As visually beautiful as it is, the city of San Francisco is a very strange place with such contradictory aspects to their worldview. Here is a world where people support bans on smoking yet oppose the criminalization of marijuana. A world where people support the idea of entering the country illegally yet oppose continuing the ROTC program. From this strange world, one should expect a fair amount of hypocrisy that to focus on. Indeed, there is quite an abundant set of paradoxical viewpoints that prevail beyond the splendor of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The one worth focusing on for this installment will be San Francisco’s decision to focus a great deal of legal pressure on a certain group within its environ. No, not the illegal immigrants who violate American sovereignty and refuse to go through the system. Nope, not the people who even with the electoral failure of Proposition 19 still clandestinely manufacture marijuana. Rather, the great danger to society in San Francisco, according to its City Supervisor Malia Cohen and City Attorney Dennis Herrera, is the prevalence of pro-life pregnancy centers that offer alternatives to abortion.

On August 2nd, Cohen and Herrera announced that they were going to take legal and legislative measures to prosecute (or is it persecute?) pro-life clinics who, in their words, “purport to offer non-judgmental abortion services and counseling to women with unwanted pregnancies, but that instead push an anti-abortion agenda on those seeking constitutionally protected medical services.”

“The legislation that will be introduced today would prohibit these limited services pregnancy centers in San Francisco from misleading the public about the services they perform,” said Cohen.

The big target for this combined legal and legislative action is the Christian pregnancy center First Resort, whom Herrera mentions by name in his remarks.

“First Resort is certainly entitled to advocate for ‘an abortion-free world’ to anyone who wants to hear it, but the center is breaking the law by misrepresenting itself as an abortion provider for the purpose of luring women with unwanted pregnancies to its office,” said Herrera.

“This is an insidious practice that victimizes women who are, in some instances, already victims,” continued Herrera.

Once again, a friendly reminder: Herrera did not conclude that entering this country illegally was an “insidious practice”, neither did he conclude that selling marijuana and cultivating new generations of addicts was an “insidious practice.” Talking women out of having an abortion is, in his words, an “insidious practice.” To limit it more to the topic at hand, consider what Herrera decided was not an “insidious practice”: partial-birth abortion.

In 2004, it was City Attorney Herrera who challenged the constitutionality of President George W. Bush’s partial birth abortion ban. Quoting Herrera, “In this, the most important fight over abortion rights in a generation, the stakes are far too high for San Francisco to remain neutral.”

For Herrera, a procedure that terminates the life of a being that can survive outside the womb, feel pain, form memories, and recognize its mother’s voice is a constitutionally protected right but to convince an expectant mother to not go through with such a procedure is, as he put it, an “insidious practice” that should be criminally prosecuted. Yet there is another dimension to Herrera’s morally contradictory activities: the absence of the prosecution of abortion clinics that may use deception to bring in clients.

For generations, abortion providers have downplayed the various maladies that come from the abortion procedure, be it fetal pain, infertility, increased likelihood of breast cancer, death of the mother, etcetera. Regulation has always been lacking and examples of nightmarish clinics where essentially no oversight was given are a matter of record. So when will Cohen and Herrera combine their legal and legislative efforts to go after those abortion clinics that engage in such deceptions? Probably never.

This whole episode should serve as a reminder as to the danger of criminalizing or otherwise restricting the activities of an entire ideological group due to some of their members possibly engaging in dubious practices. Even if First Resort was genuinely deceiving women who were seeking abortions to not have them, does that make abortion providers who genuinely deceived women into having abortions not culpable in deception as well? If adamantly pro-life politicians took over San Francisco, would they be justified in closing down pro-choice lobbying groups because some of their number engaged in deception? Every cause has its extremists, its deceivers, its rotten apples, and every so often every group uses knowingly or unknowingly false information to advance their claims. If San Francisco seeks to criminalize such behavior, then they should penalize the pro-choicers who also deceive. And if they are not going to penalize pro-choicers who engage in deception, then they are a profile in hypocrisy.

About the author

Michael Gryboski wrote 38 articles on this blog.

Michael Gryboski was born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia, making him one of the few people living in Northern Virginia who’s actually from Northern Virginia. He earned a bachelor of arts in history with a minor in psychology from George Mason University. A writer aspiring to greatness, Michael’s work can be found on numerous websites. Michael would rather be correct than widely accepted.

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