Planned Parenthood

 

PPFA’s Cecile Richards on increasing pro-abortion solidarity through “talking about abortion experiences”

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By Dave Andrusko

Cecile Richards

When PPFA president Cecile Richards wrote in ELLE magazine last fall that she’d had an abortion, we discussed that revelation once and then, shortly later, wrote about it again.
And because this is the president of the largest abortion conglomerate in the galaxy, we returned for a third time when Richards posted a 1 minute, 19 second long video for “The 1 in 3 Campaign,” a project of Advocates for Youth.

Now, having got the hang of it, Richards has just written for what has become another in-house publication of the Abortion Movement–TIME magazine–under the headline “We Need to Talk—Really Talk—About Abortion.”
Before we get to why we really need to talk about abortion, according to Richards, some background will help us understand her “evolution” from a Johnny-come-lately (in “speaking” about her abortion) to someone who can’t talk about it enough.
Her October 2014 ELLE essay ran under the headline “Ending the Silence That Fuels Abortion Stigma.” The essay was 748 words long. Just 68 talked about her own abortion in language that was almost clinical.
By contrast her interview with Cosmopolitan, even with a highly sympathetic interviewer, couldn’t be that bland. What was interesting (as we wrote) was her insistence that her family had handled this shocker in an almost matter-of-fact fashion.
Richards said when she opened up to ELLE, her children’s response to learning they were short a sibling

was really awesome. It’s interesting, I just talked to my kids the other day, and they knew I’d had an abortion, and they were sort of like, “Mom, it was no big deal,” but I could also tell it was important to them that we talked about it. I look at the positive response from Planned Parenthood employees……[etc., etc., etc.]

But how could that possibly be true? If it was “no big deal,” how and why could she tell “it was important to them that we talked about it”?
You know your mom is a big shot in the “pro-choice” movement, runs in powerful circles, and is joined at the hip to pro-abortion President of the United States.
But while your mom has talked about being non-judgmental; about how having an abortion is easy as pie; about “freeing women,” you didn’t know that she non-judgmentally freed herself by having an easy-as-pie abortion of your brother or sister.
Of course that would be a big deal, which is why my sympathies immediately went out to Richards’ children.

Which brings us to her TIME magazine essay.
Richards is delighted that movies and television programs are talking about abortion–talking about abortion in the prescribed fashion, of course. (They “depict women making the decision to have an abortion and finding support from their family and friends.”) She’s even happier that celebrities such as Jemima Kirke are talking about their abortions.

Richards conveniently omits that these “stories” reveal far more than is intended and, in fact, often work against the narrative that abortion is as safe as taking two aspirins and that Planned Parenthood is a paragon of health care virtue. (See here.)

She also subtly suggests that abortion is an almost afterthought to PPFA, which is absolutely not the case.
But in a sense Richards is right about one thing in her TIME essay.
The discussion about abortion is “filled with “myths” and “stereotypes”–but not because they are filling a “void” left as the result of women failing to talk about their abortions. The myths and stereotypes are of the Abortion Industry’s own making.
Such as? The illogical myth that there is essentially no post-abortion aftermath–and if a woman is having problems they are because she had emotional or psychological difficulties prior to the abortion. (How’s that for sympathetic?)
In fact, a sizeable minority of women do have a whole range of difficulties, as we have discussed numerous times at NRL News and NRL News Today.

Or the myth that the ranks of the abortion industry is filled with Dr. Welbys. Just read about abortionist Steven Brigham–just one of the many, many stories we have written about abortionists–and you quickly realize how grotesquely untrue that is.
And then there such demeaning stereotypes as the cruel notion that the thousands of loving pro-life volunteers who work at women helping centers care not about the woman or girl who is about to make a life-and-death decision but only about their “ideology.”
Richards concludes, “Women are increasingly feeling supported to share stories that have, in some cases, been kept silent for years.” True.
But they are not stories that celebrate their abortions. Overwhelmingly they are confessionals in which a woman says she would do anything if she could just go back in time and save her baby.
But those are not the kind of stories that TIME magazine gives space to or ELLE touts to its readers.

Source: NRLC News