I’ll never forget the time my girlfriend came back from a planned parenthood in tears because 50 or so women were shouting baby killer and whore at her. The best part is she wasn’t even getting an abortion. She was getting prenatal vitamins for a healthier pregnancy.
I get screamed at every time I get an STD test. Or they have people out pretending to work for PP and telling people you have to check in with them at the gate then BOOM they give you anti abortion shit.
I'm like, bro. This location doesn't even offer abortions.
ETA: there sure are a lot of uneducated people in the comments who are absolutely baffled by the idea of routine testing and responsible sexual health. Y'all are the reason for the statistics. But I guess if you never get a test, you technically never have to disclose your status to your partner. 🤡
No, because they don't literally say that. What they do is put a certain color shirt on and reflective vests and stand at the gate with clipboards, waving cars to stop at the gate to sign in on the clipboard. But then BOOM. Surprise bitch! We're here to shit on you instead!
Dude, they used to bomb the university campus that I cooked at for 10 yrs. Every semester we would get notice that they were coming a week or so ahead. All staff were told they could stay home if that would upset them. Every god damn time I was short staffed and I don't even care if some just took it as a day of rest nicely placed in their lap, not my problem and I can rock a long ass shift on the line.
However I made a point of marching right up to them after my shift. They usually were being ignored by the passers by and so engaging me was just what they hoped for, until I unleashed. Listened first of course but just long enough to allow their own words to be the rope I used to hang them.
Starting with, where do you volunteer that assists orphans and foster children that were saved from abortion? What changes to the foster system are you fighting for? How is your outreach here affecting the orphaned and those in foster care? How many volunteer hours have you put in today, how many this year? What meaningful assistance has personally been given to orphans, orphanages or the foster children? How many at risk youth programs are you involved in?
Followed by generally asking passers by what they think of someone who is willing to hold anti abortion propaganda for an afternoon and has given X amount of time to foster children and orphans. Actively spending over an hour sharing their answers with those just going to and from class, students who happily chastised the activity of these activists. Often enough the head of their team would ask me to leave to which I happily pointed out that my freedom to express was as valid as theirs and ask if they wanted a security guard to come by, as I am campus staff and have them in my contacts. Then I'd open up to them that some 40 staff took the day off to avoid these activists, just another group of people like the foster children and orphans that they have shown disregard to by simply putting time and effort into this anti-abortion message instead of helping and caring for those who are hurting. That they seem very calloused to the fact that they bring a huge wake of events that they do not engage. Once I felt like I aired my grievances for the long shift I'd leave them with this. Foster kids are expected to have all there personal items fit into black garbage bags as they are moved through the system and no church group has bothered to do a thing about it, they are abandoned by the very people who preach that life is precious, people who have more things than can fit into black garbage bags. Fix that issue or admit your a hypocrite.
And with that I went home smiling. Moved on from chef life so I haven't had a chance in years. Maybe that'll be my goal this year, find some anti-abortion activists and give them my 2 cents.
Edit
Thanks for the kind words. Appreciated honestly but like I said I cooked for students on campus a *long time. Many fine cooks came from tough circumstances, needed a break coming in late and hung over, again. I shared this today because it still is a broken system today in 2021 as it was in 2004 when my eyes were first opened to the foster system realities. Always burned me seeing so many hold signs and no one could even get the foster system to afford these kids some luggage. Black garbage bags... Doesn't feel very good to admit that I've done very little though. I'm no hero. So I googled foster care reform and found this, seems a good place to start but open to suggestions. https://partnersforourchildren.org/resources/topics/foster-care
Where I went to high school there was a civics teacher who was religious and prolife. I remember when talking about Roe V. Wade he let some of his personal views come out while reading the decision and arguments. Him and his wife were foster parents, and adopted two children. He was pro-universal health care before it was ever talked about in the US. Thought it was a moral obligation Christians had along with feeding, clothing and housing the poor. He was anti-war, anti-nuclear proliferation, anti-death penalty and strongly anti-poverty.
When discussing the Supreme Court decision and the arguments the lawyers presented, he said that while he personally felt abortion was murder, it wasn't a classification that could be made legally. He had us go down slippery slope arguments of "could you abort a baby 2 weeks after it's born?" Or "Do you try to police the uterus and try to charge every woman who miscarriages with negligent homocide?" That was when I first learned how common miscarriages were. He did that to help explain why the court decided on the trimester model that they went with. He explained how women who were raped or were victims of incest would would often kill themselves instead of bring the baby to bear, and how virtually everyone in the US agreed that baring those women, or women whose lives were threatened biologically by pregnancy was seen universally in the US as the worse than abortion of two (and the reasons and polls behind it). He then explained how the 14th ammendment was interpreted that it wasn't O.K. to force the disclosure of the reasons behind abortion, so even if rape/incest/mother's life being in danger is a small percentage of total abortions, the government could not distinguish those abortions from the others.
He also showed us some statistics of women who died from and hospital wings filled with self-abortions or back-alley abortions.
He said his personal conclusion was making it illegal wouldn't change demand, only make it more dangerous and hurt more people. And that the best way to get rid of abortion was by making a world where having a child wasn't having a burden by making child care, health care and economic aid etc more readily available for everyone. While he didn't like contraceptives, he sill considered them the lesser of two evils when compared to abortion so figured they should be free and available to everyone.
Completely warped my view of what "pro-life" was. I assumed most pro-life people were like him. Working at their church food pantry on the weekends and all that bs. Nope. I have never met another pro-life person since then, only anti-choice people. I assume there are more pro-life people out there, maybe, but we only ever see or hear from the anti-choice people.
Oh jeez, I can imagine you going around like "I don't get the hate for pro choice people, they make a lot of sense" for a while before you ran into the vast majority of them
Yup. 100% I didn't get the hate for pro-life people before I met "pro-life" people. He did make a lot of sense. Prior to the deep dive on Roe V. Wade I was solidly in the pro-abortion camp. Just a collection of cells, why not use it as birth control etc. After, while he didn't sway me to a pro-life stance, I understood that it is a much more complicated moral, biological, social, legal, philosophical and political issue than I had thought. The idea of when personhood started, the court cases where the murders of pregnant women were charged as double homocides vs. the dystopian ramifications of starting personhood at conception.
Definitely put me in the pro-choice camp instead of the pro-abortion camp as I realized for many parents, miscarriage is losing a child and there is a ton of grey area where making the decision legally for every case and person is a mess.
I never understood how the same people who preach about life being sacred before a baby is born then have no interest in that child’s wellbeing after they are born. Eg the same politicians who want to criminalize abortions also vote to lower funding to preschools are don’t want to raise the minimum wage. They actively want these same lives that they save (and their mothers) to be in destitute poverty.
Because they don't get the cognitive dissonance between two of their stances:
1) Abortion is murder, so all kids must be born
and
2) The government should do as little as possible to help people, even/especially those who have no ability to help themselves and rely on others to survive.
I've tried to argue with these types of people that reducing taxes and privatizing health care means people just won't be able to afford it (like what we already have in the US), and a better method is to take the taxes and health care costs we're already paying, and make it actually work for everyone via Universal Healthcare. They refused to accept that if you lowered taxes, there would be people who couldn't afford health care; they seriously believed the only reason someone wouldn't go to the doctor is that they didn't prioritize their health. It's pure insanity.
The motive behind it is quite simple to understand.
It is the currently most effective method of producing maximally exploitable (cheap) labor for the capitalists. In short, an increase in Reserve army of labour.
This also explains why these politicians don't care at all what happens to the children after birth.
Because it’s not about protecting life it’s about controlling women and punishing them for having sex. Why is it than many so called pro lifers are in favour of the death penalty? Pro life is just a Trojan horse for female submission and control
It's literally just a culture of hating women. It goes all the way from the bottom up in conservative/christian culture. The wife submits to the husband, the woman must have an intact hymen at marriage or she's 'unclean,' periods are 'gross,' etc. It's indoctrinated into them from birth (I know, I was one) and not many have the critical thinking skills and willpower to logic their way out of that kind of backwards thinking. So they get shunned by society and the only people that will engage with them feel the same way. It would be sad if it wasn't deadly.
I just commented upthread about this; wish I'd seen your remark first. It's patriarchy in all its ugliness, a descendant of the Puritanical approach to Christianity in the west, and related to other fundamentalist viewpoints in every major religion.
Indonesia, for example, just announced THIS WEEK that they will no longer submit female military recruits to a two-fingered "virginity test."
I think it's rather easy: 1. they think abortion is murder. Stoping murderers is a really really important thing, it comes first. 2. in their eyes it's a certain demographic that gets abortions: poor, not married women. They don't want that people to have kids, not as long as their are not married. Of they make the life of poor/ single mothers hard they can punish them for their way of life, don't have to spend their money for other people and make the life of a poor/ single mother/ family so unappealing that that it scares people from doing things that might get them in that situation: (unprotected) sex before marriage.
Along the same lines I also never understood why the same people who are anti abortion also demand abstinence only education. If you are actually against abortions then why not promote safe sex education?
They want to punish poor people for being poor, they grow up in insulated wealthy communities who are deathly afraid of losing the tiniest amount of privilege and see poor people as a threat when they ask for things like increased minimum wage and expanded welfare because they believe it will come at the expense of their tax haven loopholes and free reign to take as they wish.
There's also the double bonus of punishing women for having sex when they should be married and obeying her good Christian husband.
Usually the well off families raise their kids to not screw around so stupidly to have a kid. “They believe” is just a way for you saying I have no idea what they mean that’s just my opinion.
the same politicians who want to criminalize abortions also vote to lower funding to preschools
and they vehemently support and push the death penalty, going so far to have their poisons hand-made because the pharmaceutical companies that make the real thing refuse to sell to GOP death camps.
Dude holy shit, vuvuzelas are the most annoying things in the world (besides these anti-abortion activists and antivaxxers). You're a genius and I implore everyone to buy a vuvuzela!
My best friend was a foster care kid, because his mom couldn't get an abortion, and was forced to try her best to raise a child she was mentally, physically, and financially too unwell to care for.
He went from house to house, getting continually traumatized by abusive foster homes mixed with getting sent back with his abusive family. He was sexually assaulted, starved and more in that system.
He ended his own life last year, just a few days after turning 19 and getting kicked out of his most recent foster home.
The adoption system is fucked, it cost one of the most amazing people I've ever met his life, and forcing a human being to have a child they cannot care for is immoral. There is no good that comes from it, people get abortions for a reason.
I remember when the religious weirdos would accost me in college. My favorite moment was the look on some poor girl's face when I said 'well who's to say your holy book is right and the others are wrong?' She was just blown away. Clearly had never considered that Muslims also think their holy book is true scripture. It cracks me up you can be a supposed 'child of god' and understand so few of his children.
I really don't like the idea of abortion, but like all these silly "My body my choice" antivax people I think freedom sides with abortion! Don't like it, but I get it!
The sad issue is, your actually playing into the hands of the church. At some level they recognize that no amount of protesting will end abortions. But, if they send there members out, and they are ignored, yelled at, fought with, or any other typical behavior, all day, every day, it'll but up some anger in the church member. Then, they come into the safe loving arms of their church community. They get to talc about how man everyone was. Commiserate over the lost babies. And their church solidifies their hold on the individual.
You say that but I actually don't think those persons will ever change. They'll flee to parents and church groups always and they will get told it's just bad old sinners. Fuck them. I couldn't care less about them but when they try to impose that view in public I'm not happy. When that public protest is directly impacting my kitchen and my staff I am pissed. Impact my customers/client and I will show the rage of a chef who worked 1,000 tickets by noon without hesitation. Not because the protestors needed to hear it but because the foster home my prep cook went through left scars I noticed, because my front of house manager has done years of therapy to work through her past. Because countless customers mentioned the protest signs and it's affect on them. Happily I'll be seen by my peers, subordinates and clientele chastising the idiocy that came to visit. To stand with my kitchen against this mental assault is a duty I took with pride. If that man-god they love was actually something they took seriously perhaps they would be more loving and helpful to the prostitutes and unhoused population, until then they're hypocrites without merit. Fuck them and the doom they preach.
Oh believe m me, they deserve all the grief. They deserve people handling out anti-cult pamphlets and harassing their church members every Sunday. They deserve to be identified at their places of business and called out as the hateful beings they are. They deserve to be treated the way they think they are with their holy warrior victim complex. It won't ever change their minds though.
Dude, they used to bomb the university campus that I cooked at for 10 yrs. Every semester we would get notice that they were coming a week or so ahead.
Man, you had that whole wall of text and never once talked about the repeated bombings you dropped in the first sentence. Talk about burying the lead.
Well there was a bus loop with a plaza between two of the main buildings and that's where they were in a group of 20-30, half holding signs and half with pamphlets. So if I didn't start at 6 and was a student I'd either arrive on bus to fetus signs or be leaving one of those buildings and stumble into some stupid smiling "pamphlet hands" waving paper by your fingers and quickly chattering. So no literal bombs, as you pointed out but a rather bothersome jolt of an experience or way to express an opinion.
Read the edit. Not afraid to admit my involvement was low. Did find a resource I linked in the edit and am a volunteer at the soup kitchen since its fun to play with big equipment for me. So gonna try and do more in that avenue for certain. There was a sort of knowing though, after all the years. More than a few call outs in all departments was inevitable and my salty day had a fair bit of steam that felt good to let out. In my eyes they volunteered to do a whole show and in the wake of that I was effected and thus the self justification.
have you shared or published your list of questions somewhere? I bet that would be a pretty valuable resource for people fielding these protestors all over.
Do you know how many foster kids I trained and gave a chance knowing they were struggling with addictions and trying to afford rent? Late for work hung over, again... Do you even know the rage of ten hour day flipping breakfast to lunch and then setting dinner? Short handed?
This is such a bizzarre, desperate argument comng from someone who knows she's on the side of abject evil. It doesn't get much more evil than killing children. No one's asking you to raise them, no one's asking you to be a parent, no one's asking you to stay with them, people are just asking you to not kill them. Really, the absolute bare minimum for being a decent human being. And you take mortal offense at that. What does that say about you?
I mean, read your post over again. You are quite literally arguing for eugenics. "It's okay to kill babies because foster life can be hard." "It's okay to kill babies because they might grow up to be criminals!" "It's okay to kill babies because they might grow up to be poor!" What the fuck, man? Talk about mask off.
It's more about putting money where the mouth is. If they care so much as to stand with signs at a campus that has to warn staff that graphic images will be along their travel to work then maybe they don't see how actions have consequences. As I vehemently believe that advocating a cause deserves being ready for confrontation it was most often that these sign holders expressed they didn't have any involvement in any other programs for children or youth outreach if it wasn't church related.
But you realize that argument doesn't work at all, right? You're probably opposed to rape, armed robbery, kidnapping, and arson. Now imagine a rapist, armed robber, kidnapper, or arsonist smugly telling you that you can't morally oppose those things because you haven't personally devoted your life to being a counselor, cop, investigator, or firefighter. That's nonsense. That person knows what they're doing is wrong but rather than self-reflect and stop doing it they're just trying to shift the blame onto you for not personally stopping them.
Also, if pictures of abortions make you uncomfortable then maybe you're not as okay with it as you pretend to be. We all like to think if we'd been around during slavery or the Holocaust or some other such normalized atrocity we'd have had the courage to fight it, even if it were legal and socially-accepted and condoned by all sorts of respected, intelligent, and otherwise well-seeming doctors and scientists and academics. Good news: here's your chance.
Bro…noone read your whole bullshit excuse as to why you think it’s okay to murder babies…shut the fuck up and own up to the baby you create…you fucking pussy
In the EU you'd be able to sue them for vast amounts of money. The EU is starting to take Data protection VERY seriously for a few years now and medical data is especially sensitive (I work in medical IT, so I know a thing or two about what is necessary to work with that kind of data).
Gathering personal, especially medical, data under false pretenses can net you a 5 digit fine if you're unlucky.
You realize that many forms of assault are literally misdemeanors you can get a ticket for right? I'm not talking about ruining my own life. I'm just talking about making them think twice before they do it again.
There scheme is more sinister than that with the clipboards. They are known to take down names and license plate numbers and use their contacts within state DMV's to get home addresses and then use that information to terrorize the patients through the mail by sending them horrific pictures of "aborted" fetuses and propaganda.
I mean they aren't kidnapping you. All they're doing is pretending to be necessary for your appointment. They don't make you do anything and that's their defense: they didn't force you to do or not do anything. Once you figure out who they are, you tell them to fuck off then you enter the parking lot. They never technically go on the premisis and they haven't touched anyone or prevented anyone from entering. They are immoral and unethical but have technically not done anything illegal.
And they WANT PP to needlessly waste money on court proceedings. They'd fucking love that. PP is doing exactly what they should: ignoring them and having their staff tell people they don't need to stop at the gate.
They want you to consider choosing to keep the baby and will give you more options and information than PP because PP profits from aborted fetal tissue. I wouldn’t consider that shitting on someone.
What a schmuck. THE LOCATION DOESNT EVEN OFFER ABORTIONS, TED. No one driving through the gate could possibly be there for an abortion, you soggy fucking potato.
I think technically not, as the check in desk wouldn't be a medical professional, but rather clerical staff.
However, the fact that they're impersonating a person who works directly with a doctor should (but likely doesn't by law) count. Frankly I think it's bullshit that it doesn't count, considering the end result would be the same.
I swear to god I am not a violent person but i think with things like this, it should be perfectly legal to slap that person once really hard and walk away.
Yeah... Honestly, I'm not saying we should go back to the medieval times, but people have such fucking audacity to do terrible shit today because they're basically free of any violent repercussions. Or if they do suffer them, the person gets put in prison, even if it was morally justified.
The worry is that it's hard to define the specific circumstances where violent responses are valid, and there are plenty of people who think that some tiny slight would be worth a fight over, and a lot more of those people carry guns than reasonable people who would only respond with force to extreme harassment.
For every service worker being harassed by a Karen to the point of tears, there's a Karen who thinks that a service worker saying "no you can't have her arrested for taking the last apple" is worth hurting them over, and while, for most circumstances, reasonable people would all agree, prejudice is a huge issue. What happens when someone assaults an autistic person because they had a meltdown and were incoherent, even though they weren't actually hurting or targeting anyone else (meltdowns often cause self harm, it's extremely rare, rarer than allistic people hurting people in regular tantrums, for an autistic person to actually target the people around them), and the fact that the autistic person can't look anyone in the eye makes everyone trust their assaulter? What happens when some black guy gets attacked at a rural gas station while driving cross country, and the majority of the people around him are racist assholes who want to go back to the days where black people could be lynched over any accusation?
I absolutely think it's morally justified to hurt the people who are actively harassing others. I don't think it would be to hunt them down since at that point, you can prevent further harm via other tactics, but in the moment? Yeah, punching them in the face is absolutely appropriate. But we have to treat any system as though it's going to be abused. Just as Jury nullification has protected as many, if not more, bigots who assaulted someone that the jury agrees is inferior than it has protected people charged with a crime that shouldn't be illegal.
Back in the day you mentioned when they lynched black people was called mob rule. People that felt they were doing the justice then and there off the smallest slight. Careful what you say. Harassment is not enough to get violent and if it is we might as well not have law.
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u/slugsliveinmymouth 15d ago
I’ll never forget the time my girlfriend came back from a planned parenthood in tears because 50 or so women were shouting baby killer and whore at her. The best part is she wasn’t even getting an abortion. She was getting prenatal vitamins for a healthier pregnancy.