Planned Parenthood Official: Abortion Decline "dismaying"

Perhaps the focus on abortion has caused women to rethink? Be more careful? Demand more care on the part of their male partners?

Birth control is not new, nor is it rocket science. A little planning and/or forbearance, and PP is out of business. And I don't mean that in a mean way. It's a sad business.

No invasive surgical procedure is without risk or harm. No doctor will tell you it's "good". That abortion might go away because it's not needed is a condition to be devoutly wished for, hoped for, even fought for.

I can think of a number of reasons for the decline, and would hope that education and morality (gasp!) might be contributing causes.

Squawking haters loitering outside a clinic with signs and noisy rhetoric have always struck me as the poorest way to make progress in this arena. The denizens are almost universally out of the breeding pool, by age or sex, and their anger is ugly, needlessly self-righteous, judgemental and ill-placed in such a personal and difficult arena.

Teach, lead, raise your children well, encourage biology teaching, religion, respect for human life, and, yes, birth control.

Prevention is, and will always be better than abortion.

heldmyw, it seems to me that you are judging the "Squawking haters loitering outside a clinic".

Although I cannot vouch for everyone who stands outside abortion clinics, I would like to share my personal experience. I am a 16-year-old high school student. I became passionate about the issue of abortion when I was required to research it for my freshman morality class. I realized that could be no argument for abortion; it was undeniably the killing of a human being.

Therefore, since then, I have been trying to educate people and make this violent act as rare as possible. I have found that many people have simply not truly thought about the issue. For example, they often do not know that the unborn human heart begins beating at 21 days after conception. Also, many pregnant women are unaware of the pregnancy resources in their community. When the people I talk to learn this, they often alter their opinion and oppose abortion.

Anyways, these two things are what compels me to stand on the sidewalk in front of abortion clinics. Because I oppose abortion, and because I can see that many people do not know much about abortion (and when educated, they change), it is only logical to go to the place where abortions happen: abortion clinics. There, I stand, but not as a political statement (which you seem to assume it is). Instead, I pass out pamphlets detailing the development of an unborn child and giving a page-ful of pregnancy resources. Sometimes I hold a sign, saying something like, "Abortion hurts for a lifetime." My purpose there is not to be angry, judgmental, or self-righteous, as you assert. Instead, I offer information and help to any woman that might need it, in order that she is not forced into having an abortion that she will regret later.

In my personal experience, I have never noticed my fellow "Sidewalk Counselors" to be angry or judgement. They do not "squawk", nor do they shout. On the contrary, the only people who do are the clinic escorts. Their entire job is to prevent the women from hearing or reading anything we say. (So much for an informed choice.) The clinic escorts often carry large umbrellas to block a women from seeing us, blast music from 2-3 boom-boxes so that women cannot hear us, and when women do manage to overcome this obstacles and take a pamphlet, the escort have taken the pamphlet and ripped it up in my face.

So, in my experience, your characterization of pro-lifers is extremely false. It is in fact much more accurate of the clinic escorts. This leads me to question whether you even know the people you speak of. Have you even had a conversation, or do you assume that your ignorant judgement (probably based on abortion clinic propaganda) is correct?