Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, has a 0% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

A year after a domestic terrorist killed three people in a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, the case is a damn mess — a mess that’s highlighting why the incoming administration, the most anti-abortion in history, could be dangerous not just for patients, but for providers.

The shooter, Robert Lewis Dear Jr., has three separate times now been found not legally competent to stand trial on 179 criminal counts, including murder and attempted murder. Dear’s defense team has asserted an insanity defense against his wishes; Dear himself has stated openly and proudly that he hopes to stand trial because his attack was justified, calling himself a “warrior for the babies.” Defense experts have testified that his belief that the federal government is targeting Christians, and him specifically, is delusional and proof that he cannot fully assist his lawyers.

Justifiable homicide was the defense Scott Roeder used unsuccessfully after shooting Dr. George Tiller to death in 2009. Tiller was the 11th known abortion provider to be killed in the United States for their work. Dr. Warren Hern — one of a handful of providers who still performs late-term abortions after Tiller’s assassination — told ABC News in 2009:

Just 100 miles away from the Colorado Springs clinic, in Boulder, Colorado, Hern fears for his life again — this time because he has denied a request by the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, an anti-choice witch-hunt, for access to confidential patient information. In a scathing five-page letter to panel Chair Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Hern writes:

“You and your Republican party are vigorously allied with a violent terrorist movement that threatens the lives of women, their families, and health care workers. … Your ‘investigation’ is legislative harassment that endangers our lives. The blood of any of us who are assassinated is on your hands.”

Hern has reason to be concerned. As a longtime clinic escort, co-founder of an escort group in Englewood, New Jersey, and founding board member of the Clinic Vest Project, which has provided free vests and other resources to more than 100 clinics in over 30 states just in the past three years, I’m concerned too. The incoming administration openly plans to make life less safe for women overall, and there’s little question that it will embolden, excuse, and even tacitly encourage anti-abortion terrorism.

When an abortion provider is threatened, it is routinely the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service that respond. Both are federal agencies overseen by appointees chosen by the president and his administration. It’s not hard to imagine what effect having hostile men in those positions and as attorney general could have on the safety of those who perform abortions, as well as their staff, their patients, and even neighboring businesses and residents.

The Trump-Pence administration’s appointees thus far show cause for concern, especially since the general public and law enforcement are already disastrously under-educated about anti-abortion extremists’ tactics and history of success.

Last year, Dr. Leah Torres, a Salt Lake City-based OB-GYN specializing in reproductive health, told me that rampant anti-abortion violence — including 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, and 185 arsons since 1977 — hasn’t been taken seriously enough. “I’m scared for my colleagues, I’m scared for my patients,” Torres said. “This violence continues to be excused because Planned Parenthood provides health care.” If anything, that’s likely to get worse.

The threat to women’s and health care workers’ lives goes all the way to the highest law enforcement position. Anti-choice publication Life News is celebrating the appointment of Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to attorney general, due to his 0% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

“We are incredibly concerned about Jeff Sessions becoming the attorney general,” NARAL National Communications Director Kaylie Hanson Long told me. “The last person women and families need in this job is someone who has repeatedly given a pass to individuals who commit acts of violence against abortion clinics, doesn’t take sexual assault seriously, and was determined to be too racist by a GOP-led Senate to become a federal judge. But that’s who Jeff Sessions is.”

Sessions’ legislative track record is a cornucopia of abortion restrictions; he has introduced or supported essentially every attack on access. Here’s the not-even-comprehensive list from On the Issues:

• Voted YES on defining unborn child as eligible for SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program)
• Voted YES on prohibiting minors crossing state lines for abortion
• Voted YES on barring HHS (Health & Human Services) grants to organizations that perform abortions
• Voted NO on expanding research to more embryonic stem cell lines (because the embryos are “babies”)
• Voted NO on $100M to reduce teen pregnancy by education & contraceptives (I find demonizing teen parents to be abhorrent, but this points out some hypocrisy)
• Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions except for maternal life (reminder: “partial birth abortion” is not a thing)
• Voted YES on maintaining ban on Military Base Abortions

Sessions isn’t just bad on abortion; he’s atrocious on all manner of human rights. “His record of misogyny and racism makes him unfit to be the country’s top lawyer,” Hanson Long said. “The American people deserve far better, but with Donald Trump at the helm, we know we won’t get it.”

The GOP also has a demonstrated commitment to closing abortion clinics, which not only strips women of access to a legal, protected medical procedure but also makes life easier for domestic terrorists — fewer targets mean easier targeting. There’s no reason to believe this will change under Trump, says Hanson Long: “Instead, we fully expect their priority will be to do everything in their power to restrict a woman’s ability to get health care, including abortion care. Their track records suggest nothing less.”

Clinics have had to brace for increased violence since the doctored tapes targeting Planned Parenthood last summer that painted it as a fetus-fueled capitalist empire. Even clinics that hadn’t previously experienced harassment or hadn’t had picketers for a period of time were forced to create or expand programs to counteract a surge of harassment on their sidewalks and around their parking lots.

Volunteer clinic escort groups are the most visible protection for patients; escorts wear neon vests labeling them as an extension of the clinic and use non-violent non-engagement to create a buffer between picketers and patients. Benita Ulisano is the founder of the Clinic Vest Project and has been involved in escort training and organizing since before the federal policy prohibiting the blockade of doors — the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) Act — was signed in 1994.

“There has been a dramatic increase in vest requests since the Planned Parenthood anti-choice videos were released,” Ulisano told me. “Clinics that did not need vest support or clinic escorts for the longest time now needed our help — and in larger quantities. We have also seen our current client base of escort teams need more vests as well. We have sent vests to over 100 clinic in the past three years, with a dramatic increase in 2015–2016.”

Ulisano is particularly concerned about federal appointments because, essentially, federal law trumps state law. In her city of Chicago, the Pro Life Action League — the group that created “sidewalk counseling” (i.e. harassing patients as they try to enter a clinic) — is suing for the right to get all the way into patients’ faces. If they win, patients will still be protected by the federal FACE act — but not if it’s overturned by the new administration. Ulisano worries about “the blockades happening again like they did in the late 80’s, 90’s when hundreds of anti-choice protesters would show up at a location and literally block entrances and people from going in. It was so, so scary.”

While the threat level started spiking before the election thanks to the videos, Ulisano says clinics are — again — bracing for an increase in harassment.

“The clinic escort group I co-organize for the Illinois Choice Action Team hopes to have an emergency response plan worked out with our clinics,” she said. “It’s an effort we will be working on beginning in 2017. I am aware of other groups doing the same as well.”

As with any policy hindering access to safe, legal abortion, independent providers face the bulk of the obstacles. Independent clinics provide between 60 and 80% of abortions annually, with far less name recognition-boosting fundraising dollars than an organization like Planned Parenthood. It’s vital that our independent clinics have the resources they need ahead of January 20th.

Nikki Madsen, executive director of the Abortion Care Network — the national association for independent community-based, abortion care providers and their allies — stresses that the threat of violence, though it may get worse under the new administration, is nothing clinics aren’t prepared for.

“Abortion care providers care deeply about their staff and patients, so no matter who is in office, Abortion Care Network providers are always thinking about safety and security,” said Madsen. “While we’ve certainly seen some opponents of abortion access emboldened by the recent election, anti-choice harassment and threats are, unfortunately, nothing new.”

What Madsen has seen is an increase in awareness about clinic violence and people signing up to help.

“Our member clinics have seen an increase in the number of people interested in volunteering as clinic escorts since the election,” she said. “It does seem that anticipation of an administration hostile to reproductive rights has mobilized members of our community who are invested in their local clinics and willing to show up to defend patients’ right to access care.”

The interest in helping is welcome. Madsen says that “it’s crucial that allies and community members get to know and support their local clinics.” This is an area where people can do very hands on work providing support; we have a lot of power at the local level.

“There are many ways that those committed to reproductive freedom can help,” Madsen said. “Donate directly to their local clinic, volunteer as an escort, support local and state buffer-zone ordinances, and oppose state funding for deceptive, so-called ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers.’ Because independent abortion care providers are deeply rooted in their communities and every community is faced with different challenges, we recommend connecting with your local clinic directly.”

We can’t know exactly what’s going to happen and how fast. But having the most aggressively anti-abortion administration in our country’s history at the helm means that anti-choice extremists and their supporters have been validated. The combination of validation and perceived oppression (the primarily white, middle-class, Christian picketers are oppressed, don’tcha know!) can be combustive.

Now is the time to get involved in supporting your local clinics. When you’re preparing for an all-out assault on bodily autonomy and self determination, there’s no such thing as too much help.

You can send a message of support to Dr. Hern through NARAL with THIS LINK, find your local independent clinic HERE, and contact the Clinic Vest Project to be connected to a volunteer escort group in your area HERE.

When they donned the “pro-life” label in the 1970s, anti-abortion activists and politicians planted their flag in the moral high ground. After all, what could be more moral than protecting the sanctity of life?

Despite their singular focus on forcing any pregnant person to give birth without regard for what happens after the baby takes its first breath, and despite not offering any public advocacy for prenatal care or tackling our country’s horrific maternal mortality and child hunger rates, those opposed to abortion continue to claim that they are righteous.

It’s an incredible act of alchemy really; their rhetoric handily transforms anyone opposed to them into immoralists. (Linking pro-choice demands to morality has rarely been done on the left outside of typically sidelined reproductive justice groups and organizing efforts — like the highly intersectional 2013 Moral Monday protests.)

More than 40 years after the passage of the Hyde Amendment — which prohibits the federal budget from covering abortion care and remains the only medical procedure ever banned from Medicaid — it’s clear that the majority of Americans don’t believe in the rigid structure created by those opposed to abortion. A full 74% of voters — including 62% of Republicans — not only think abortion should be legal, but that “as long as abortion is legal, the amount of money a woman has or does not have should not prevent her from being able to have an abortion.”

With public opinion firmly on the side of bodily autonomy, perhaps it’s time for pro-choicers to snatch back the morality flag and fly it high themselves.

“[T]here is a moral case for abortion. More importantly, there is a moral case to empower a woman to decide whether to have an abortion on the basis of her own moral reasoning,” writes Ann Furedi, chief executive of the UK’s leading abortion provider British Pregnancy Advisory Service and author of a new book, The Moral Case for Abortion.

Furedi argues that empowering people with the right and ability to access abortion — whether or not they exercise that right during their lifetime — is a moral good all its own.

“When we prevent a woman from making her own moral choices about her pregnancy, we undermine her humanity by taking away that ability to exercise her agency,” she says.

The most prominent abortion provider in the country agrees. Dr. Willie Parker, OB/Gyn and board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled simply, “Why I Provide Abortions.” He described his change of heart — having once seen abortion as “morally wrong.” The more patients who came to him for help, however, the harder it was to see denying them care as the moral position:

“I want for women what I want for myself: a life of dignity, health, self-determination and the opportunity to excel and contribute. We know that when women have access to abortion, contraception and medically accurate sex education, they thrive. We who provide abortions do so because our patients need us, and that’s what we are supposed to do: respond to our patients’ needs. It is the deepest level of love that you can have for another person, that you can have compassion for their suffering and you can act to relieve it. That, simply put, is why I provide abortion care.”

The public debate over abortion as it’s covered in the corporate media has little room for this narrative. Abortion polling is done to make it seem as though Americans are divided, that the battle for hearts and minds is up for grabs. News outlets — even on the “left” — and elected officials whose voting records are given high marks by reproductive rights groups perpetuate this by shying away from being bold and unapologetic in their support of abortion care. In January, for example, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) — the highest ranking democrat in the House as well as the former Speaker — told the nonpartisan politics/election coverage site Roll Call: “I don’t believe in abortion on demand.”

When we prevent a woman from making her own moral choices about her pregnancy, we undermine her humanity by taking away that ability to exercise her agency.
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Furedi addresses this couched support (to put it nicely) for abortion in both the U.K. and the U.S. in her book, writing:

“Liberal thinking no longer tries to define what is ‘right’ by appealing to deontological [i.e. moral] principles. Instead it looks to find what is ‘acceptable,’ what is ‘reasonable,’ or what ‘works.’ In polite liberal circles, expressions of belief in values, and opinion about rightness and wrongness come across as rather old-fashioned and judgmental.”

Anyone who’s ever been on the wrong side of a Thanksgiving dinner debate has experienced this. Somehow, the conservative viewpoint is always given deference; the impetus to change hearts and minds is on the person speaking from a liberal perspective. Why? Because of the conservative claim on morality — a claim that has been largely conceded over the years by their opponents. Furedi posits that this has left the liberal viewpoint vulnerable:

“A further problem with the liberal estrangement from moral principles is that is has left the moral high ground free for occupation by a small, but loud, minority of those who are fundamentally against reproductive choice for reasons based on faith and doctrine. A moral case as it relates to abortion is assumed to be a case against it, not an argument, as made in these pages, that morally defends its choice.”

This concession of morality has allowed stigma to flourish around a procedure that has existed as long as pregnancy, has a less than 1% complication rate, and will be utilized by one-in-three people who experience pregnancy in their lifetimes.

Much of the work being done by reproductive justice groups is to — at least in part — reduce the stigma around abortion care. Those leading this work overtly challenge unfortunate and persistent tropes like “safe, legal, and rare” by proudly declaring abortion a public good. They’re here to take back that moral high ground once and for all.

“Abortion is absolutely a moral and public good in and of itself,” Pamela Merritt, co-director of the reproductive rights direct action group ReproAction, told The Establishment. “That’s why the current state of abortion access in America is a degrading, man-made humanitarian crisis.”

ReproAction has gone hard at liberal favorites like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and President Obama for being wishy-washy on abortion, often avoiding referencing it — even with euphemisms. Merritt and her co-founder Erin Matson are looking for champions and demanding even those “on our side” to be proactive. As Rebecca Traister so concisely wrote in her latest book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, women in the democratic party were told to put their needs aside for the good of the country for decades as anti-choice democrats were strategically run and elected. The result of the party priorities? Anti-abortion restrictions have been introduced and passed at a historic rate.

Merritt is here for a trend reversal:

“To deny . . . people who experience pregnancy access to abortion is to deny access to a needed and safe healthcare option. It’s ridiculous that so many people have the right to abortion in name only because of closed clinics, financial barriers, insulting hurdles, baseless religious exemptions, and terrorism against providers. ReproAction celebrates legal, accessible, and funded abortion as a great thing. We know women must be able to have sex and become parents on their own terms if they are ever to enjoy political, social, and economic equality.”

Steph Herold, co-director of The Sea Change Program, which is dedicated to the study and reduction of stigma surrounding abortion and other reproductive experiences, is also unapologetically celebratory about the role abortion plays in our lives.

“Abortion is more than a public good; it’s a five-minute procedure that often gives people control back over their lives,” Herold told The Establishment. “When people are able to choose their own futures and decide if and when they’re ready to start a family, that’s better for them and for society as a whole.”

To deny people who experience pregnancy access to abortion is to deny access to a needed and safe healthcare option.
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Herold is frustrated at the way polling is often done on abortion; it assumes a binary that simply doesn’t exist. People’s views on abortion change with circumstances and questions from polling firms are sorely inadequate.

“Unfortunately, the majority of polling data we have about how the American public thinks about abortion is pretty flawed, because it turns out people have complex views about this issue,” she says. “For example, a standard Gallup question they’ve asked for decades is, ‘With respect to the abortion issue, do you consider yourself pro-choice or pro-life?’ What that question doesn’t tell you is how that person would treat a friend or family member who’s had an abortion or how they think an abortion experience should be.”

Citing newer polling data with questions that respect the complexity with which people approach abortion, Herold was hopeful.

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son

“Of the people they polled, most want abortion to be available in their communities,” she says. “They want people who have abortions to feel supported and be able to access abortion without burdens. To me, this signals that the way people label themselves related to abortion views doesn’t necessarily map on to how they feel interpersonally about abortion. We need to figure out how to help those folks see how they can help manifest that desire for compassionate abortion care in their communities into action.”

The question is, then: How do we do that? How do we get to a place where society allows the standard internal moral compass supporting legal, accessible abortion to become the presiding public narrative? How do we take the private conviction that — at the very least — it isn’t our legislature’s right to dictate the course of a pregnancy and make that conviction the publicly acknowledged starting place from which laws are written and discussions of health begin?

“At the same time as being a procedure that over 1 million women have every year, we all know that abortion is a social, cultural, and political experience too,” says Herold. “That’s where I think we have some work to do — in making abortion normal, social, and a connecting instead of a dividing issue.”

Merritt, like Furedi, spreads the blame for the stigma barrier around.

“We must acknowledge that abortion stigma has been nurtured by both opponents and advocates; people have received negative messages about abortion for decades,” she says. “So, when I talk to people about abortion, they often start out repeating those negative messages — even if they support access.”

One of the biggest myths that perpetuates stigma is “abortion regret.” It’s the foundation of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “concern” for women who have abortions. As Supreme Court expert Dahlia Lithwick wrote at Slate last year, Kennedy helped to solidify this non-occurrence into both our legal system and broader culture:

“Those of us who were incensed at Kennedy’s paternalism in Gonzales v. Carhart, his last major abortion opinion, in 2007, took issue with his odd (and scientifically unsupported) fetish around ‘post abortion syndrome,’ and his insistence that ‘it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.’

This kind of language sent Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself into orbit in her dissent, scathingly noting that ‘the Court invokes an anti-abortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from severe depression and loss of esteem.’ Ginsburg went on to quote a 2006 study showing that ‘neither the weight of the scientific evidence to date nor the observable reality of 33 years of legal abortion in the United States comports with the idea that having an abortion is any more dangerous to a woman’s long-term mental health than delivering and parenting a child that she did not intend to have.’”

Still, the myth persists.

A 2013 study at the University of California, San Francisco found that “[w]omen who are denied an abortion feel more regret and less relief one week later than women who undergo the procedure” and a 2015 study from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) found that just having abortion available for those who can get pregnant increases positivity and the ability to make and achieve goals.

Study after study proves the emotional, fiscal, and cultural importance of abortion access, and yet far too many ascribe to Kennedy’s thinking: “Well, certainly some people regret their decision.” Sure, people regret decisions every day; this doesn’t mean we take away their right to make regrettable decisions. Even if “abortion regret” or “post-abortion syndrome” were real, it wouldn’t be legislators’ jobs or right to eliminate options. As Furedi writes, “policy makers and politicians need to accept that there is a moral component to abortion and not everything about it can, or should, be resolved by law or regulation.”

“The reality is that most people who have an abortion do not experience regret,” says Merritt. “I’m thrilled that people have started to share their stories and push back against stigma and I’m optimistic that the more we talk about the reality of abortion, who has abortions, and what their actual experiences are, the more people in America will see abortion as a moral good.”

Study after study proves the emotional, fiscal, and cultural importance of abortion access.
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Herold looks forward to a day where abortion is not just accepted, but understood as a beneficial part of society.

“Abortion is a fact of life — and I use the word ‘life’ deliberately,” she says. “People will always need abortions simply because people will always have sex. I’d like to think not so much that we’re stuck with abortion, but rather that we are in the awesome place of building a world where abortion is a visible to the public — where people who have abortions can choose to be open about that experience, where abortion is integrated into mainstream medicine, and where having an abortion fosters connection between people instead of driving them apart.”

To get there, even with the public behind abortion access individually, will take time and yet more work.

“ReproAction believes in the power of direct action, so we are excited to build on the momentum already present in the grassroots,” says Merritt. “We’re going to be doing some raucous work: holding those who stand in our way accountable, and organizing fellow rabble-rousers on the ground. Now is not the time to step back. Now is the time to march forward — and we’re ready.”

Herold is a believer in the one-on-one, person-to-person approach that empowers everyone to do their part to reduce stigma and thereby increase access to abortion.

“We all have a role to play in normalizing abortion. We can start at a place as familial and familiar as the dinner table and have genuine conversations with friends, family, colleagues, pastors, exploring how you think the experience of abortion should be in your community,” she says. “We can all evaluate where our community is at in terms of abortion access. If a friend said that they needed an abortion, would you know where to refer her for compassionate care? Would you know how to support her? Make sure you’re prepared, and then help others get there too.”

These conversations and visible showing of support like op-eds, flyers, buttons, and social media posts don’t just serve to further culture change; they also speak directly to people who might need support.

“We all know and love someone who’s had an abortion, whether we know it or not,” says Herold. “How are you going to make sure that person knows you are there for them? It really starts at that person-to-person level. Then you can build to something more: How can you show other people in your community that have had abortions that you support them? . . . There are so many ways to connect to this issue and we all have a responsibility to give people ways to plug in and take action.”

Here’s to Dr. Parker’s motivation becoming the norm for our culture:

“I found my sense of purpose and place by making the decision to provide abortions, and it is very much consistent with my core values, in regard to my spirituality and my humanity. That’s why I do this work.”

If politicians and the public could leave the doctoring to the doctors and the deciding to the pregnant person, we could be done with punishing policies like Hyde.

“We must give credit to and support the activism that resulted in the Democratic party officially opposing Hyde, and ReproAction is committed to adding our energy and voice to the call to repeal Hyde,” says Merritt. “The lack of government funding for abortion is shameful and has had devastating consequences for many women. Now is the time to push individual politicians to embrace their party’s opposition to Hyde and hold them accountable for doing the work to achieve repeal.”

Herold also credited grassroots activism for the historic stance of the Democratic party and its presidential candidate.

“The fact that the Democratic party platform now includes repealing the Hyde Amendment is a direct result of women of color and reproductive justice groups campaigning fiercely on this issue over the last decade and being unwilling to let the Democratic party — and, frankly, the pro-choice movement — throw people struggling to make ends meet under the bus,” says Herold.

“This change is also the direct result of the over 100 abortion funds across the country making visible the gap between the promise of Roe — abortion access for all — and the reality of abortion access in the US: abortion access only for the privileged.”

A right available only to the privileged is certainly not a moral position for a society. If the reproductive justice activists of today have their way, we’re moving toward a more consistent and equitable culture.

The society we live in shames women who voluntarily terminate their pregnancies; it also shames women who refuse to make an ordeal out of it.

There are women who feel sorrow over their abortion; they’re haunted about whether they did the right thing. But there are others, like me, who don’t, and aren’t.

Post-Abortion Syndrome — a form of post-traumatic stress marked by “grief, pain, regret, and denial” — is a fallacious condition used by Crisis Pregnancy Centers (also called Pregnancy Resource Centers) to frighten women into taking their unwanted pregnancies to full term. Despite the fact that this psychological disorder has been long refuted by the medical community and fosters fear and deception, and arguably ruins lives, it remains a potent and ubiquitous tactic.

The California Pro-Life Council, for instance — a nonprofit that features more than 200 CPCs on its website — takes this disorder and its negative effects on women very seriously:

The California Pro-Life Council attributes this quote to doctor Stephen Edmonson. Besides two years as a U.S. Navy medical officer, Edmonson has no specialty in this in his private psychiatric practice; he has simply “treated many women who have post-abortion problems.”

What that actually means in scientific or psychological terms is nebulous at best; not only isn’t post-abortion syndrome recognized by the American Psychological Association or the American Psychiatric Association as an actual disorder, but a 2015 study from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) found that 95% of 1,000 women who sought abortions in 21 different states not only didn’t regret their decision but described profound “relief.”

In fact, the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Mental Health and Abortion concluded that external societal factors like “interpersonal concerns, including feelings of stigma, perceived need for secrecy, exposure to antiabortion picketing, and low perceived or anticipated social support for the abortion decision, negatively affected women’s postabortion psychological experiences.”

In short? The choice to terminate a pregnancy does not induce mental harm, but anti-abortion rhetoric, manipulative tactics, and the shame-based climate they create certainly do.

More than 3,000 CPCs are run by religious organizations from coast to coast in the United States; their ‘modus operandi’ is to attract women with purposely deceptive advertising — often appearing to be abortion clinics where they offer free pregnancy tests and counseling — before revealing their true nature and frightening women into questioning a salient decision they’d already made.

The California’s Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care and Transparency Act, known as Reproductive FACT Act, went into effect on January 1. This state law requires licensed CPCs to post signs in their waiting rooms stating that California offers free programs for family planning and abortion. They are also obligated to provide a phone number for a real abortion clinic. Unlicensed CPCs are additionally required to publicly disclose their lack of an official medical permit in their facilities.

Those clinics that don’t abide by these stipulations are fined $500 for a first offense and $1,000 for each subsequent offense.

Five pregnancy centers in California have filed separate lawsuits to deny their clients this information. They argue that the Reproductive FACT Act violates their right to free speech, and that therefore they are protected by the First Amendment. Two cases have been turned down by U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller because the law requires neutral information from all women’s health centers and doesn’t specifically target pro-life-affiliated providers. However, it appears that the judicial fight is not over, as these groups are preparing to elevate their case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Perhaps most importantly, the California Reproductive FACT Act also requires pregnancy clinics not to lie about abortion. The information provided concerning the termination of pregnancy must be unbiased and scientifically sound. This might seem obvious, but CPCs deceive women every day about abortion.

When I found out about my unplanned pregnancy, I was 21, still in college, and living with my parents in a small town in Southern Spain. I went to my doctor in our country’s public health system — something unheard of in the United States — and directed my questions to her. My main concern at such a young age was infertility. My doctor’s answer was crystal clear. She told me that my odds were good — despite my pending abortion — to be a mother some day, when I was ready.

Every woman deserves that kind of honest information.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information published this study more than 15 years ago that disproves the link between abortion, infertility, and ectopic pregnancy.

“Except in the case where an infection complicates induced abortion, there is no evidence of an association between induced abortion and secondary infertility or ectopic pregnancy.”

While risk of death marginally increases the later a woman has an abortion, jumping from one in a million abortions to one per 11,000 at 21 weeks, only 1.3% of abortions occur post 21 weeks.

You are, in fact, 40 times more likely to die from a colonoscopy; the risk of death associated with childbirth is about 14 times higher than terminating a pregnancy.

And yet, misinformation rages on, largely unchecked.

A study conducted by the NARAL Pro-Choice America found that CPCs constantly lie to their clients about the risks of abortion. One in three CPCs in California tell women that abortion can lead to infertility and virtually three quarters of the investigated clinics warned women about the risk of Post-Abortion Syndrome.

Almost half of them linked pregnancy termination with breast cancer, a theory that, again, was disproved long ago. Breast cancer and abortion — induced or spontaneous — are not related; The National Cancer Institute reached this conclusion in 2003, but CPCs conveniently didn’t get that memo. (These stats are pre-Repro FACT Act, but their rippling effects can’t be underestimated.)

Recently, members of Students for Life gathered outside Attorney General Kamala Harris office in Los Angeles, protesting her investigation of antiabortion activist, David Daleiden, who broke the Internet last summer with his hidden camera “sting” videos of Planned Parenthood supposedly selling fetal tissue.

Remember that nightmarish morass?

Following Harris’s orders to seize Daleiden’s computers, hard drives, and California IDs he used to infiltrate meetings of the National Abortion Federation and clandestinely film Planned Parenthood doctors discussing their — completely legal — procurement of fetal tissue for medical research, pro-lifers are calling for Harris’s resignation.

But, there is a sneaking silver lining to the misinformation and fear-mongering. AB 2775 in the California Legislature was recently proffered by antichoicers as an attempt to counter the Reproductive FACT Act:

“This bill would require a facility that offers abortion services to disseminate a notice to clients, as specified, providing the telephone number for a specified organization and stating that pregnancy centers can provide women with services at no cost that include, consultation, pregnancy tests, sexually transmitted disease or sexually transmitted infection (STD/STI) testing, ultrasound services, support groups, parenting programs, and material assistance.”

Basically? They wanted an eye for an eye; if CPCs are required to disseminate information on abortion clinics, abortion clinics should be forced to disseminate information on CPCs.

But it failed to pass on April 19, ushering in a not-so-small victory for California women.

The CPC positing their dangerous misinformation as “opinions” and looking to protect their freedom of speech is not just a manipulative travesty, it’s a crime. Help fight the good fight and sign this petition urging lawmakers to enforce the Reproductive FACT Act.