Abortion Clinics

 

“Carafem” —the latest pro-abortion idiocy—abortion as a trip to the spa

By Dave Andrusko
Editor’s note. This first ran earlier this year. It is particularly appropriate in light of some of the comments made Thursday by pro-Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee which we will discuss elsewhere today.

There is a kind of in for a dime, in for a dollar logic to “Carafem” which (the Washington Post tells us) “promises a ‘spa-like’ experience for women with a very open and unabashed approach to pregnancy termination.”
It’s the latest extension of the hey-abortion-is-no-big-deal mantra that gives us women uploading their abortions onto YouTube [Emily Letts], unfunny “comedies” about casual hook-up/abortions [“Obvious Child”], and a defiant insistence that having an abortion is “as moral as the decision to have a child” (the feminist poet Katha Pollitt).

So what does Carafem offer besides a location in “tony Friendship Heights,” in Maryland, just a few blocks outside of Washington, DC? Several things.
“Slick ads set to go up in Metro stations across the Washington region,” says the Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar, which “leave nothing to doubt: ‘Abortion. Yeah, we do that.’”
Once inside,

“staff members plan to greet clients with warm teas, comfortable robes and a matter-of-fact attitude.

“We don’t want to talk in hushed tones,” said Carafem president Christopher Purdy. “We use the A-word.”

“It’s fresh, it’s modern, it’s clean, it’s caring,” Purdy added. “We use the A-word.” None of this “hushed tones” stuff for Carafem.
But there’s “another striking aspect of the project”–the design. Somashekhar (“the social change reporter” for the Post) tells us

The clinic will have wood floors and a natural wood tone on the walls that recalls high-end salons such as Aveda.

Appointments, offered evenings and weekends, can be booked online or via a 24-hour hotline.

“It was important for us to try to present an upgraded, almost spa-like feel,” said Melissa S. Grant, vice president of health services for the clinic.

If the project is successful, Purdy says, he hopes to expand his model to other states.

In most ways the story is actually less about Carafem per se than it is about how it fits into the counter-offensive by pro-abortionists who are getting their ears pinned back, electorally and in the battle for public opinion: destigmatization.
Lanae Erickson Hatalsky, director of social policy and politics for the relentlessly pro-abortion Third Way

praised efforts to “destigmatize” the procedure, which she said is attracting a passionate new crop of young activists to the movement. The effort to tell personal stories echoes a strategy successfully employed by the gay-rights movement, she said, which helped change public opinion by coaxing people to come out of the closet to their friends, neighbors and colleagues.

Lots of luck with that.
Actually the most interesting section of the story is something NRL News Today has written about numerous times: how the Pro-Abortion Establishment is responding to what is, after all, an in-your-face campaign.

“Groups such as Planned Parenthood are trying to walk a fine line,” Somashekhar tells us diplomatically.

As the very epitome of the old-guard, PPFA is trying to stay “appealing” to the younger set without offending those “who are less supportive of abortion,” as Planned Parenthood spokesman Eric Ferrero delicately put it to the Post.

How? By trying to “communicate is in a more empathetic framework that kind of says, ‘Look, these are really complicated personal issues.’”
But, of course, the whole point of the “No apologies, ever” set is that abortion is not complicated at all!

A woman wants one. A woman (or a girl) gets one. She moves on—and woe be to anyone who dares to disagree that having an abortion is essentially indistinguishable from a quick trip to the spa for a pedicure.
They actually think this is a winning strategy. You have to wonder what planet they are living on.

Source: NRLC News