For those that are unfamiliar with the film, 12th and Delaware is a non-narrative HBO documentary about an intersection in Florida where there is a crisis pregnancy center - a so termed “pregnancy assistance clinic” owned by a deeply religious anti-choice organization - directly across the street from a legitimate abortion clinic. I think it’s important to note that there’s no narration - the documentary is comprised entirely of raw footage, which, in my opinion leaves very little room for bias and allows the crazy to speak for itself.
The lengths that the CPC employees will go to coerce a woman not to have an abortion are absolutely sickening. Women were given misinformation - directly, by CPC employees - about fetal development. Ultrasound results were falsified to make it look as though there was a fetal heartbeat well before one would naturally develop. Employees would lie to women about how far along in their pregnancy they were, making them think that they had longer to decide whether or not to terminate the pregnancy than they actually had, in the hopes that it would be too late once they had actually made a decision. Women - I can hardly call them women, they were girls, fifteen, nineteen - were lied to about the mechanics of the procedure, told they would suffer inconceivable pain, that there would be blood everywhere, that the complications were endless, that abortion causes breast cancer, a claim that the American Cancer Society has refuted numerous times. One employee went as far as to tell a woman that condoms were only effective 85% of the time - a statistic that is just blatantly untrue. Don’t even get me started on the medical ethics of feeding women false medical information. Overall, the point is that these women were severely misinformed about their conditions, and then told that they would be murderers. Murderers.
Two cases stood out to me in particular. First, there was a 24-year old woman who already had two children saying that she could not afford to raise a third child, that she would not be able to care for it to the best of her ability, and that - this is the important part - her boyfriend was already intensely verbally abusive and she did not want to bring a child into that environment. The director of the CPC immediately said to her, “For all you know, this baby could change that.” Directly encouraging this woman to bring a child into an intensely unsafe situation. Making entirely clear that her concern was not for this woman and her safety, - because there is a thin, thin line separating verbal abuse from physical abuse - but about the “sanctity” of life that “God has instilled inside of her.” Second, there was a woman who was verbally accosted by a large group of people directly outside of the abortion clinic, telling her that “deep down,” she didn’t want to do this and that “God would punish her” for killing her baby. She calmly explained to them that she was a single mother of six children, with no income, no government support, and no way to care for this seventh child. The people from the CPC immediately told her that they would pay for whatever she needed - food, clothes, rent, gas, diapers, anything. One woman goes so far as to to tell her that she will go to the bank that day and withdraw whatever amount of money she needs. While it sounds lovely in theory, they won’t do it. They don’t have the resources, and maybe they can pay this month, but what about next month, and the month after, and the months after the baby comes? Who’s going to help her care for those children? Certainly not the vigilantes standing on the street corner.
Lastly, the things that horrified me was the fact that the anti-choice protestors actively stalked the abortion clinic physicians. Every morning, the owner of the abortion clinic would go to some undisclosed location to pick up the physician, and when he drove the physician into the clinic, the physician’s face would be covered with a sheet so that none of the protestors could ascertain his identity - this, of course, was all done for his safety, considering the huge number of abortion physicians who have been murdered simply for what they do. One of the protestors that stood outside the clinic ended up following the car to find out who this physician was and where he lived and said that he planned to make billboards with the doctor’s face and address on it, captioned “THIS MAN PERFORMS ABORTIONS,” and allow his fellow protestors to do what they will - violent or otherwise. The irony, the hypocrisy of this is overwhelming to me.
I could go on, but honestly this all just makes me so uncomfortable, to the point where I am starting to feel physically ill. I will just end by saying that there is a reason I have chosen to pursue Public Policy in reproductive justice. I am entirely disgusted by this, and I will keep fighting until things like this don’t happen anymore.
