Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Fetal fate
Posted By Stephen Dark on August 10, 2010, 9:46 AM
This week's upcoming cover story looks at a small building on 900 East between 600 and 700 East in downtown Salt Lake City that sits smack on the fault line of Utah's abortion debate.---
The Pregnancy Resource Center [PRC] is one of five such Utah-based organizations that are part of a national pro-life movement geared towards offering alternatives to abortion-minded young women with unplanned pregnancies so they take the baby to term. Like so many PRCs across the country, Salt Lake City's operation is located next door to family planning clinic, Planned Parenthood, to which it is diametrically opposed.
Utah's abortion debate in many ways lacks the invective in other states. I interviewed PRC staff and volunteer counselors, a board member, a nurse who provides ultrasounds to verify the pregnancy and several young women who had been either counseled by the PRC or attended its Bible-based course on dealing with their post-abortion trauma.
I also visited Planned Parenthood and a local abortion clinic, where I interviewed a number of young women who had just gone through abortions.
For all the lack of in-your-face picketing and psychological warfare that you find elsewhere, Utah's abortion debate, particularly when Utah winds up for the annual legislative session, is still capable of turning heads. Utah, afterall, made national headlines this January when legislators attempted to effectively criminalize miscarriages.
More headlines, it seems, are to come. What surprises Rep. Carl Wimmer [R-Herriman] has in store for the next legislative session he has yet to divulge. He has, however, told Planned Parenthood officials they will hate him next year.
The PRC, meanwhile, offers an opporunity to look at the abortion debate from the ground up, where the struggle is over one young woman's soul at a time.
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