According to the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Christian organization “the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates” runs 1300 “crisis pregnancy centers” across the United States. If this were an open and shut case of a religious organization making itself available for women with similar beliefs, these “CPC’s” would most likely provide a service that those people could be proud of.
Instead, these CPC’s are being operated under the guise of a women’s medical clinic there to offer support and advice to women seeking abortion.
The methods utilized by these centers are deceitful; from their advertising and exposure right through to the end of the woman’s “counseling.”
The pro-lifers (or anti-choicers as NARAL prefers to call them) place misleading ads both online and off so women searching for abortion options, contraceptives and counseling to lure women to their doorstep. They come up in Yahoo results as “abortion clinics,” which couldn’t be further from their actual description.
They often base their operations in the direct vicinity of actual abortion counselors and providers, adding to the confusion.
When women call, they are given misleading information and confusing messages crafted in order to ensure they make an appointment. When they arrive, they are met by someone in a white lab coat carrying a stethoscope, even though nobody there is a medical professional.
NARAL sent investigators to some of these CPC’s to see just what kind of service they were offering. According to their report:
If women knew that CPCs existed only to scare them out of considering their full range of reproductive health-care options, particularly abortion, they would avoid them entirely.
The report says that the people sent to CPC’s left “confused” and “feeling bad.” One NARAL investigator in Massachusetts described her visit to a CPC as an “intense experience, nerve-racking, emotional.”
An investigator reported that during her visit to a CPC in Montana:
The only information given was on the risks of abortion. The nurse … talked about abortion potentially causing breast cancer. … The other risk focused on was cervix incompetence. She … illustrated on the diagram how [the cervix] could become ‘too stretched out’ and that could lead to later miscarriages and potentially lead to not being able to have children in the future.
In another report, a CPC volunteer in Ohio painted a gruesome picture of abortion clinics and providers, claiming they weren’t licensed, that the clinics were dirty and splattered with blood, and that the doctors only cared about making money. A local provider was called “a butcher.”
Clearly these places are willing to go to any lengths to push their Christian agenda, including scaring women and slandering the names of real doctors.
They also choose to lie about the mental health aspects of abortion:
• 55% of the CPCs investigated in Massachusetts told investigators that having an abortion would or could lead to negative mental health effects.
• 54% of the CPC websites investigated in Massachusetts asserted that women who have had an abortion report emotional and/or psychological trauma or experience “post-abortion stress.”
• 87% of the CPCs investigated in Minnesota advised that abortion will lead to severe mental health problems.
• 65% of CPCs investigated in North Carolina claimed that abortion results in “post-abortion stress.”4
• 78% of CPCs investigated in Montana claimed that abortion causes serious psychological damage.
These places aren’t just about denying abortions to women, they are also anti-contraception. They follow the straight hard-line of the Christian extremist to the letter.
NARAL is doing a fantastic job of having these CPC’s exposed. They’ve had their ads removed by Google and Yahoo and have spent an enormous amount of time and effort making women across the country aware of the practices these so-called “do-gooders” are engaging in.
H/T: NARAL | Image: Think Progress
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