Any individual who seeks health-care services should receive full, unbiased, medically and factually accurate information about all of his or her options. Women facing unintended pregnancy deserve no less. When women are fully informed, they are better able to make responsible and appropriate decisions about their reproductive health. Mindful of this, the anti-choice movement has for years tried to restrict, control, and manipulate the information doctors give women facing unplanned pregnancies. Their most recent strategy is ambitious and clever: unable to shut down legitimate public health clinics, they are instead building a network across the country of parallel fake clinics – so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs).

While some CPCs may provide support and information to women facing unintended pregnancies, many do not. Unfortunately, reports indicate that CPCs frequently misinform, mislead, and coerce women with unintended or crisis pregnancies. Staff and volunteers at CPCs often use anti-abortion films, slide shows, photographs, and hear lectures. Some may also refuse to provide information about or referrals for birth control¹. These practices prevent women from making a fully informed choice about their reproductive health and endanger rather than protect the health of women with unplanned or crisis pregnancies.

CPCs may list themselves in the yellow pages of phone directories under the headings “abortion,” “abortion alternatives,” “abortion services,” “family planning information centers” or “women’s organizations” even though the only “abortion service” they provide is anti-abortion persuasion².

CPCs may also choose names similar to those of legitimate reproductive health clinics that provide abortions and locate themselves near those clinics to confuse women and lure them into the center.

While CPCs may falsely suggest that they provide a full range of reproductive health services, some centers may not have any medically-trained or medically-supervised personnel³. Even in the cases of centers that are overseen by medical professionals, there are no regulations in place to ensure that women will receive medically accurate information and services that meet an appropriate standard of care with respect to all of the women’s reproductive health options.

Women often call to inquire which services are offered and the cost for services such as abortion care. When presented with such inquiries, the staff at CPCs may evade the questions or lie outright in order to attract the woman into the center.
The Pearson Foundation’s How to Start and Operate Your Own Pro-Life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center manual tells staff that “there is nothing wrong or dishonest if you don’t want to answer a question that may reveal your pro-life position by changing the caller’s train of thought by asking a question in return.” As an example, the manual recommends answering the question “Are you a pro-life center?” with “We are a pregnancy testing center…What is pro-life?” After all, “[o]ur name of the game is to get the woman to come in as do the abortion chambers. Be put off by nothing…Let nothing stop you. The stakes are life or death.” Although it is not clear whether CPCs continue to follow this manual, which was published in the 1990s, the manual demonstrates the intent of many CPCs is to mislead and deceive women facing crisis pregnancies ⁴.

In some cases, the CPCs deceitful or misleading practices have been so outrageous that courts and elected officials have intervened on the public’s behalf.

In 2002, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer issued subpoenas to a number of CPCs based on concerns that their advertising and business practices could lead women to believe that the centers provide medical services – including professional pregnancy testing – or that they provided abortion services or referrals. Attorney General Spitzer eventually reached an agreement with one of the CPCs requiring it to: (1) tell people who call or visit the center that the center is not a medical facility; (2) clarify in advertising and consumer contacts that the pregnancy tests the CPC provides are self-administered or over-the-counter tests; (3) disclose orally and in writing – before providing a pregnancy test or counseling about pregnancy – that the center is not a licensed medical provider qualified to diagnose or accurately date pregnancy; and (4) clearly inform people who inquire about abortion or birth control that it does not provide those services or make referrals for them.

Women may be forced to watch shocking films, slide shows, or pictures designed to scare vulnerable women into carrying pregnancies to term.

One volunteer at a crisis pregnancy clinic stats that to shake the complacency of women seeking abortions, she pulls out a big, color photo of a fetus with closed eyes and a smile. She then flips to another full-page color picture: fetuses in a trash bin. Sometimes she takes [the pregnant women] into a tiny chapel to pray before a marble altar.

According to a 2002 report by the Center for Reproductive Rights, a women at a “pregnancy help center” was told that she “had the devil inside her” and was then “bombarded with graphic images of disfigured babies and aborted fetuses.”

In an effort to scare women away from considering abortion as an option, some CPCs provide false propaganda about the “consequences” of abortion – including an alleged increase in the risk of breast cancer, sterility, and psychological damage.

Women may be subject to other kinds of manipulative anti-abortion counseling designed to prevent them from exercising their right to choose. A woman recently testified before Minnesota State Senators that when she went to a pregnancy center in Minneapolis, “a counselor asked me why on Earth I wouldn’t have this baby as if keeping the baby was a consequence for my ‘irresponsible’ behavior. She made it seem as if having this abby was the only way for me to rectify a bad situation.” CPCs may also distribute information that tells women that they “risk their spiritual health by having abortions” ⁵.

Recently, these centers have been trying to further their anti-abortion persuasion efforts by seeking – and often receiving – state or federal funding. Funding may be in the form of direct allocations or tax credits in state budgets, through the establishment of “choose life” license plates (the revenues of which are used to fund CPCs), the purchase of special equipment, or even through federal “abstinence-only” sex education programs.

Crisis pregnancy centers continue their campaign to misinform women about abortion and to dissuade women from exercising their right to choose. While there are centers that do not deceive women or attempt to coerce them into making choices against their will, many CPCs continue to use deceptive and intimidating practices in order to prevent women from accessing the full range of reproductive health options. Women are entitled to accurate, comprehensive, and unbiased medical information with which they can make their own decisions. The government should support legitimate, comprehensive reproductive health clinics, rather than centers whose goals are to prevent women from exercising their constitutionally protected right to choose.

May 12, 2005

Notes:

1. Planned Parenthood of America, Inc. (PPFA), Anti-Abortion Counseling Centers: A Consumer’s Alert to Deception, Harassment, and Medical Malpractice (2002), at http://www.ppfa.org/pp2/portal/files/portal/medicalinfo/abortion/fact-antiabortion-centers.xml (last visited April 25, 2005).


2. Planned Parenthood of America, Inc. (PPFA), Anti-Abortion Counseling Centers: A Consumer’s Alert to Deception, Harassment, and Medical Malpractice (2002), at http://www.ppfa.org/pp2/portal/files/portal/medicalinfo/abortion/fact-antiabortion-centers.xml (last visited April 25, 2005).


3. Planned Parenthood of America, Inc. (PPFA), Anti-Abortion Counseling Centers: A Consumer’s Alert to Deception, Harassment, and Medical Malpractice (2002), at http://www.ppfa.org/pp2/portal/files/portal/medicalinfo/abortion/fact-antiabortion-centers.xml (last visited April 25, 2005).

4. Robert J. Pearson. How To Start and Operate Your Own Pro-Life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center, (undated) at 18, 21.

5. Pregnancy centers’ hope for $2.5 million in state funds, ASSOC. PRESS, Apr. 10, 2005.