This is an excellent piece from Katherine Spillar.  If you have just 10 minutes, watch the YouTube video and read the text later.  And then do your homework: what’s happening in your community?  what are your thoughts on the issue, and on the larger issues of reproductive rights, sex education, deception/shaming of women about their bodies and choices, religion in health care, and federal funding.

And read below the link…the issue of Crisis Pregnancy Centers is personal to me…but not for the reason you might assume.

Crisis of Deception: Fake Clinics Spread Misinformation on the Federal Dime

 by Katherine Spillar (www.rhrealitycheck.org)

Crisis pregnancy centers are fake clinics that provide deceptive and erroneous information to both pregnant and non-pregnant women on pregnancy, abortion, and contraception. And they often brazenly violate the separation of church and state. …

A personal connection, a family division

I sent the above article to a few friends with the following note:  “[…] My mom volunteers at a “crisis pregnancy center” […]. I am respectful and don’t confront her – it wouldn’t do anything but drive a wedge.  But I would welcome any advice from my sisters on how to rationally speak with my family on why such clinics are NOT HELPING ANYTHING, and are immensely harmful and dangerous.  My family is quite religious […] I would like to start a dialogue…but this proud Feminist is struggling.”

Advice came in.  Most said that despite how I feel about crisis pregnancy centers (and I DO think they’re dangerous, and DO think they’re spreading information that is not factual or scientific and are scaring women into a decision that isn’t based on their decision, made after they have all the information on all options for their care), I can’t change my family and shouldn’t try.  And on reflection, I realized they were correct.  I wrote back to the same group of friends.  Here’s part of what I said:

I didn’t intend to come across as if I expected that I could somehow change my mom, dad, or anyone else in my family, but see now that I did (and OK, maybe some small part of me wishes we agreed on a few more things OR that we were a big ‘debate the issues’ family, which we’re not…pretty much the opposite).

I know I can’t change anyone except myself.  So I will keep on lovin’ each one of them and supporting them where they are and in what they believe, and I will hope that perhaps some some day we’ll all be more comfortable discussing my point of view.  Why do I say discussing “my point of view”?  Because I listen at length to anything and everything they have to say.  I am comfortable with it, and supportive of their views, ask questions, and actually find it all interesting; it helps me understand them and their lives…and they are where I came from.  It just gets hard sometimes because I don’t feel I have the same invitation to speak of my feelings/thoughts on issues.