“One woman I spoke to broke down crying when I told her the nearest clinic was ten hours away. I informed her that there was another group who could help arrange travel, and yet another group that existed soley to provide lodgings. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t take that time off work. The call ended with her saying she would find another way. She didn’t mean she would go to a CPC and they would magically help her carry to term (cause they never do, the “help” stops the moment you are too far along for an abortion). She meant she was going to risk her life and her health. She was going to seek out a back-alley abortion, because legislators had systematically taken away all of the clinics she could have gone to in her area a few years ago. I keep hoping this woman calls us back.”

“

Now because the majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester, if you’re going to get an ultrasound image, as the Virginia law requires, the law states, basically, that any woman seeking to have a legal procedure known as an abortion, whether she wants to or not, first lay back in a chair, spread her legs, (put her) feet in stirrups, and have an eight- to ten-inch wand put inside her — even if the woman in question is pregnant as the result of a rape.

I don’t really have a joke here. I just thought I’d tell you.

”