“WORRIED? PREGNANT?” scream the advertisements plastered on city buses nationwide. Billboards with stock photos of women with furrowed brows looking at pregnancy tests with line the highways.
These are examples of crisis pregnancy center advertisements. Sometimes, you don’t even have to look further than The Daily Reveille to find some.
Usually run by non profit organizations, crisis pregnancy centers target young, pregnant women. They often offer free medical services like sonograms or screenings for sexually transmitted infections. Employees are trained to counsel the women who walk through their doors.
But behind this nice, friendly facade lurks something more ominous: The sole purpose of CPCs is to manipulate those women into not getting abortions.
CPCs are akin to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They disguise themselves as abortion clinics with the limited rhetoric in their advertisements. The young women who show up usually are looking for an abortion and usually are tricked by the centers’ employees into thinking they can receive that type of procedure there.
In fact, CPCs essentially have replaced abortion clinics in many states. In a short film that exposes the untruthful nature of these types of centers, Vice.com estimates that CPCs may outnumber abortion clinics five to one.
Many CPCs follow a guide entitled, “How to Start and Operate Your Own Pro-Life Outreach Pregnancy Center,” otherwise known as the Pearson Manual. It’s a 93-page guide on how to lie, cheat and manipulate women searching for abortions.
According to a report by contraceptive expert Dawn Stacey, the manual recommends, among other things, to answer questions such as “Are you a pro-life center?” with statements like, “We are a pregnancy testing center … What is pro-life?” If a patient questions anything the employee does, the guide tells the employee, “at no time do you need to tell them what you’re doing.”
Although CPCs offer free pregnancy testing, they almost always use store-bought tests and the manual cautions employees not to let patients know whether they are pregnant, only if the results are “positive or negative.”
Lastly, the Pearson Manual lays out its semblance of a mission statement. “[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.”
CPCs operate fraudulently, pretending they are medical centers when all they provide are lies. Even if you disagree with the fundamental nature of abortion clinics, at least they are honest about what’s going to take place there. The majority of CPCs are run by Christian non profits, and if I remember my catechism days correctly, there’s something in the Bible about “thou shalt not lie.”
The women who are duped by CPCs usually need abortions the most. But CPCs disguise their evil and untruthful ways with free stuff, Christian rhetoric and withheld information.
Fortunately, many states are fighting back against CPCs.
In 2009, the Baltimore City Council mandated that CPCs must display signs stating they do not provide contraceptives or abortions. Just four years later, the Austin City Council followed in Baltimore’s footsteps, and CPCs that didn’t abide by the ruling would be fined and given citations.
More recently, the battle with CPCs has reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last Monday, the Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal to a controversial New York City law that forces CPCs to inform patients whether they have a licensed medical professional on staff. Despite pressure from pro-life clinics, the Supreme Court rightfully agreed these centers can’t legally women.
Organizations that run and fund CPCs claim laws like these are a hindrance to their First Amendment rights. These pro-lifers think the U.S. constitution not only guarantees the right to speak, but also the right not to speak.
Constitutionally speaking, this is true.
But if packs of cigarettes have to be plastered with warnings of what smoking can do to you, why can’t CPCs have warnings of what they won’t do to you?
SidneyRose Reynen is a 19-year-old film and media arts sophomore from New Orleans, Louisiana. You can reach her on Twitter @sidneyrose_TDR.