It’s so good, I don’t even know where to start quoting (and I don’t just say that because it’s written by our own beloved Amanda Marcotte). It’s the best article I’ve seen yet on Crisis Pregnancy Centers, and takes a different tack than most: Instead of just emphasizing the CPC’s system of lying and coercion (although she does that too), she tackles the issue from a healthcare perspective, pointing out that these crisis pregnancy centers simultaneously suck up tax dollars and short-change women.
According to a recent Planned Parenthood email, a 17-year-old girl mistakenly walked into a crisis pregnancy center thinking it was Planned Parenthood, which was next door. “The group took down the girl’s confidential personal information and told her to come back for her appointment, which they said would be in their ‘other office’ (the real Planned Parenthood office nearby).”
When she showed up for her nonexistent appointment, she was met by the police, who had been erroneously tipped that a minor was being forced to abort. The crisis pregnancy center staff followed up this harassment by staking out the girl’s house, phoning her father at work, and even talking to her classmates about her pregnancy, urging them to harass her.
I contacted Jennifer Jorczak of Planned Parenthood of Indiana to verify this story, and while she was unable to provide details out of respect for the patient’s privacy, she confirmed that everything in the initial action alert email was true.
This humiliating and frustrating experience seems, by all accounts, to await more American women in the near future. And the best part? It’s funded by your tax dollars.
Nice, right? These people literally went to her school and encouraged her classmates to harass her about her pregnancy. How charitable.
These tactics are even more troubling in light of the growing legislative support to direct taxpayer money towards crisis pregnancy centers and away from places that provide actual reproductive services to low-income women. Texas, as usual, stands at the forefront of conservative innovation in the art of draining public funding while reducing services. In the latest round of cuts, $25 million was sliced from the state budget for family planning services and $5 million of that money was set aside in a rider from Republican Sen. Tommy Williams to fund crisis pregnancy centers.
Peggy Romberg of the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas estimates that 17,000 low-income women will lose access to affordable family planning as a result of the cuts, adding to the 75 percent of low-income Texas women who are eligible for state-funded family planning services but who lack actual access. And that’s just in Texas. According to Planned Parenthood crisis pregnancy centers across the nation “have received $60 million of government grants.”
But as long as it’s about the babies…
except when it’s not.
Crisis pregnancy centers have a long history of providing the absolute minimum of services required to maintain the illusion that they provide care while they further their actual goal of trying to persuade women out of abortion — sometimes using deceptive methods.
Peggy Romberg recollected that when she worked for Planned Parenthood in the ’80s, crisis pregnancy centers would actually provide shelter to pregnant women right up until the eligible date for legal abortion had passed. They would then turn the women out, and it was Romberg’s agency that was tasked with explaining to these desperate women that it was too late.
This is why CPCs really embody the anti-choice movement: They care about life up until the moment of birth — or the moment when abortion is no longer available.
I called Austin Life Care, a prominent local crisis pregnancy center and grilled the unlucky receptionist about the services offered. She said they offered pregnancy tests and counseling. When I asked about the credentials of the counselors, she replied, “Well, we have all different levels of education and some of them are really academic.”
I followed up by asking what kind of medical staff they had on hand and she replied, “Well, we have sonographers.”
When I asked her what a sonographer was, she was curt: “It’s someone who can do your sonogram.”
Actually performing a sonogram on a client probably adds to the illusion that crisis pregnancy centers are providing care. In fact, this allure explains why there’s a bill pending in Congress to grant crisis pregnancy centers ultrasound machines, despite the fact that having a sonogram performed by an unsupervised technician could be dangerous. Dr. Diana Kroi, the ob-gyn who authored “Take Control of Your Period,” explained that ultrasounds need a trained physician to look for problems like ectopic pregnancies and other dangerous indications that a woman’s health is imperiled.
If a woman who’s had an ultrasound mistakenly thinks she’s had actual prenatal care, she may not go elsewhere for real care. Anti-choicers are banking on the ultrasound’s appeal as a pre-born snapshot machine, though it’s an actual diagnostic tool, or as the Mayo Clinic puts it, “[Ultrasound] isn’t meant primarily to provide parental thrills or souvenir snapshots,” and it’s irresponsible to treat it as if it were. This is especially irresponsible in a setting where clients are being told that Planned Parenthood and other affordable clinics are nothing but abortion mills who want to hurt the woman and the expected baby.
In other words, these clinics further discourage women from getting actual medical care.
Now, I think crisis pregnancy centers would be a great idea if they actually helped women and offered them non-judgmental, unbiased care. I don’t have a problem with their existance. Ideally, they would open their doors to low-income pregnant women who want to give birth, and they would offer those women actual healthcare services, well-baby care, and other resources. If that’s what they actually did, you can bet I’d be first in line advocating for them to receive more funding.
But I can’t support their MO of fake healthcare and coercive services. Their primary focus isn’t helping women — it’s coercing them into staying pregnant, or stringing them along until they are no longer able to obtain abortions, and not doing much of anything to help them once they’re parents. It’s not pro-woman, and it’s not pro-life.