Hornswogglers, bamboozlers, swindlers, and hoodwinkers have been a key element of the American political experience from the get-go. So arguing that things are worse now than they used to be might seem a stretch. However, all this behavior has been founded on lying. While there was plenty of this in the past, today it seems to saturate our public discourse more incessantly, remorselessly, and arguably, unprecedentally. And this lying not only goes mostly unpunished, it is celebrated in taverns and legislatures as well.
The previous occupant of the White house, for instance, told more than 30,000 lies during his four years there, according to a count by The Washington Post. Far more, surely, than all the lies told by every previous president combined. Lies that obviously still persuade a deluded and/or malicious cohort of voters to imperil our democracy. These include the phony “Electors” and those 147 Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Then there are the lies of politicians, right-wing economists, fossil fuel industrialists, and paid-off mouthpieces that have endangered civilization itself by arguing for decades that scientists only say there is a climate crisis because it means they get more grant money.
And, of course, there are several Supreme Court justices who lied at their confirmation hearings and one of whom lied by omission regarding “gifts” he received from billionaire ideologues with a desire for certain rulings. These deceitful justices are making grotesque rulings on guns, reproductive freedom, voting rights, environmental protection, and the administrative state.
But damaging as all that lying was and is, this isn’t the deception that has me riled today. Rather it’s the taxpayer funding of “pregnancy crisis centers” that disinform pregnant women about abortion. As reported by The Guardian Friday:
In the months since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, at least 16 states have agreed to funnel more than $250m in taxpayer dollars towards anti-abortion facilities and programs that try to convince people to continue their pregnancies.
Much of that money is set to go to anti-abortion counseling centers, or crisis pregnancy centers, according to data provided by the Guttmacher Institute and Equity Forward, organizations that support abortion rights. It has been paid out throughout 2023 and will stretch into 2025.
That haul marks an increase from 2021 and 2022, when states sent closer to $217m towards crisis pregnancy centers and “alternatives to abortion” programs, according to the groups’ data.
In addition to the payments, at least two states, Louisiana and North Dakota, initiated programs in 2023 that implemented tax credits for crisis pregnancy centers.
That $250 million—much of it going to centers that require all staff to be Christians—doesn’t account for money funneled through the federal government’s family-planning program or from money earmarked for abstinence-only sexuality education.
As has been reported for more than a decade in various media, including Daily Kos, the lying at pregnancy crisis centers begins before a woman even walks in the door. Many of the estimated 2,500-plus such centers set up since 1967 have duplicitous names, like “Your Choice,” or “Women for Choice.”
Inside the lying continues. The centers—few with a medical license or supervision by credentialed healthcare staff, and mostly peopled by volunteers—have been widely shown to repeat phony medical information to vulnerable women. The list is long and includes lies about a supposedly increased risk of breast cancer from abortion. No such link exists. Centers claim that surgical abortion is more dangerous for pregnant women than childbirth, which is an absolute lie. They lie about birth control. They lie about fetal development. They assert there’s such a thing as “post-abortion syndrome” that creates numerous mental health problems, which, of course, they don’t compare with the incidence of such problems for women who are deterred from getting an abortion. The American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the American Public Health Association all fail to recognize “post-abortion syndrome” as an actual thing.
As this example shows, acting in accord with some of that disinformation means a potential risk of deadly health effects:
[A woman running a crisis pregnancy center, Patricia Henderson, informed] another that she was not pregnant and just had a stomach virus. According to the state report, that wasn’t true.
Henderson allegedly told a third woman not to bother getting an abortion because her nine-week-old embryo wasn’t “forming properly” and she would probably lose the baby anyway. “She told me my body would do the right thing and in one week I would have a miscarriage. Which would save me $555!” the woman wrote in her complaint to the state. A doctor later determined that the pregnancy was normal.
In the most serious accusation against her, [Henderson] told yet another woman that “the baby was stuck” in her fallopian tube, a potentially catastrophic complication known as an ectopic pregnancy. If not treated immediately, the condition can lead to major hemorrhaging and, sometimes, the mother’s death. But Henderson allegedly advised the woman to “relax at the beach” and come back in a few days. Fortunately for the woman, Henderson was wrong. The five-week-old embryo was where it should be, in the uterus.
As unspeakably loathsome as all this lying is, it’s now done against a background of American women in 21 states being second-class citizens with no control over what, after suicide, has to be the most personal decision a woman ever makes—whether to continue a pregnancy. The affluent and the lucky still have alternatives, but for others the path is filled with political and economic obstacles.
Since, for the moment at least, we are stuck with the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, forced-birthers at these crisis pregnancy charades, camouflaged behind their original and biggest lie of all—“pro-life”—should get the same treatment they gave abortion clinics over the past decade. They should be forced into complying with all kinds of expensive, unnecessary, non-medical regulations with the obvious intent of shutting them down. Unfortunately, the centers cannot be shut down simply for being untruthful
If “pro-life” itself were true, we’d see a lot more effort from anti-abortion zealots to deal with the fact the United States, the richest nation on the planet, ranks 10th out of the 10 wealthiest nations when it comes to maternal mortality. Count all nations, and the U.S. ranks a fucking despicable 55th, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The overall death count from pregnancy-related causes in 2021 was 33 women per 100,000 live births. The rate for white women was 26.2, Latino women 26.6, Black women 69.9. “Pro-lifers” have long harassed abortion clinics and their clients. Why aren’t they doing the same to lawmakers at their offices to spur action to fix this maternal mortality abomiination, with all its class and race disparities?
A pox on the “pro-life” pretenders and their accomplice legislators who choose to deliver our tax money to crisis pregnancy charades and their battalions of deceivers. We have enough liars without subsidizing them.
