Gaslighting:
As a post-abortive woman, I’ve become accustomed to the methods used by powerful abortion advocates to silence dissent from their former clients, yet I’m consistently astonished at the lack of awareness from the average pro-choice individual regarding this duplicity. Utilizing methods which are more typical of abusive partners than caring physicians, organizations like Planned Parenthood and the NAF regularly trivialize the suffering of a large percentage of their post-abortive patients.
In addition, they encourage their supporters to ridicule women who have chosen to publicly share their despair over lost parenthood. What would easily be recognized as a sort of “institutionalized gaslighting“ if it were to be perpetrated by any other group, is seen as justifiable resistance by those who choose to disparage the regretfully post-abortive. Implying these women are delusional, religious fanatics, and supporters of a patriarchy which wants to control women’s bodies, abortion proponents claim justification to engage in overt incivility and outright violence.
After all, well-behaved women seldom make history.
While I’m not a proponent of victimhood culture, calling out abusers in a fair and concise way is an acceptable recourse for those of us who want no more than to set the record straight. Coming from a major political organization with universally favorable media coverage the abuse is more difficult to pick up on.
Like any abuser, their opening salvo is to isolate the potential victim — most people’s initial introduction to Planned Parenthood is through middle-school sex education. These controversial programs position advocate facilitators as the ultimate authority, and anyone who disagrees as ignorant and old-fashioned. Because the most efficient way to isolate potential victims is by discrediting critics, in conjunction with so-called “comprehensive” sex education, attacks on anti-abortion initiatives, such as Pregnancy Resource Centers, is common. Abortion advocates want to be our only source of information a bout sexual health to the extent of openly advocating against parental knowledge or control of children’s sexuality.
Again, like abusers do, they lie, blatantly, about things which are easily disproven. Case in point— Planned Parenthood continued to publicly proclaim they performed mammograms, long after it had been proven they never offered them. Even now many of their most ardent supporters ignorantly persist in asserting you can get a mammogram at their facilities.
When caught in their lies, they revert to isolating the victim: instead of focusing on disputing the lie, they focus on (what they see as) the character flaws of the accuser. Critics are labeled as oppressors, part of a malignant patriarchy whose only goal is to control women. Everyone except for abortion proponents are the enemy, meaning your reliance on them for information becomes vital to your well-being. They’re the only ones keeping women safe. We saw an example of this after the scandalous undercover videos filmed by the Center for Medical Progress, in which abortionists were caught bargaining for payment in return for fetal body parts. Despite numerous affirmations that videos were not deceptively edited, Planned Parenthood and its supporters continue to refer to them as the “heavily edited videos”.
It does not matter how much evidence there is of their lies, they still assert a distorted version of the truth. For those who have relied on their ministrations, and still are, the evidence of their dishonesty often creates confusion which manifests in cognitive dissonance— you’ll note the inability to entertain dissent, from post-abortive women who have become activists. Their unwillingness to acknowledge basic scientific facts regarding fetal development, the eugenic nature of abortion, and the misogyny implicit in expecting women to kill their children to work on par with men, are also telling as to their motives.
One thing to remember in this, most gaslighting is an intentional act, with concrete goals: to make the potential victim(s) doubt their own recollection of events— it’s meant to distort your sense of reality. and to discredit you to those peripherally involved in the story. National abortion organizations spend a significant amount of money on lobbying, marketing, and peer-to-peer efforts. My accusation isn’t that they may inadvertently be gaslighting women who are unhappy with their efforts, but intentionally implying we are unstable, and our stories are anomalies so that they can continue to manipulate women for profit.
The accusations of instability are incredible, coming from an organization which promotes female empowerment as a brand; why would anyone who purports to support women — to “believe women” — be so dismissive of the claims thousands of us have made, regarding their grief and regret? Well, for the corporations making money off of the continued addiction to abortion, the answer is simple: money.
But when it comes to the average person, the answer lies in the language of low-level abortion supporters themselves: internalized misogyny, class privilege, and ableism. Now, to be clear — I am not proposing we fall prey to the victimhood culture which seems to proliferate amid progressive orgs. I’m simply suggesting using their verbiage to describe the foundation of their smear campaign:
Pro-abortion supporters have internalized the idea of weak women, women who need abortion to succeed. Women can’t possibly finish school/have a career, and parent children at the same time.
Pro-abortion supporters promote the idea that hardship is somehow not part of building the American Dream, and is to be avoided at the expense of our offspring. Only when you are wealthy are you permitted to have a family sans censure.
Pro-abortion supporters have long been in favor of elimination of the weak through eugenic abortion. In their view, children with profound disabilities are better off dead, through abortion expansion during all 9 months of pregnancy.
Internalized misogyny.
Class privilege.
Ableism.
Like most abusers, their actions are rooted in the twisted reflection they have of what they see as their own deficiencies. They don’t believe in their own power, their own worth, their own abilities
They know they can’t win this argument on the basis of facts because the facts support the anti-abortion position. We know women are powerful, impoverished children have a right to be alive, and the disabled are not “better off dead”.
Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the plethora of other abortion-rights advocacy groups have never been interested in helping women overcome difficulties. Their only interest is self--interest. Posh lifestyles and luxury cars.
We need to be louder and more persuasive. We need to keep our children away from abusers, in the classroom and within the structure of social clubs. We need to expose the abortion lobby’s hypocrisy to youth already entangled in an abusive relationship with an abortion provider. Just like we would try to help our children to avert an unsavory situation in dating and friendship we must encourage them to think critically about the organizations they choose to use for their care.
It’s time to identify the abusive behavior for what it is: dangerous manipulation, whose purpose is disenfranchising the vulnerable, for the sake of the almighty dollar.
- Tuesday, March 26, 2019
- 0 Thank You For Visiting
