By Mississippi law, women seeking abortions must sign informed consent forms, certifying that they've been told about the risks of abortion, including "danger to subsequent pregnancies, breast cancer, and infertility." Thus doctors in Mississippi are legally required to mislead their patients. At least, that seems to be the intention. Booker gets around it by taking the wording of the law literally. When patients come in for a consultation, he tells them about the links between abortion, breast cancer and infertility, explaining they are nonexistent.
A really sad article, about the last abortion clinic in the
entire state of Mississippi, and the fundy zealots who are trying to close it down, then move onto regulating the rest of everyone's sex life.
Of course, their approach of lying because Jeeeeesus! told them to do it has worked brilliantly.
At Jackson's Center for Pregnancy Choices, which gets roughly $20,000 a year in payments from the state's sale of Choose Life plates, I picked up a pamphlet about condoms. It warns that "using condoms is like playing Russian roulette ... In chamber one you have a condom that breaks and you get syphilis, in chamber two, you have an STD that condoms don't protect against at all, in chamber three you have a routinely fatal disease, in chamber four you have a new STD that hasn't even been studied."
According to Barbara Beavers, the pretty, honey-voiced mother of four who runs the Center for Pregnancy Choices, as many as 40 percent of the pregnancy tests the center administer come back negative. Some of the women who take them live with their boyfriends, making a commitment to abstinence unlikely. But Beavers is unapologetic about her opposition to birth control, in part because she thinks a woman whose contraception fails might feel more entitled to an abortion. "They think, it wasn't their fault anyhow, so let's just go ahead and kill it," she said. The best birth control, she added, "is self-control."
A girl in Mississippi would have to do some digging to find other sources of information about contraception. When it comes to sex education, the schools teach either abstinence or nothing at all. "You would be surprised what they don't understand about their own bodies," Thompson, the former director of the Jackson Women's Health Organization, said about the clinic's patients. "It still amazes me what they don't know."
Even when girls and women manage to learn about birth control, getting it isn't always easy. Besides private physicians, the only places that provide birth control prescriptions are the Jackson Women's Health Organization and the offices of the State Department of Health. Once a woman gets a prescription, there's no guarantee she'll be able to fill it. Mississippi is one of eight states with "conscience clause" laws that protect the jobs of pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraceptives. It's especially hard to obtain emergency contraception. According to a survey by the Feminist Majority Foundation, of 25 pharmacies in Jackson, only two stock EC. Booker said he's written several EC prescriptions, only to find his patients unable to fill them.
There's no indication that Mississippi's policies have led to increased chastity. There is, however, plenty of evidence that both women and their children are suffering. Mississippi has the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country and the highest teenage birth rate. It is tied with Louisiana for America's worst infant morality rate. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, more than half of the state's children under 6 years old live in destitution.
... because jesus wants babies to live in destitution, don't you know?
Gr. Levels of hate rising.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
