No sane person (not that there are many left) – supports sex trafficking. The victim of trafficking may be the young woman – or man – sitting next to you on the subway or entering a house on your block. She may be in a bodega on Roosevelt Avenue or on Main Street in Flushing. The victims of trafficking who are sold from pimp to pimp and moved across state lines – and through other countries as well – live among us and are invisible unless there is an arrest in progress. And even then, frequently they are handed back to their abusers for further abuse as there is no one there to “vouch for them”.
Per Michelle Sterlace of Feminists Choosing Life, and Laura Lederer of the Global Centurion Foundation, approximately 71.2% of these victims become pregnant at least once; 21.2% become pregnant five times or more; 55.2% have had at least one abortion; 29.9% have had multiple abortions and over half of the women interviewed stated that the trafficker forced them to abort – mostly in Planned Parenthood which remains the largest abortion provider in the United States. Rather than report the forced abortions and the abuse of the victims – many of whom suffer from STD’s, drug addiction, alcoholism, severe depression and even old gunshot wounds – PP enables the pimps to continue with their nefarious trade. Sometimes these women are even murdered by their pimps, commit suicide or die from drug overdoses. Even when they are rescued, many of them suffer from depression for many years.
Pimps frequently fill them with Plan B or Depo Provera making it easier for the women to contract cancer and other diseases. When they go to emergency rooms because of botched abortions, frequently the doctors and nurses do not contact the police to report the abuse or the bad procedures, taking the word of the pimps that what happened was “just an accident” and that “she will be all right”. Sometimes the women abort in “homemade clinics” operated by relatives of the pimp.
Several years ago, Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe posed as a prostitute and a pimp, went to the offices of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) and asked if they could refer underage prostitutes from El Salvador for abortions! The ACORN staff stated that they could – another example of a non-profit willing to be involved in trafficking and forced abortions.
Lila Rose from Live Action has also caught Planned Parenthood employees in Perth Amboy, New Jersey telling a fake prostitute and pimp to have underaged girls lie about their age to avoid mandatory reporting laws! Yet PP continues to receive public funding and then United States Attorney General Eric Holder refused to prosecute PP. (Pregnant trafficked women, the victims of violence, cannot even seek redress in New York State thanks to New York’s Reproductive Health Act, if they are assaulted and lose the baby as there is no criminal penalty for the death of the unborn child.)
New York State if now likely to consider a bill which would decriminalize prostitution or “sex work” as it is euphemistically called. Who would benefit from this? Surely not the young women who are trafficked. The government would see this as a means to fill its coffers – not as a way to fix broken lives and hearts. What New York and other states need is vigorous prosecution of pimps and the customers as well as help for the victims and greater surveillance of abortion clinics, especially PP.