls and says, ‘Do you do abortions?’ we do not tell her, No, we don’t do abortions.” The volunteers in his centers and others like them don’t mind tricking women because they think they are following some ‘higher law’. They don’t mind lying and misrepresenting things like the specious breast cancer-abortion link, the dangers of abortion, and most cruel of all, the help available to a woman who realizes that she honestly cannot support a child financially. The original Pearson manual includes: “[o]ur name of the game is to get the woman to come in as do the abortion chambers. Be put off by nothing… Let nothing stop you. The stakes are life or death.” In 12th and Delaware we witnessed a young woman who came to a Fake and was so terrified by what they told her about abortion that she went home and months later knew with great anguish that she was still in no position to have and support a child. But by then she had little choice.

I remember in my own clinic years that when a woman came to our front desk crying and shaking I always knew she had been waylaid by the Fake Clinic directly across the hall from us–the Fake Clinic that advertised Free Pregnancy Testing and Financial Assistance. There was no financial assistance for abortion in Dallas, Texas. We did everything we knew to alert women to its existence including telling everyone who called us that the Fake Clinic was next door. But women who were poor, didn’t speak English, and had the very fewest resources went to the Fake Clinic because they believed they would be able to get a free abortion. During one of the most stressful days of their lives, some of our patients still got confused and went in the wrong door. Sometimes the Fake Clinic would actually send their white-coated volunteers out into the parking lot to take our unwitting patients into their facility–like spiders luring flies to their doom.

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We always spent extra time with patients who had been to the Fake Clinic because we knew they hadn’t been told the truth. But I was shocked to really GET how powerful the lies were. I counseled with a patient who had been to the Fake. She said she didn’t feel like she could get up and leave even though she knew it wasn’t the right place, because the woman reminded her of her grandmother and she didn’t want to be rude. In counseling she seemed resolved about her choice, so we did all the usual paperwork and lab work. She was early in pregnancy so an abortion was many times safer than continuing a pregnancy. I went through her abortion with her. After the five-minute procedure she burst into tears and said, “I can’t believe I lived”.

As a result of that experience, we sent a spy over to the Fake Clinic to steal one of their tapes so that we could see what our patients were seeing. We were more than appalled. After that our counseling with victims of the Fakes included extensive debriefing about what they had been told, what they had seen, and how it had affected them. I don’t care how extensive your counseling is, or how skilled, it is damned hard for any woman to feel safe when she been told she will probably die from an abortion.

There are millions of stories of women who have gone to Fakes Clinics. Here’s just one more.

“Then they asked us what we wanted to do and my daughter and I said we decided the best thing for her to do was have an abortion and how much would that cost? The two ladies said ‘please wait a minute’ and left us … They came back with a doll and … scissors … and said: ‘this is what your baby looks like now and we want you to start cutting her up because that’s what will happen if you get an abortion – so start cutting!’ I grabbed her and threw the doll at those ladies and got out of there fast! I later found out it wasn’t a real clinic…” (excerpt from Legal but Out of Reach published by the National Network of Abortion Funds)

With all this evidence, and the founder of this movement himself acknowledging that the purpose of these facilities is to deceive women, what are we to think about legislators who would intentionally subject even one woman to this travesty?

Can it be that they actually hate us because someone told them that Eve was to blame for all the problems in the world? If anyone had any doubts that the recent insane barrage of anti abortion legislation in state after state is based in total disrespect for women, this should make it clear. It truly is a War Against Women.