California: A state of death

LOS ANGELES—Shortly after signing a bill allowing assisted suicide in California, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed another measure that forces crisis pregnancy centers to “offer information about affordable contraception, abortion and prenatal care.”

The information is to be displayed in the form of a sign tacked to the crisis center’s door and must include a phone number to the nearest county services office where free or low-cost family planning services can be obtained.

Deceptively labeled the Reproductive FACT Act, the measure requires women seeking help with an unplanned pregnancy to be informed of alternatives, including abortion, which of course pro-life crisis pregnancy centers do not offer.

Republican state Assemblyman Brian Jones tells me the law is a “one-way street.” He says the law does not require signs in abortion facilities advising women about the availability of pro-life alternatives. Jones, who voted against the bill, says he showed some of his Democratic colleagues the undercover Planned Parenthood videos that revealed employees discussing the sale of fetal body parts from aborted babies. Jones says his colleagues claimed not to have seen the videos and were “shocked.” Not shocked enough, though, to vote against the bill. Jones blames the Democratic leadership for pressuring its members to vote for the measure.

A Los Angeles Times editorial said the law will “counteract the troubling and deceptive practices employed by some ‘crisis pregnancy’ centers to deter women from considering abortion.”

The real deceivers are the ones who promote abortion as a woman’s “right.”

Carol Everett, a former abortion provider, had an abortion herself, then wrote a book (Blood Money: Getting Rich Off a Woman's Right to Choose) revealing how women are pressured into having abortions and denied information that might lead them to reconsider. She says abortion providers deceive women by telling them their “fetus” is not human, or is merely “tissue,” and suggesting that their lives will be better after they get rid of the “burden.” Anything, she says, to get their money.

At the Priests for Life website, Everett writes about abortion centers: “They don’t sell keeping the baby. They don’t sell giving the baby up for adoption. They don’t sell delivering that baby in any form. They only sell abortions.”

For more than three decades I have spoken at fund-raising events for crisis pregnancy centers. I have met the dedicated and compassionate women who run them and many of the clients who have received free counseling and services that include baby clothes, help in finding a job, and spiritual counseling about different lifestyle choices. Not once has any of these women told me they regret their decision to give birth.

I have also met many women who have had abortions and who have gone through a program called Post-Abortion Counseling and Education (PACE). The program helps women come to terms with their decision to end a pregnancy and is where they can experience healing and forgiveness without judgment. And when these women suffer depression or turn to drinking and other self-destructive behavior, the abortionist doesn’t help them. Crisis pregnancy centers do.

Often these women have told me that if the abortion provider had given them information about alternatives to abortion they would have made a different choice. Many were not allowed to see a sonogram of their baby. According to PolitiFact, “Research indicates that some women seeking an abortion change their mind after having an ultrasound.”

With the number of unborn baby deaths in the United States approaching 60 million since the Supreme Court made abortions legal in 1973, and with assisted suicide now legal here in California and in several other states, life in "brave new world" America seems to be growing increasingly cheap.

But it's not cheap. And we who are pro-life must continue to stand—winsomely yet firmly—against the carnage.

© 2015 Tribune Content Agency LLC.

Listen to Cal Thomas’ commentary on The World and Everything in It.