Incidentally, the victim had to have an emergency c-section; she and her daughter, aptly named “Miracle”, are both doing fine.But really, doesn’t this behavior just sound like something out of Butterbox Babies, or perhaps an extreme version of a Christian “shepherding home”? Bit of both, maybe–in this case, the unlicensed fauxtetrician and the “shepherder” were one and the same.Whatever it is, I think the anti-choice movement should own up and claim this crazy woman as one of their own.For nearly five days, police said, Veronica D. Deramous kept the pregnant woman, bound with duct tape, inside her Suitland apartment, giving her food and drink to keep her alive. Deramous wanted the woman’s unborn baby girl, police said, and was willing to get it by any means.Sometime over the weekend, police said, Deramous turned up the volume on the TV, shoved a rag in the woman’s mouth and put a piece of tape over it. Then she uttered a chilling warning.“You’re strong,” Deramous told her victim, according to police. “You can handle what I’m going to do to you.”Using a few box cutters and a razor blade, Deramous cut into the woman’s abdomen, police said. When the woman, 29 and homeless, escaped sometime in the next 24 hours, her placenta, stomach and intestines were still exposed.
Ya know, ‘Bina, as I read this, and followed the link to Christian “Shepherding Homes”, it suddenly hit me: “The anti-choice crowd want to overturn Roe v. Wade because of the money.” The abortion placement business is a gold mine for them. Forget all that stupid preaching to the unwashed masses on Sunday. Those ingrates don’t understand that they could never live up to our level of holiness. Let’s go into the business of “helping” frightened women who are pretty much defenseless and confused and lack the money to resist us. We give them our canned talks, make them feel terribly guilty at a time when they are emotionally vulnerable, rake in huge amounts of cash from the desperate parents who want to adopt and throw the whole bunch out on the street when the TRANSACTION is done. And we can smugly pat ourselves on the back and brag to the world how holy we are.
Overturning Roe v. Wade has nothing at all to do with religious dogma, it has to do with raking in huge amounts of money with out all that expense of building that ostentatious church, buying all that expensive television equipment and putting up with all those whiny people. We just do the paperwork, have some sleaze-bag lawyer sign off on it and we’re done, with a suitcase full of money. As Deep Throat said, “Follow the money.”
Don’t forget unscrupulous lawyers, Jim…there are a lot of them handling mainly or even exclusively adoptions. Reading about one notorious Canadian baby farm in Butterbox Babies has really opened my eyes to how much money plays into the whole adoption racket, both for baby farmers and the lawyers who facilitate the transactions for them. Very few women would give up their children if they had any idea how these schemes really operate. The infamous home in the Butterbox Babies saga closed down after too many deaths and too much negative publicity finally made the place too scandalous to ignore. Legislation regulating adoptions more tightly followed soon after that.
Once abortion laws were liberalized here in Canada, and single mothers were given welfare allowances if needed, the number of women giving up infants for adoption dropped dramatically (this was in the late ’60s/early ’70s.) Changing attitudes also helped; once the stigma of single motherhood was removed, a lot of women kept their babies AND their jobs. Those who didn’t choose abortion were still not forced into those dismal maternity homes anymore, to conceal their “offending” pregnancies from the eyes of the disapproving public and then give up their “bastards” to someone who would “give them a good home.” The maternity homes are almost all closed now, and those that still exist, operate more as shelters for homeless women or those in transition from an abusive home. These days, one only gives up a child if one really feels it to be the better way, at least here in Canada.
There are, however, a growing number of “crisis pregnancy centres”, which use a quasi-feminist rhetoric to mask the fact that pregnancies are often unwanted (and in the case of those they address, certainly unintended.) There’s one operating in my hometown; I found some of their literature in a garbage bin in a public washroom once. I was appalled by it–it recommended that the “volunteers” subtly manipulate the women who come in seeking only a free pregnancy test. It’s the same five-minute urine test you can buy in a drugstore or just take for free at any doctor’s office, but they bank on scared, broke young women not knowing that! Their racket seems to be a kind of backdoor adoption-coercion scheme, in which they throw all kinds of bogus horror scenarios at the woman: abortion will give you cancer, it will scar you for life, it will leave you infertile, etc. They try to direct pregnant women to certain “Christian” medical clinics for prenatal care (there was one operating here for a few months in a local mini-mall, but it closed. Interesting!) They also try to scare them out of keeping the baby if that’s what they have in mind–urging them to give it up to “a good home”. And what I find most reprehensible is the fact that they also spread misinformation about birth control, trying to push abstinence as “the only 100% effective method”. Everyone who’s ever had an “oops” will know just how well THAT works…
Those centres definitely skirt the law, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of several that have flat-out broken it. We need federal controls limiting them and the damage they can do. So far, though, I don’t think we have the regulation we need.