At Politico, reporter Rachel Bluth recently discussed the issue of NIMBYism — “not in my backyard” — in California, of all places, regarding abortion. Though California prides itself on being an abortion haven, it seems at a grassroots level, abortion facilities aren’t always welcome to set up shop there.
Numerous citizens in various California cities have fought the opening of new abortion facilities. For instance, hundreds of people protested when a new facility was set to open in Fontana, and community pushback caused an abortion facility in Beverly Hills to lose its lease. Even Planned Parenthood abandoned plans for a facility in Visalia when residents complained. Politico noted that another new facility planned for El Centro couldn’t open due to bureaucratic red tape.
Billboards are now being erected around Los Angeles, paid for by the LA Abortion Support Collective and the National Institute for Reproductive Health, calling for the Beverly Hills facility to be allowed to open. “It’s striking because here we are in bright blue California, and I think the perception from other parts of the country is that we’re wildly supported here,” Jon Dunn, the head of Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties, told Politico. “The Governor has been a champion for us, as has our legislature, but municipality by municipality, it can be very different.”
Jess Fuselier, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Abortion Support Collective, added, “Let Los Angeles serve as a cautionary tale: In a city and state with legal protections for abortion care, providers still cannot open the desperately needed clinics to provide the necessary abortion care later in pregnancy.”
Yet what is not acknowledged is that people just don’t really like abortion, even if they want it to remain legal.
The abstract, theoretical notion of ‘letting people do what they want with their bodies’ sounds nice (even if completely contradictory, given the fact that laws frequently restrict the actions of individuals and their own bodies) — but polling has found that people largely still find abortion to be morally wrong. This becomes even more true when people are shown the reality of what abortion truly is — and they don’t want it happening in their neighborhood.
READ: Watch their minds change on abortion: ‘That’s like mutilation right there’
Man-on-the-street videos from Live Action have shown how people react when they see how abortion procedures are carried out. Using non-graphic, 2D animated videos, viewers were polled about how they felt about abortion both before and after watching an abortion procedure video; their minds were inevitably changed when they were able to see the violence of abortion firsthand.
“It was horrific, yeah,” one man said. “It was kind of sad to see the baby moving and then it getting, like, torn out of there. I didn’t know that they did it when they were that small.” In another video, a man reacted by saying, “That’s like, mutilation right there, bro.” Another video featured two women, who both reacted emotionally to the videos. “I didn’t realize the fetus would be so big,” one of the women said. “Just kind of seeing it being, like, ripped apart, and piece by piece, it just… it’s kind of unsettling a little bit. Um, I didn’t — yeah, like I said, I was shocked by how big it was, and I thought it would be way smaller.”
