One about killed a woman by not identifying her pregnancy is ectopic. Many anti abortion folks are convinced that even ectopic pregnancies can be viable.
These places promise things like free pregnancy tests and medical advice to get people in the door.
They really just exist to pressure women into not getting abortions. They will lie through their teeth - all the classics, like suggesting that an abortion makes it impossible to get pregnant again, or that abortion causes cancer - they’ll say anything to prevent an abortion.
They are pretty much completely unregulated, and present themselves as secular non profits.
For more details and the odd laugh, last week tonight with John Oliver did a piece ont it.
Many “centers” in the US are religious organizations pretending to not pump their own religion: Alcoholics Anonymous, Boy Scouts of America, Salvation Army, Scientology has a bunch of these, too. And Mormons.
In my experience, AA is very open about the “higher power” thing and every meeting I have ever been to has also emphasized the flexibility and variety of what that even means to a person. But I would argue there’s absolutely a reason why it’s said that you need to hit your personal rock bottom first. Recovery is a wild experience and you do only reach it when you are so out of ideas as to how to make your own bullshit work anymore. I’m sober today although not through attending AA. But - in retrospect - the whole thing does make logical sense to me and my process looked a lot like the progression of the 12 steps. While I still have criticisms and skepticisms of AA, I wouldn’t consider it to be anywhere in the vicinity of anti-abortion “pregnancy centre” type deceptions.
The BSA is a multi-religion organization. The only requirement is that you believe in a higher power, and even that’s not a big deal if you don’t go off about being atheist all the time.
Why would you need to believe in a higher power in order to learn outdoorsy stuff?
Or is it more about making sure they’re pliable?
Atheist eagle scout here, can confirm.
Seriously, the USA is becoming more and more like Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale
*afghanistan but different breed of religion
Well in Gilead, wouldn’t a woman need permission to have sex?
The main difference in Handmaid’s Tale, is the setting of a world where birth rates have inexplicably plummeted.
They use that as a reason to subjugate the women who can still give birth.
So depends on which class of women you mean. I’m not sure if the Commanders’ wives ever had sex, since they would view it as a waste of their husband’s sperm (though that’s ok at the Jezebel clubs I guess).
Have you seen the latest louis theraux docu about the manospere? They literally say that. More than 40% of young males think these people make positive messages.
and 90% of statistics are made up
I’m a data analyst. A significant part of any statistic is selecting the dataset to aggregate over, which often means filtering it down to the subset you’re interested in, and responsible analysis has to be aware of the bias that introduces.
Suppose you’re tracking delivery times. If I calculate the average time from order to delivery for orders placed in the last week, none of the orders will have a delivery time greater than one week. I’ve had to argue why we should use the orders delivered last week instead.
On the other hand, if a set of orders is delayed, we won’t immediately see that spike in turnaround time until they actually get delivered, so we need to separately track and compare the amount of open orders and their respective age at the start of the week to put the turnaround time in context.
The problem I see with many statistics online, particularly ones just reposted somewhere else as summary, is intransparency about the criteria for selecting and aggregating the data, the impact of context and the bias resulting from both.
Every statistic is skewed in some way, but without explaining how and why, it’s easy to misunderstand (or even misrepresent) them.
In essence: 90% of statistics are worthless. Even if not made up, they might as well be.
(That one definitely is made up though.)
Doesn’t everyone need permission to have sex? From the person they’re having sex with, no doubt…
Who else could they be claiming someone would need permission from?
I was sent to a Christian (Baptist leaning) high school and in 9th grade instead of sex ed we had an abstinence unit in health class where they brought in 2 people (one man and one woman) from some outside organization to speak to us about abstinence. So boys and girls were split up and they tried to “encourage us to ask honest questions.” Some of the things that the girls were told is:
- Pregnancy dangerous. Abstinence is the best contraceptive
- Think of your future husband. Don’t you want to share that special bond with him? If you give yourself to someone before marriage then you won’t be able to give your entire self to your husband later
- Casual sex will make it so you can’t enjoy married life later
- Don’t dress slutty or you’ll tempt men. Even if your bf is a good Christian man, you shouldn’t tempt him like that
The boys were apparently told similar things except that there was a big emphasis on how masturbation and porn count as no longer being abstinent bc they’ll be sex and porn addicts. Then the male speaker spoke to the boys and girls together about stds and how if you have sex with one person then you’ve basically had sex with anyone they’ve had sex with, so you’ve basically fucked 1,000 people. We were literally told that
Ironically, the female speaker was pregnant (married) and the male speaker told us how his wife didn’t wait till marriage and she had to pray super hard and luckily God answered her prayers and let her enjoy married life like she had been abstinent (whatever the fuck that means??)
So basically, as women we were straight up told to consider the feelings of a theoretical future husband and let that determine our actions :/
I got the same crap. I’m sorry you were subjected to that bullshit, too. :(
That is fucked up :(
Then the male speaker spoke to the boys and girls together about stds and how if you have sex with one person then you’ve basically had sex with anyone they’ve had sex with, so you’ve basically fucked 1,000 people.
I was taught this in public school.
I grew up in a christian environment too (non-denominational, but beneath the surface it was baptist-leaning, though I didn’t realize that till much later; I was just told it was “true christianity” because it wasn’t adulterated with any “denominational doctrines.” Spoiler: it was).
Anyway, I was homeschooled in elementary and part of middle school. I was given puberty books from a christian publisher that told me things like “masturbation is a sin because sex is supposed to be between husband and wife, not you and yourself” and “your parents might sound crazy sometimes, but that’s actually because you’re loopy from hormones and your parents are actually always right about everything.”
Then I joined a church youth group, and we were told similar things to what you were saying. The old “duct tape and lint” analogy, the “you have to be faithful to your future spouse” gimmick. Of course talking about pregnancy and stds, the failure rate of condoms, how viruses are smaller than sperm so they can apparently fit through the condom easier…
I don’t think they separated us by gender for those talks, maybe because none of the youth group leaders were women (the women prepared the meals, though, obviously…). So as far as I’m aware the girls weren’t told anything different from what the boys were.
There was a dress code, especially when it came to swimming, which mostly applied to the girls, but boys wouldn’t have been allowed to wear crop tops or bikinis either even if we wanted to. I don’t know exactly what messaging the girls received about it because it wasn’t directed at me so I didn’t internalize it. But there was a lot of general undertones of bodily shame to go around.
So yeah, it sucks that we were programmed with that messaging at an age when our minds and self-identities were still developing. But it doesn’t have to be a “guys vs. girls” thing. It happened to both of us, and we can heal from that without blaming the other gender. Otherwise, the programming wins by keeping us separate, as a perpetual “wedge” placed between us by that messaging we received growing up…
Oh yeah, I wasn’t trying to say it was a girls v boys thing but rather to point out the gender stereotypes those in charge were pushing as part of the message. They always assumed that girls don’t have to be told to not masturbate bc women aren’t sexual, men are. And yet, they had to constantly tell the girls to not dress slutty and tempt the boys. We were all taught fucked up things, they just changed it up slightly between the boys and girls to fit gender stereotypes
Oh, valid. Yeah, I remember being told “Guys think about sex every 11 seconds, that means we have to work really hard all the time to keep our minds pure, while women’s minds are just pure by default.”
I basically internalized this messaging that as guys, we’re inherently perverted, disgusting, aberrant, and impure beings who need to constantly remain vigilant and fight with ourselves to keep our animalistic nature in check. You know, to protect women’s chastity of course, because without us they would be perfectly pure beings with no sexuality whatsoever. Apparently…
Rachel’s House is one of the biggest ones. I don’t know if they rebranded.
In my country, you go to jail if you provide medical care while not being a physician
The same is true here. The point is that they do not provide any medical care.
Ah, but they don’t actually provide any medical services. They just lie and say that they do.
Wish I lived there
If all they do is counseling and give advice, does that count?
In the story I linked, they gave a woman an ultrasound and confirmed to her that it was an intrauterine pregnancy. That seems to be “practicing medicine” to me.
The question is did they actually know that it was ectopic and lied to her (because the religious right is doing a huge push right now to convince people that ectopic pregnancies are somehow survivable), or did they lie to her about the ultrasound, or did they just fuck it up entirely?
All three extremely disturbing, and probably all three happening daily at this evil places.
Religous people “We’re honest hardworking people!”
Proceed to lie and deceive about everything.
Are there any legitimate crisis pregnancy centers? I’ve never seen one, only the tricksters practicing medicine in ways they should not legally be allowed to do.
Mostly Planned Parenthood. There are a few other places, but they have less to spend on advertising.
I’ve thought about calling up a few as a trans man to see how they’d respond. The reaction would probably help identify how legitimate they were.
By definition, no. Legitimate women’s healthcare providers don’t call themselves “crisis pregnancy centers.”
I know that in the past there have been cult deprogramming communities that were run by some cult-like christian organizations that preyed on those that were at their most vulnerable. Real bottom feeder scum behaviour.
Evil.
these places are vile and need to all be shut down. Stick to Planned Parenthood if you can.
Pretty sure I head mamdani was closing them all in new York. Yeah they are everywhere
Historically, many hospitals (and schools too) are created by religious organizations, so I’m unsure how useful this is on its own. How can one tell if one such health center truly is about caring for their patients, versus a religious outreach that happens to provide healthcare?
Religious hospitals in the US have certainly historically had problems reproductive health care. But they by and large exist to provide medical services. I imagine far less than 1% of a typical “St Such and Such’s” daily operations are telling women than abortion will cause them to have breast cancer.
Ectopic pregnancy is also one of those things that was until recently understood to be “yeah that doesn’t count as pregnancy and you shouldn’t die because of it” as an objective fact. I know a hardline pro lifer who had an abortion for because it’s not viable and you die.
These are things ran by small, local, powerful churches. These fucked ideologies are the type that are preached by the pastors some of the highest up in the nation - the congregations and preachers that states like Texas Oklahoma and Arkansas exist around.
It’s a warped death cult that wants more soldiers in its war against the world, which it calls Satan. Fundie evangelicals hate sex, music, dancing, art, and most pop culture, to the point where they need to publicly acknowledge they are Christian ™ every 20 minutes.
They make their own history textbooks, tv shows, etc, etc, which is justified under the idea of being not worldly, but all of it is bad and only exists to reinforce specific messages to them. all of it is obnoxiously polemical in a way the gamergate crowd always pretended the Last of Us Two was.
But to practically answer your question - services that solely provide pregnancy counseling that don’t explicitly offer abortion as an option are bad. Abortion is a standard part of reproductive healthcare, and if you are going to someone specializing in reproductive healthcare they should be frank with you about it.
The “how are the motives of the people running these facilities different” part - St Such And Such’s wants to keep you alive by and large as its primary and professional goal. These crisis pregnancy centers exist to talk people out of abortion, first and foremost.
There’s a crisis bus in my town that offers “abortion reversals”
I offer that in my house, results not guaranteed but free admission
Um. More sex?
