Last week, the Washington Post featured a story on D.C.’s newest abortion clinic, Carafem, described as offering women a “spa-like” experience and an “unabashed approach” to abortion. Along with a chemical abortion drug to end their pregnancy, women at Carafem are provided spa robes and tea. This “abortion spa” is designed with wooden floors and plush upholstery, to resemble a high-end salon.
But despite the setting, profit is still the bottom-line for the abortionists at Carafem, and volume matters. The owners admit that women are expected to be in and out of the abortion spa in one hour. Following the abortion spa experience, women are sent home with a second round of chemical abortion drugs to be taken the next day, and then the abortion occurs six hours later—at home without medical supervision or professional support. This is particularly concerning in light of a study showing that chemical abortions fail almost one in five times.
Once again, Big Abortion is putting profits ahead of women’s health and safety—this time just with a new face.
The abortion spa is just one aspect of Big Abortion’s attempts to normalize the killing of unborn children. With Americans increasingly becoming more pro-life, abortion rates declining year after year, and with more than 200 pro-life laws enacted across the States since 2011, Big Abortion is becoming more and more desperate to paint abortion as “no big deal” in order to keep its profits up.
But even with fresh paint, new color schemes, and improved branding, ending the lives of unborn children will never be a simple or painless process. And Big Abortion’s attempt to minimize the pain and agony that comes with abortion only demonstrates how out of touch abortionists are with women today.
Consider that the risk of suicide is three times greater for a woman who aborted her child compared to the woman who delivered her child; and that 10 percent of the mental health problems that women suffer can be directly linked to abortion.
While the abortion industry is pushing life-ending drugs, chemical abortion can carry more risk than surgical abortion. One study found that chemical abortions cause immediate problems for women at four times the rate of surgical abortions. In particular, hemorrhage and incomplete abortion are more common after chemical abortions. Tea and robes cannot mask these complications.
Tea and robes also do little to compensate for Big Abortion’s opposition to even the most commonsense measures to protect women inside abortion clinics—including parental notification laws designed to protect girls from sexual predator abuse. In fact, Big Abortion vehemently opposes laws that would hold abortion clinics to the same basic health and safety regulations found in other ambulatory surgical centers. The result is that, nearly fifty years after the start of the “sexual revolution” in the United States, animals in veterinary clinics are receiving better protection than women in abortion clinics.
Tea, robes and plush upholstery also would not have helped Tonya Reaves, who lost her life after bleeding for five hours inside Planned Parenthood’s flagship clinic in Chicago before an ambulance was called. It also would not have helped Karnamaya Mongar, who lost her life following a late-term abortion in the squalor of Kermit Gosnell’s “house-of-horrors” West Philadelphia clinic, in a state where abortion clinic regulations were not being enforced.
Of course, these tactics should not surprise us as Christians. Evil has always attempted to mask itself behind superficiality—in this case décor. But we must also be vocal advocates for morality in our day, with an approach that truly supports women—with truth, support and compassion.
