In an article on Mashable yesterday, readers were introduced to the new concept of “Holistic abortion”. The article comes to us this week upon the U.S. Supreme Court hearing of the oral arguments of Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt and gives us a glimpse inside the Whole Woman’s Health Clinics, a vision of Amy Hagstrom Miller.

Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Women’s Health said this in 2012 about abortion:

Abortion involves all the big things in life – sex, death, life, religion, family, money. Providing abortion gives me the opportunity to have heart-to-heart conversations about these things every single day. I get to sit with a woman as she examines what she believes – as she looks at what matters most to her. What are her intentions? What are her dreams? Abortion is a rite of passage for many women – it is often one of the first times where women take a look at the values that they have inherited from their family/church/culture/education and decide which ones are applicable or meaningful to them, and which ones are not.

You can read the whole speech here. What exactly is a “holistic” abortion clinic? Read on:

In the waiting room at the Whole Woman’s Health clinic in San Antonio, patients nervously tap their feet. Along Came Polly, the romantic comedy featuring an uptight Ben Stiller, plays on the television screen. It seems like an odd choice for an abortion clinic. But then patients and their loved ones start to loosen up. They giggle when, during a basketball game, Stiller’s face gets body slammed by a sweaty, shirtless competitor. An infamous scene about an overflowing toilet draws laughter.

The choice of the movie is intentional and designed to break the seriousness of the impending procedure and the agony of waiting while fostering a camaraderie between women. The rooms in each of the eight clinics in Texas, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico and Minnesota are named after inspiring women like poet Audre Lorde, Michelle Obama (!) and Frida Kahlo. One wall displays this quote from Patti LaBelle:

The clinic also provides fleece blankets and herbal tea after the procedure-a practice a model that staff at Whole Woman’s Health Clinic believe to break the mold of typical abortion clinics (a-hem…Planned Parenthood).

Funny movies to foster a bond. Fuzzy blankets and herbal tea. Will they start providing foot massages, too? My sarcasm here is not meant to demean any woman who goes through this procedure as I know camaraderie between women sometimes comes out of pain. I personally, could not be laughing and could not bond with someone over an experience such as an abortion. After all, I just severed one of the closest bonds I may have experienced but did not give a chance to form. Have we, as a society, become so deluded that we actually think the process of killing a child can be somehow less painful physically and emotionally? According to the Whole Woman’s Health abortion menu on their website, the clinic offers abortions up to 24 weeks gestation. To provide some clarity, this is a child at 24 weeks and two days:

The medical community calls a child who is born at this age a micro-preemie. The abortion community? A clump of cells. With a heartbeat, fingers, toes, eyes and genitalia. This “clump of cells” is of the female variety.

The definition of holistic in the medical sense is this:

Holistic: Characterized by the treatment of the whole person, taking into account mental and social factors, rather than just the physical symptoms of a disease.

In the philosophical sense:

Holistic: Characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.

It seems as though in the abortion community, the lines have been blurred between whether or not a pregnancy is a “disease” versus something that is “intimately connected and explicable only by reference to the whole”. Intimately connected. This is not about women who choose to abort but about the powers-that-be blurring these lines telling women to be empowered and look at pregnancy as a diagnosis for which abortion can be a treatment; not as something that connects them to another potentially great human being. I don’t know any woman whose “dream” is to have an abortion so I guess it’s open to debate whose dreams are being crushed here. To me, no fuzzy blankets, no hot cup of my favorite orange spiced tea and the funniest flick on the face of this earth could cure the void of what was once whole and now is literally in pieces.