Wichita, we're wishing your all of our best.

Dr. George Tiller, age 67, was shot and killed Sunday morning while entering his church.

Tiller, a doctor at the only clinic that performs later-term abortions in the mid-west, and one of two abortion clinics in the state of Kansas, has been a focal point in the abortion debate because of the questionable legality of his practice and his opposition to a state law requiring an "independent" physician's opinion before a woman could obtain a later-term abortion. He was found not guilty in March.

In 1993, Tiller was shot in both arms by radical anti-choice extremist Rachelle Shannon, but he continued to practice. His Wichita clinic, Women's Health Care Services, is the only clinic in the mid-west that provides later term abortions, and one of two abortion clinics in the state of Kansas. The clinic has been the target of vandalism, illegal blockades, bomb threats, and other forms of violence, and the staff receives consistent death threats from extremists.

Late-term abortions are never an easy decision for a couple, especially when that decision has been politicized and demonized by anti-choice extremists. In nearly all cases, the abortion is performed to either save the woman's life, because her baby will be born stillborn, or (most commonly) because tests reveal a lack of fetal development or a birth defect that, unfortunately, ensure the baby will only live a very short, very painful life upon birth. Often the parents choose late-term abortion because, after much medical counseling and deliberation, they realize it would be better to terminate the pregnancy instead of bring a child into the world only to suffer in its short life.

Dr. Tiller provided services rarely seen amongst late-term abortion doctors: he performed the controversial (yet far safer) intact dilation and extraction procedure, allowing couples to view the fetus before cremation, something that women describe as positive because it gives them closure on the pregnancy. He even staffed a chaplain to counsel clients or even baptize the fetus before cremation, if the couple chose to do so, and offered women and couples time alone with their fetus to pray and say their goodbyes. In this way, Dr. Tiller provided great levels of comfort to couples who were suffering with their choice and suffering even more due to the lack of understanding and complete lack of compassion amongst the protesters outside the clinic.

I wish to extend my greatest thanks to Dr. Tiller, a man who battled bureaucracy and politically-motivated restrictions, to save women's lives and offer women and couples a light of hope at the end of a very painful tunnel. Our thoughts and prayers go out to your family and friends, and to your colleagues at WHCS.

CPC Watch endorses the National March for Equality, 10/10 in Washington DC!!!

And why wouldn't we??

CPC Watch operates under a platform of reproductive justice, the idea that all women and girls ought to have complete physical, spiritual, and economic control over their bodies, their sexualities, and their reproductive lives. The concept of reproductive justice takes into account issues of race, class, physical ability, and sexual orientation, as different demographics obviously have different obstacles achieving reproductive freedom and sexual autonomy.

In our research on crisis pregnancy centers, we've found many troubling trends that extend far beyond a mere anti-abortion agenda. Most CPCs work solely with adoption agencies that adopt out to heterosexual married couples, often discriminating against non-white or interracial couples as well as non-Christian households. In addition to their unrealistic "abstinence before marriage" version of sex "education," many also preach that being gay or bisexual is a sin and can be reversed with adequate prayer and "anti-gay" counseling. Our understanding of crisis pregnancy centers is that they are not only a threat to abortion rights, they are a threat to choice and nearly all reproductive and family options that don't fit within a narrow, heteronormative mold.

Today, a grassroots movement is brewing nationwide in response to the recent stripping of marriage equality in the state of California. While citizens of states such as Iowa, Maine, and New Hampshire celebrate recent victories in securing equal marriage rights, advocates from all over the country are fed up with the United States' refusal to provide equal rights to all couples regardless of sex or gender identity and the sustained second-class status of LGBT citizens overall.

For these reasons, CPC Watch officially endorses the October 10, 2009 National March for Equality. This march is being scheduled around the 30th anniversary of the October 14, 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the historic march that drew 100,000 to demand equal rights for the LGBT community.

We believe the LGBT community desereves full equality in all matters governmental, including health care, employment-related discrimination, hate crime legislation, the right to parent, and of course marriage equality. While several of our coordinators have different views about how governmental the term "marriage" should be for any couple, we believe that the LGBT community has every right to enter into this institution, regardless of the partners' sex or gender identity.

We wish to add our concerns with the high rate of homelessness among queer youth, the additional obstacles LGBT people of color face in their communities, and poor or non-existent components of LGBT issues in school sex-education curriculum.

Please visit one of the below websites for further details regarding the march, or email our outreach coordinator for help finding or organizing a bus or caravan to D.C. as we get closer to the date! Also consider a donation to one of the many grassroots organizing groups behind the march. These organizations are most likely run completely by unpaid volunteers, and any support would be very much appreciated.

In Solidarity,

Lauren Guy McAlpin
Project Coordinator


To volunteer, donate, or otherwise get involved:
National March for Equality
National Equality March

EVENT: Women's Liberation Today

From Equal Pay to Reproductive Justice
Women's Liberation Today

January 22, 2009 marked the 36th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision granting women in the U.S. the right to abortion -- a decision that anti-choice activists are fanatical about overturning. That victory came about as the result of the women's liberation movement, but now women have lost some ground, and many rights won by women have been chipped away.

Only an unapologetic defense of women's rights today will make up some of the ideological ground that we've lost in the decades since Roe first became law.

Why are women oppressed in our society? How do we win back our rights in the era of Obama? And how will we win full liberation for women once and for all?

Featured Speakers

Lauren Guy-McAlpin, CPCWatch.org
Catherine Geary, Intl' Socialist Org.

April 30, 7:00PM
UNCG Campus
Graham building room 310

Sponsored by
Crisis Pregnancy Center Watch
and
The International Socialist Organization

Op-Ed: Fake clinics mislead pregnant women

By Melanie Rockefeller

Editor's Note: This article was originally printed at The Maine Campus and is being reprinted here with permission from Ms. Rockefeller and The Maine Campus.

Women in the United States are at risk of receiving false information about their reproductive health and the choices available to them from fake clinics operated by anti-choice organizations.

Unplanned pregnancies can be highly stressful. Adding to this stress through intimidation and misinformation is flat-out unconscionable. Furthermore, women have the right to make their own decisions about their reproductive health and should not be intimidated into making decisions that may not be right for them.

Fake clinics often call themselves "crisis pregnancy centers" or "pregnancy resource centers." These names are intentionally vague and do not accurately describe the services they provide. Not only is the anti-choice mission of these clinics not made apparent by their names, their advertising also conceals their agenda. Advertisements for centers routinely state they provide women with information about, or services for "all options." In reality, crisis pregnancy centers are usually affiliated with at least one national anti-choice or anti-birth control organization.

A report on federally funded crisis pregnancy centers prepared for Congressman Henry Waxman of California found the clinics are "virtually always pro-life [anti-abortion] organizations whose goal is to persuade teenagers and women with unplanned pregnancies to choose motherhood or adoption. They do not offer abortions or referrals to abortion providers." Some clinics have even been known to inform women they are not pregnant, so that they will miss the period of time in which they could have obtained an abortion.

Another myth perpetuated by these clinics is that they are comprehensive women's health facilities. Ads for these clinics often tout the availability of free pregnancy tests, thereby encouraging the belief that they are in fact medical clinics. In reality, anti-choice staff or volunteers, who are not medical professionals, usually run crisis pregnancy centers. These clinics do not provide abortion or birth control services, and do not refer individuals to clinics that do. Information provided by these clinics about abortion and birth control is often false or misleading.

For example, crisis pregnancy centers have been known to present inaccurate information about condoms' ability to prevent sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. A congressional investigation on crisis pregnancy centers that received federal funding during the Bush Administration found that 87 percent of clinics presented inaccurate or misleading information on the health effects of abortion.

Chances are high you have seen an advertisement for a crisis pregnancy center. Often, these centers are located near college campuses and advertise that they provide free pregnancy tests to the student population. Also, fake clinics, with approximately 3,500 locations nationwide, are twice as prevalent in the U.S. as comprehensive women's health clinics.

Because of the prevalence of these clinics and their advertising, it is imperative that the public is educated about their mission and existence. While these clinics have a right to exist, women also have the right to decide what is best for their lives and their bodies, including the decision to have an abortion. Women should not be intimidated with propaganda and false information into making a decision that may not be their own.

Melanie Rockefeller is a senior women's studies student at The University of Maine.

April showers bring... hate mail?

...we really wish these people would leave their actual contact info. Then we could pull a Margaret Cho and post their email addresses here with the screen shot... throw them to the pro-choice wolves, so to speak!







(Fowl language blurred for sensitive readers)

Really it's just documentation of the emails we've been getting as of late. We have access to the IP addresses of all senders should anything else come of the harassment. (And yes, these were sent from two different IPs located in two very different areas of the country.)

Rural teens taking veterinary drugs to induce abortions?

The following is a cross-post with Choice Words, the blog of ChoiceUSA.

Factual horror or alarmist hype?

According to Anna Anderson, a staff member at a Wisconsin CPC, "at least 10" young women aged 14-18 admit to taking prostaglandins, a drug used by cow breeders to regulate the animals' heat cycles, to self-abort. The American Animal Hospital Association has issued an advisory to breeders who use prostaglandins, although no case of a woman actually using the drug to induce abortion.

The reports are being investigated by the Wisconsin Vetrinary Medical Association, as well as the Wisconsin Department of Public Health, who are both skeptical that women actually used the drug for terminations. The Wisconsin Department of Public Health issued a statement saying the "extent of [prostaglandin-induced abortions] is e-mails and Web sites ... There's no proof that this occurring."Staff at Monroe High School (the school where Anderson's alleged clients attended school) have looked into the matter and cannot find any evidence of any student using this method.

If the rumors are true, this is a dangerous new trend in growing instances of "do it yourself" abortions. The risks would be similar to that of RU-486, or "the abortion pill," a drug sometimes used to induce a miscarriage early in pregnancy: excessive bleeding, incomplete abortion, and infection. However, these risks would be far more severe since the drug would be administered without medical supervision. Where RU-486 is administered in a controlled dose, prostaglandins would be consumed in an uncontrolled amount, possibly leading to overdose or excessive hemorrhaging. Where a woman experiencing excessive bleeding would be advised to contact their abortion care provider, a young woman self-aborting would not have that backup help, and the lack of a follow-up visit to ensure the abortion was complete could easily lead to serious infection that could go untreated and do permanent damage or even lead to death.

For all the press this CareNet staffer has received in this possible reproductive horror story, only one statement from Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin (also looking into the rumor) can be found: "It's disturbing if it's true." And disturbing it is. Unfortunately, most of the attention from the rumor has been focused around how "sad" it is that these girls are getting pregnant and self-aborting. Anna Anderson and CareNet Pregnancy Center of Green County, where these rumors first surfaced, are enjoying massive amounts of local press and thank-yous for alerting local parents to this phenomenon. Real clinics like Planned Parenthood are facing subtle accusations for even introducing abortion into the community's vocabulary in the first place.

Never mind the fact that CareNet is one of the strongest forces in the antichoice camp's plight to restrict abortion access (which would surely increase instances of these dangerous do-it-yourself abortions). They're also staunch supporters of abstinence-only sex education and parental consent requirements, which teens in Wisconsin are, like most teens in the U.S., required to receive before abortion. Wisconsin is also one of many states with an insurance prohibition on abortion. Surely young women would not have to resort to such drastic and dangerous measures if these restrictions were not in place...?

Of course there's one thing Anderson and I can agree on: if teens are in fact using prostaglandin to induce abortion, they are risking their own lives. But what we disagree on is monumental. Do it yourself abortions are a measure of last resort (or a measure of securing one's confidentiality, as the case may be), highlighting the drastic need for major reforms in all realms of reproductive health: education, prevention, and access.

Orange County proposes shifting Planned Parenthood funds to CPCs

*Slams head against keyboard*