{"id":8110,"date":"2004-01-21T08:25:04","date_gmt":"2004-01-21T08:25:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/cognitive_dissonance_in_pittsburgh.html"},"modified":"2004-01-21T08:25:04","modified_gmt":"2004-01-21T08:25:04","slug":"cognitive_dissonance_in_pittsburgh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/cognitive_dissonance_in_pittsburgh.html","title":{"rendered":"Cognitive Dissonance in Pittsburgh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clinic encourages women to post farewell messages to their aborted children<\/a><\/p>\n

These are letters from women who have just had abortions at the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center in East Liberty. They are posted — dozens of them — on the walls of the clinic for other patients to read and to think about.<\/p>\n

They are not easy to read, but then, “what about abortion ever is easy?” asks Claire Keyes, center executive director.<\/p>\n

“Life is not simple. No one ever came into my clinic saying, ‘Hello there, I want to exercise my constitutional right to an abortion.’ “<\/p>\n

Fathers and boyfriends are allowed to express their feelings: “This situation is very hard for me and my girlfriend, but this is the only thing we can do,” said one. “I would like to have a baby with her,” adds another, who writes in a special journal kept for men in the clinic’s waiting room. “But not now, not like this, a mistake.”<\/p>\n

Keyes, 61, is a veteran of the abortion rights movement and has been with the center for 25 years. She describes herself as strongly supportive of legalized abortion, approved in the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision 31 years ago this coming Thursday .<\/p>\n

But in the 1980s, something began to dawn on her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clinic encourages women to post farewell messages to their aborted children These are letters from women who have just had abortions at the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center in East Liberty. They are posted — dozens of them — on the walls of the clinic for other patients to read and to think about. They are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCognitive Dissonance in Pittsburgh - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/cognitive_dissonance_in_pittsburgh.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Cognitive Dissonance in Pittsburgh - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Clinic encourages women to post farewell messages to their aborted children These are letters from women who have just had abortions at the Allegheny Reproductive Health Center in East Liberty. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}