The Right's Sneaky New Strategy to Take Control of Women's Lives

http://www.alternet.org/gender/rights-sneaky-new-strategy-take-control-womens-lives

Recent months have revealed a scary new trend in the anti-choice movement: claiming, falsely, that anti-choice conservatives are the ones trying to give women more control over their reproductive decision-making. Yes, the new lie coming from anti-choicers is to pretend, as hard as it may be to believe, that they are actually pro-choice.

In the Bay Area, a crisis pregnancy center whose entire purpose is to try to guilt and bully women out of abortions is now trying to trick people into believing it’s a pro-choice counseling center. As reported by Katie Baker at Buzzfeed, the city of San Francisco passed a law requiring crisis pregnancy centers, which often pretend to be abortion clinics in order to lure women seeking abortion, to put up signage to explain that they do not actually offer abortion services. After their lawsuit to stop the law failed, the crisis pregnancy center First Resort has started a rebranding effort, calling itself Third Box and claiming it’s a counseling center for “undecided” pregnant women.

Third Box goes out of its way to give the appearance of being a pro-choice organization, even using the phrase “pro-choice” in a press release. Its website insinuates that women will be given fair and honest counseling about all their options, including abortion. Most women would, in fact, get the impression from the website that Third Box offers abortion referrals. That’s highly unlikely, however, because, as Baker pointed out in her article, the CEO of Third Box, Shari Plunkett (who also runs the First Resort crisis pregnancy centers that have been called out for trying to trick women out of getting abortions) celebrated the closing of local abortion clinics in a 2011 email, writing that they offered “one of the most amazing opportunities we’ve ever had to serve abortion-minded women.”

You also see a turn toward "pro-choice" language in the campaign over Amendment 1 in Tennessee. Currently, the state constitution provides broad rights to medical privacy that have made it hard for legislators to pass unnecessary regulations to close down abortion clinics. Amendment 1, which is a ballot initiative, would remove those protections and allow the legislature to pass intrusive laws banning abortion, which is exactly the point of putting this on the ballot for November.