Alternet.org, May 2, 2006
Exposing
Anti-Choice Abortion Clinics
By Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet
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.
Even here in the liberal city of Austin,
Texas, the signs are everywhere: "Pregnant?
Need help?"
If you're facing an unwanted pregnancy,
one of the possible solutions would be
getting un-pregnant -- still a legal,
if sometimes difficult-to-find, option
in America. But the "crisis pregnancy
centers" these signs advertise seek
to limit and, in some cases, prevent women
from exploring their legal options for
health care.
Dishonest as these types of crisis pregnancy
centers are, it's hard to argue against
their right to exist, especially since
most of their clients enter their doors
willingly. However, the aforementioned
incident reported by Planned Parenthood
of Indiana indicates that some groups
are not above using more aggressive methods
to stop women from aborting pregnancies.
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."
Only two organizations applied for the $5
million in available funding for Texas's
crisis pregnancy centers, and the one
that received it, the Texas Pregnancy
Care Network, appears to have been formed
just to acquire this money. The TPCN is
associated with a group called Real Alternatives,
an anti-choice organization that has put
so little effort into their "educational"
materials that the site goes so far as
to have sections called "Telling
Your Boyfriend" and "Telling
Your Parents," seemingly ignorant
of the fact that most abortions are performed
on adult women, many of whom are married.
Anti-choice activists openly regard family
planning clinics like Planned Parenthood
as primarily feminist organizations that
just so happen to provide health care.
Sarah Wheat of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas,
who spent a considerable amount of time
researching crisis pregnancy centers and
has compiled a full report on them, explained
that the first crisis pregnancy center
was opened in 1967 by Robert Pearson as
"the service arm of the anti-choice
movement." 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.
These hardline tactics were softened after
a number of states began cracking down.
Texas's own attorney general sued to prevent
crisis pregnancy centers from advertising
themselves as abortion providers in 1985.
As a result the centers evolved to put
on a better show of caring about women's
health by advertising themselves as places
to obtain full medical information.
But the kinder, gentler crisis pregnancy
centers might be even more problematic
than those engaging in more open harassment,
as in the Indiana incident. The gentler
face of the centers makes their health
care pretenses slightly more plausible,
even if their function is primarily political.
Sarah Wheat said she and her staff regularly
make phone calls to crisis pregnancy centers
to learn more about the services offered
there and, as a general rule, these pseudo-clinics
have few or no paid employees, no medical
personnel on staff and no real facilities
to provide any medical care. Generally
speaking, the medical treatment provided
by the largely volunteer staff is nothing
more than handing clients a pregnancy
test that could be purchased over the
counter for $10.
A friend warned me to be careful when contacting
crisis pregnancy centers, as they are
known to give callers the runaround, refusing
to give information over the phone and
asking you to come in for an appointment.
Curious, 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.
So it's possible that these centers are
not only detrimental to those women seeking
abortions, they could be inadvertently
stopping women from obtaining proper prenatal
care. And from what I could gather on
the website, most of the "counseling"
available is for the only syndrome that
crisis pregnancy centers show any interest
in treating; one they call "post-abortion
stress syndrome." The problem with
this syndrome is anti-choice activists
made it up. Unlike, say, post-natal depression,
neither the American Psychiatric Association
nor the American Psychological Association
recognizes "post-abortion stress
syndrome." So add proper mental health
services to the list of services not rendered.
Because they have so little overhead, crisis
pregnancy centers are proliferating while
clinics offering actual medical care lag
behind. NARAL Pro-Choice Texas noted that
as of December 2005 that there were only
43 abortion providers in Texas compared
to 183 crisis pregnancy centers -- which
is unsurprising considering the cost of
real medical care versus a stick to pee
on and a video to watch. There's no indication
as of yet that the $5 million grant to
Texas Pregnancy Care Network will result
in anything resembling professional medical
care offered to the low-income women who
need it, most of whom are punted by crisis
pregnancy centers onto Medicaid, escalating
the cost to the American taxpayer.
The truth is that Texas taxpayers are being
asked to pony up $5 million to an organization
that provides no services apart from furthering
an outsider political agenda. Even the
much ballyhooed "education"
about alternatives to abortion isn't worth
a dime of taxpayer money, even from those
who would prefer fewer women to have abortions.
After all, Planned Parenthood was already
in the business of educating women about
their options and the education offered
is far more complete.
Peggy Romberg ended with a story about a
young woman she'd worked with a few years
back who'd been fortunate enough to get
help from a college friend whose parents
were friends of hers. The young woman
had recently broken up with her boyfriend
only to discover she was pregnant. When
she contacted him for help, he instructed
her to meet him at a nearby crisis pregnancy
center. The ex-boyfriend had gone to a
football game instead, forcing the young
woman to endure the berating of the staff
alone. She then went back to her dorm
and despaired, running into another friend
who was able to help her obtain the abortion.
Without that stroke of luck, Romberg noted,
there's no telling what a young woman
who so far had met with nothing but abandonment,
lies and berating would have done to escape
her situation.
Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular
blog Pandagon.
