My neighborhood has a lot of the usual features of a well-established community that happens to be in the middle of a major city: farmer’s market, library, bars, specialty stores, schools, restaurants. Oh, and the crisis pregnancy clinic.
I visited this “faith-based” CPC several years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter, because I was curious to see what kind of information this facility was giving prospective clients about pregnancy, sex and abortion. And while the woman I met with was friendly and polite, I was troubled by the fact that she and others at the CPC called themselves “counselors” even though the intake form stated (in small print) that they were not licensed counselors. I was even more troubled by the written information I received, which included incorrect statistics about the effectiveness of condoms, and claimed both that abortion makes women infertile and that there is a connection between abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, among other organizations, have strenuously rebuked both of these “claims.”
Deliberately misleading people about a medical procedure, or anything involving their health, is unconscionable. But even though what this facility was doing might have been morally and ethically repugnant, it was legal under current D.C. law. And aside from raising my blood pressure a bit each time I walked by the building, the facility itself wasn’t interfering with my day-to-day life. I’d speak out against it when appropriate, which always felt good, but after a while I started to wonder if I should be doing more—and if my community should be doing more, too.
For guidance I turned to my neighbor to the north, NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland, which has done a lot of work in educating the public about crisis pregnancy clinics. Baltimore has also been in the news quite a bit over the past few years for the city’s struggle to bring more transparency to what services CPCs do and don’t provide. While that complicated, years-long battle is working its way through the courts, a thorough summary can be found here.
The author of that summary is Amber Banks, the organization’s outreach and communications director, and we spoke recently about the work that NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland is doing in community education and involvement. For starters, there’s the website itslies.org, which is “exclusively committed to giving out real information on crisis pregnancy centers,” Banks explains. “We paired that with an outreach campaign we did. We have ads on city buses [in] Baltimore; the Baltimore area has the highest concentration of crisis pregnancy centers in Maryland, so that’s why we chose to start there.”
Banks wants to make it clear that this outreach and advocacy work is firmly centered on the tactics that CPCs employ. “We believe in choice, and if there are people who know exactly what crisis pregnancy clinics are and want that kind of assistance or that kind counseling, then we think that should be available to them. It’s always been the lies and misinformation that we’ve fought,” she explains.
When I ask how individuals can most effectively combat these tactics, she says most people she meets haven’t even heard of them. “So talk to people,” she says. “Tell people what they are, especially if there’s one in your community. [And] these clinics like to get themselves on referral lists for university health clinics and women’s centers,” as well as domestic violence centers. “So if you happen to be in charge of a referral list, know exactly what an organization is before you put it on there,” she continues. “Either contact the organization making the list and say they don’t belong on there, or this only belongs on there with a disclaimer about what exactly they are.”
In my experience, the people most committed to combating CPCs’ methods and tactics are those who identify as pro-choice. But Banks raises crucial caveat: “I meet people who are pro-life all the time, but when they hear about the work that these centers are doing, [they] don’t support it. They don’t support lying to people or misinformation, they think, ‘we have a strong enough position that we don’t need to lie.’”
If these clinics really believe so fervently that abortion is wrong, that every pregnancy must be carried to term, and that no one should use contraception, why not just say that?
Why not trust that this message is enough on its own without resorting to lies, misinformation, and manipulation? Using those tactics make them look desperate—and like they really don’t trust that much in their message after all.
Lead photo: Brianne on Flickr
Sarah Erdreich is the author of Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement. She lives with her family in Washington, D.C.
