The Huffington Post’s “HuffPost Live” is a live streaming network that is unabashedly married to the most liberal of liberal agendas. Abortion – or “reproductive freedom,” as HuffPost segments gushingly refer to the deed – has been a regular topic on the network. The network featured four current and former abortion mill escorts in February who came on the show to decry buffer zone laws, which were being hotly debated across the country.
Buffer zone laws are intended to create a measure of distance (varying among different states’ bills) from the abortion mill beyond which pro-life activists are not allowed to proceed. There remains much contention about whether state buffer zone laws are a constitutional violation of First Amendment free speech rights.
Lizz Winstead, a comedian and avid Planned Parenthood supporter, was one of the escorts featured. She said that, in her experience, some pro-lifers peacefully prayed and were able to coexist with clinic staff, but the “majority” of abortion protesters did not fit this category. She betrays that she has not come to terms with what abortion really is when she attempts to explain the graphic signage used by some abortion protesters:
Then, there are the people who are not [peacefully praying protesters], which is the majority of the people, who hold up signs of some like post… post… I don’t even know what… giant… um, uh, fetus or stillborn baby or whatever it is that they hold up. And they are verbally assaulting people.
Obviously, the truth hurts. The question of whether or not it is appropriate to utilize graphic images of aborted babies at the particular venue of abortion mills aside, Winstead clearly had personal qualms about coming face-to-face with what she was actually defending as a clinic escort. If “women’s reproductive justice” is so wonderful, and she has proudly been defending it since the 1980s, then wouldn’t reason dictate that she proudly hold up those graphic images herself? Shouldn’t she be intimately acquainted with the reality of abortion, to which she has dedicated her life?
Winstead continued, bemoaning the fact that lay people come with the intention of “counseling” women:
The hubris, that in the name of Jesus you would call yourself a counselor to someone that you don’t even know is outrageous to begin with and then what they say is just like double outrageous.
Ironically, “counseling” is what women receive over the phone from lay people when they call an abortion mill to make an appointment for abortion. Counseling from lay people is what they receive when they arrive at the abortion mill and are led to a counseling room to be further counseled by a non-psychiatrist clinic worker. Winstead’s indignant attitude towards sidewalk counselors being lay people seems quite misplaced.
If they chose to look at the women as human beings, they would have to, on some level, retreat into their own humanity.
Which camp really treats women as human beings, when organizations like Planned Parenthood have shown time and time and time (and time and time) again how little they care for the humanity of women?
Also involved in the discussion was Michelle Colon, who has been an escort at Mississippi’s last remaining abortion mill for ten years. Michelle posited that it is “ridiculous” to have protesters at an abortion facility:
It’s really ridiculous. This is not any kind of protest behavior that would be tolerated at any other facility, uh, for any other cause in any other part of the country.
Michelle, who calls herself a “reproductive freedom fighter,” might have a valid point about abortion mill protesting if abortion mills were providing normal health care. At any other “health care” facility, patients are being treated or cared for so that their lives can thrive. At no other type of facility in the United States are procedures directly purposed to end human lives, as with abortion. So Michelle’s observation about the uniqueness of abortion mill protesting is valid, but her argument fails to notice that vast chasm dividing normal medical care from abortion, which only elaborate semantics can portray as “medical care.”
