On January 22, Pro-Life Action League sent a package to every abortion clinic in the U.S. Inside was a pair of plastic handcuffs, a photo of Oklahoma City abortionist Naresh Patel being arrested last month, and a note asking, "Could you be next?"
The note encouraged abortion workers to get out of the business for their own good and included PLAL's Eric Scheidler's personal cell phone number. Patel is charged with racketeering.On three separate occasions he told female undercover investigators they were pregnant, when they were not, and sold them the chemical abortion pill RU-486.
Where are the media outlets, so sensitive to a "war on women"? Why hasn't anyone heard of Naresh Patel? It's not like the liberals aren't aware. Talking Points Memo worried out loud about abortion "access" in Oklahoma if this story led people to wonder if Patel was Oklahoma's Kermit Gosnell. He has previous "eye-popping" accusations of sexual assault and burning fetuses on his property.
The list of abortionists and workers who have been arrested in the past four decades since abortion was been legal and supposedly moved off the back alley is as long as the reasons: extortion, tax evasion, sex abuse, drug abuse, illegally prescribing and se
But Cosmo's Filipovic is up in arms, shamelessly blaming pro-lifers for criminal abortionist "outlier[s]" like Patel or Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted in 2013 of murdering abortion survivors by "snipping" their spinal cords:
But the lesson of the Gosnell case, many women's health advocates say, is that early, legal abortion should be more widely available so women don't turn to sketchy providers offering illegal procedures. They say Gosnell targeted poor women who are made especially vulnerable by anti-abortion laws. For many women dependent on Medicaid for their health care, abortion services aren't covered, meaning they have to come up with the money on their own — often pushing the procedure later and later, when it gets even more expensive. Gosnell provided later abortions for less money than more reputable providers, and even performed abortions past the legal limit on low-income women desperate enough to seek him out. And finally, the more reputable clinics in town had regular picketers — as one woman told the Associated Press, she only went to Gosnell after she first tried to visit Planned Parenthood, but "the picketers out there, they scared me half to death."
Gosnell's clinic is indeed an outlier....
It hardly needs to be proven that pro-abortion "outliers" are actually the fault of the abortion industry and politicians. But I'll mention that the Gosnell Grand Jury Report laid the blame on their doorstep:
"[T]he evaluator from National Abortion Federation readily noted... [I]t was the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected... She just never told anyone in authority abt all the horrible, dangerous things she had seen."
and:
Bureaucratic inertia is not exactly news. We understand that. But we think this was something more. We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color, because the victims were infants without identities, and because the subject was the political football of abortion....
After 1993... the Pennsylvania Department of Health abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all. The politics in question were not anti-abortion, but pro. With the change of administration from Governor Casey to Governor Ridge, officials concluded that inspections would be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions.
Poor, picketed Planned Parenthood knew about Gosnell as well but did nothing. Quoting Philly.com:
Dayle Steinberg, [Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania's] president and chief executive... said that when Gosnell was in practice, women would sometimes come to Planned Parenthood for services after first visiting Gosnell's West Philadelphia clinic, and would complain to staff about the conditions there.
But Planned Parenthood didn't report Gosnell either.
Filipovic also attemptied to frame the mailer as a not-so-veiled threat. Quoting Planned Parenthood executive VP Dawn Laguens, Filipovic wrote:
"I think it reads like what it is: intimidation and harassment and a very implied threat," she said. Abortion opponents "want to outlaw abortion and put women and doctors in jail. I think they're sending about as clear a message as they can that that's exactly what they want to do."
How PLAL's mailer could be construed as a threat to lock up women is a stretch, but Cosmo wasn't alone. Kudos to BreitbartUnmasked.com for adding an illustration for flourish....
I asked Scheidler, why all the attention? It's not as if pro-life activists haven't done similar mailings before. "One reason is they think it makes us look like we're trying to intimidate someone," said Scheidler. "But if you think about it for more than a second - toy handcuffs and a signed letter including a personal cell number - a threat of what? If you're committing crimes and I know about it, then I am going to turn you into the police; that's not a threat."
Eric noted the League gets pro-abortion counterparts - mailers with red coat hangers on them. "We just laugh," said Scheidler. But PLAL's mailer also hit close to home. "I think they have a guilty conscience," noted Scheidler. "Arrests like that of Naresh Patel put them in such a bad light. It exposes them for who they are. It has been really surprising to have two abortion providers actually call me as a result of the mailer - a pro-life activist - to try to justify what they're doing." One, Anise Burrell from Summit Medical Center in Detroit, argued with Scheidler on the phone for 10 minutes. "She kept repeating, 'This is an ugly cruel world' she was sparing children from being born into," said Scheidler.
Abortion industry types know mailers such as PLAL's may have the intended impact and prompt abortionists and workers to walk away. Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards tried to mitigate the damage in a tweet...
Who's preventing more unintended pregnancies: healthcare providers or anti-abortion activists mailing them handcuffs? http://t.co/dXMQ5t1nlJ
— Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) January 29, 2015
Scheidler has indeed received calls and texts from workers wanting out. But there is a flip side. "I've received countless crank calls and crank texts," noted Scheidler, adding someone complained to Facebook about him yesterday, which led to his account being suspended for three hours.
Then there are real the real harassers.
