What the F&@$ does this MEAN?!

[cratehorus]

todd akin is saying clinics trick women into having abortions for profit.

Abby Johnson, a former director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Texas who quit in 2009 and now speaks against abortion.

"I can attest that when I served as director of Planned Parenthood in Bryan, Texas, we often scared women into getting services they did not need including abortion so we could collect the fees. This included women who were not pregnant and women who were in the process of miscarrying," Johnson said in the written statement.

Abby Johnson is an interesting character in the anti-choice movement. A former clinic director for Planned Parenthood, Johnson has crossed over to the anti-choice side and makes a living telling Christian conservatives that the non-profit bamboozles women into getting abortions to increase profit margins. Nate Blakeslee of Texas Monthly looked into Johnson's conversion story in 2010 and not only caught Johnson in direct lies, but also found substantial evidence to demonstrate that she was about to be fired for incompetence just before switching sides. Among the lies was Johnson's claim that a for-profit group performs abortions for Planned Parenthood. In fact, all services at Planned Parenthood are non-profit, but admitting this would destroy anti-choice claims that abortion is an "industry."

Part of the problem here is that, within the conservative evangelical circles that are the backbone of the anti-choice movement, "truth" is not the truth, but simply "stories that dramatically illustrate the rightness of our belief system." So while, for instance, Blakeslee can point out that there were no abortions performed on the day that Johnson claims she saw a fetus trying to escape the abortion tools on an ultrasound--a scene she loves to describe for her rapt audiences--the literal truth of her story matters less than that it reaffirm her club's belief that fetuses are cognizant beings, gifted with more awareness than their bimbo mothers (or in Akin's words: "climate control") of what abortion actually means.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/201...dure_.html