There’s another strategy that’s gotten less attention: an under-the-radar campaign by large anti-choice organizations, like the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates and Focus on the Family, to fund and guide the conversion of CPCs into licensed, limited-service medical clinics, ramping up their services to include pregnancy tests and ultrasound. Although they offer only limited women’s health services — none offer mammograms, for instance — medical clinic status has led many to start offering early prenatal care, prenatal vitamins, STI testing and even eye exams. A few have started advertising pap smears.
I’m doing some shameless friend-promotion here, but this piece is important. Most Feministe readers are no doubt familiar with crisis pregnancy centers, organized and funded by anti-abortion activists to steer pregnant people into giving birth instead of having an abortion.
But my colleague Tana details how the newest tactic is to turn CPCs into actual medical clinics, offering free health care in addition to antichoice “counseling.”
This is deeply, deeply cynical stuff. We have a massive health care crisis in this country, and most of the same right-wingers who fund this stuff funded politicians who fought tooth and nail to prevent health care reform from coming to pass, who helped water down the bill til we got some very weak reforms, and furthermore who have been attacking the funding for clinics that actually do provide (reproductive) health care to poor folks around the country.
So you’re desperate, you’ve got no health insurance, and your local Planned Parenthood had to close because the state took away its funding. But there’s a nice new clinic on the corner and it’s advertising free care!
As long as that free care comes with a side of proselytizing and pressure to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, that is.
Ugh. I can’t even handle it.
Read the whole piece. It’s frightening, and it’s important.