The new Ms. Magazine is on the shelves. The feature article (only a preview is available for free online — please subscribe) is on the disturbing growth in the number of college health centers who refer pregnant students (or those who think they might be pregnant) to CPCs: “crisis pregnancy centers.” Crisis Pregnancy Centers, funded by churches and, increasingly, by the federal government, are in the business of preventing abortion by counseling pregnant women and girls to carry to term. They rarely, if ever, offer the same panoply of health care options that might be found at, say, a Planned Parenthood clinic.
A survey conducted this past summer by the Feminist Majority Foundation, publisher of Ms., found that of 398 campus health centers at four-year colleges that responded to a questionnaire, 48 percent routinely refer women who think they might be pregnant to CPCs. Although 81 percent also refer women to full-service health clinics, some campus centers say they want to give students “all of the options,” as one health-center director put it.
But CPCs don’t offer all the options; rather, they push the unsuspecting young women who walk through their doors to keep the pregnancy. They often push dubious, or even long-since debunked statistics about the correlation between abortion and suicide, depression, breast cancer, and difficult conceiving future children. While health-care providers are required by state law and the Hippocratic oath to put the well-being of the patient first, CPCs follow a mandate to protect only one entity, the “pre-born baby” growing inside the body of a woman whose own needs are of, at best, secondary concern. Indeed, other than providing anti-abortion counseling, there’s very little that CPCs can offer:
19 year-old Nina Lopez, a student at nearby Santa Monica College, encountered CPC tactics first-hand:
“Even before I found out I wasn’t pregnant, the counselor said I should abstain from
sex,” says Lopez. She picked up a fact sheet on “post-abortion stress” and was asked to fill
out a form that sought nonmedical information about her family and her religious beliefs.
And then, when her urine test revealed not a pregnancy but a possible urinary tract infection,
the center did not offer her any medical treatment or refer her elsewhere.
College health clinics who refer students to CPCs thus put their clients’ health at risk. All medical providers have an obligation to either provide necessary care, or to refer to another provider who can provide that care. Nina Lopez’s UTI was not of interest to the CPCs, however, so she received neither care nor a referral. The fault lies as much with the college health department that referred her as with the CPC itself.
The Ms. article does a nice job of explaining the ways in which the Bush Administration has secured tens of millions of dollars in funding for CPCs, helping them to expand. While it can be hoped that under President Obama and a Democratic congress, funding for the CPCs will be diverted to health care providers who offer all reproductive options, an end to the deceptive “bait and switch” tactics of the CPCs is by no means assured. Ms. reports:
The proposed regulation, pending action by Bush’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Michael Leavitt, would give health care workers the “right to refuse” to provide women abortion referrals, unbiased counseling and even–depending on interpretation–birth control. Not only would this mean that U.S. women were no longer guaranteed full information from their health care providers, but, according to reproductive rights group SEICUS, it could also open up federal Title X funding—the bread-and-butter of comprehensive family planning clinics such as Planned Parenthood—to CPCs. Currently, Title X funding is reserved for clinics that provide women full, unbiased counseling about their reproductive options.
Do I think CPCs have a place? Yes. If a young woman were to come to me, or to a health care provider on campus, saying that she was pregnant, strongly pro-life, and planning to carry the child to term, I’d like to be able to offer a referral to a CPC. If that CPC wants to take on the cost of providing pre-natal care, arranging for either an adoption or for financial support as the young woman raises her baby by herself, then more power to them! But the CPCs don’t just focus on abortion-prevention; they push an abstinence-only agenda even on those women who are already pregnant. And relatively few CPCs are interested in providing for the long-term financial needs of a young woman who does decide to keep the child she has conceived.
I have many dear friends in the pro-life movement. The ones I respect the most are those who are committed to ensuring that the fight to let every pregnancy come to term (or to natural miscarriage, as is so often the case in the first trimester) without pushing a broader abstinence-only agenda. A commitment to protecting the unborn, rooted in a belief in radical non-violence, is an honorable (if inflexible) position to hold. But too often, anti-abortion rhetoric is twisted together with a broader message that suggests that sex is properly confined to heterosexual marriage. The pro-life movement, if it is ever to have any success in winning hearts and minds, must unmoor itself from the right-wing “chastity coalition.” Alas, the CPCs show no interest in doing so. Their commitment to life is thus secondary to their own particular religious understanding of God’s plan for human sexuality. And “health centers” that root themselves in that understanding ought not to be receiving taxpayer dollars.
It’s worth asking the doctors and nurse practitioners on your own college campuses if they refer to CPCs. And if you learn that they do, contact the Feminist Majority Foundation for tips on ways to respond.
Hugo, this is utterly absurd. No one is being FORCED to go to a crisis pregnancy center, and anyone who enters the door of one is, de facto, accepting the rules of the enterprise, which are “no abortions, anytime.” If you don’t like it, then you shouldn’t go to one. If you opened a vegan food bank, I would disagree with your reasons for doing so, but I wouldn’t challenge your right to provide charitable services according to your particular beliefs, and I would not take the side of a poor mother who sued you because she felt that she deserved to be able to feed her kids meat (however much I might personally sympathize with her.) Crisis pregnancy centers are under no obligation to ‘provide all the service’ if they believe that some of those services are tantamount to manslaughter.
You say that you don’t think women should be _legally required_ to keep their unborn children alive. Fine, I disagree with you but for the time being your side has won that debate. Now you’re saying that the government can’t even _encourage_ women to keep their babies. I believe that in the past you’ve suggested that you don’t even want us to _morally_ stigmatize abortion as a wrong choice. Exactly how do you expect pro-lifers to live out our convictions? Do you expect us just to wring our hands and pray about it? Do you think we need to respect every choice as equally valid? Sorry, I can’t and I won’t.
I’m with Hector; this complaint is on the same order as someone complaining that a vegan kitchen shouldn’t be allowed on campus because it doesn’t provide all the options.
I volunteered at a pro-life center once. The place offered free pregnancy tests and baby items for women who wanted to keep their pregnancies to term. However, they could never afford to help out with the medical bills and all the expenses that go with having a baby. Gregory Boyd addresses this in his great book Myth of a Christian Nation. His analysis is one that I agree with. He shared a story of a girl who confided in an older woman at her church that she was pregnant and did not know what to do. The older woman said that she would go through the abortion with her if she decided to do that. But she also offered her a room in her house (since the young woman’s parents kicked her out for getting pregnant) and promised to help her with medical costs, baby food, etc. The young woman decided to keep her pregnancy to term. This, I think, is what the Christian pro-life movement should be about. If you are not willing to fork out some money to help out a struggling woman considering abortion, then you really have no place to judge her decision. Merely donating diapers and such is just not enough.
Hector, I’m pro-choice, and also very much in favor of supporting all women who want to go through with their pregnancies (as is Hugo, I’m sure) — I agree with you that private charities should have the freedom to counsel people as they like, and/or exist to promote a particular cause (veganism, low-cost reproductive health care, pro-life philosophies, whatever). But, so-called crisis pregnancy centers are kind of notorious for lying, spreading misinformation, and mistreating patients — that’s absolutely not okay, no matter the charity’s cause. Futhermore, many CPCs are getting government funding, which completely changes things.
Also, it seems like Hugo’s objection is not with such organizations advocating against abortion so much as it is an attempt to impose a much broader religious ideology of sexual morality on their patients, and on the taxpayers’ dime, no less. (See his penultimate paragraph.)
It’s more like someone opening a vegan restaurant called MacDonald’s (replete with a giant golden NN as its symbol) and telling anyone who walks inside that cheeseburgers will kill them. “Crisis pregnancy centers” bill themselves as helping people cope with an unexpected pregnancy, not as an anti-abortion advocacy center.
CPCs have been known to engage in shady tactics (mostly stalling) to try to force the issue as well, by delaying a desired abortion until it’s much more complicated/expensive or outright illegal.
Ideally I’d love to see CPCs call themselves something else (relating to pregnancy aid) and serve as a hub for pre-natal care and counseling/support for mothers who have made the decision to keep an unexpected child. The fact is that, unlike Planned Parenthood, they’re not health services providers any more than the Christian Scientist churches are surgery centers, and mislabeling themselves as such is actively harmful.
I have no problem, Hector and Sam, with CPCs existing — but they need to make it explicit that they do not provide abortions or abortion referrals. “Crisis pregnancy” is deliberately vague. Everyone knows Planned Parenthood provides abortions (at least most do). It’s on the website of most local PPs. CPCs need to be equally explcit about their intent.
The fact is that, unlike Planned Parenthood, they’re not health services providers any more than the Christian Scientist churches are surgery centers, and mislabeling themselves as such is actively harmful.
Bingo.
I don’t trust Ms. Lopez’s narrator: nothing about a pregnancy test suggests a UTI. It sounds like the test provider went out of her way to suggest an alterative explanation for Ms. Lopez’s symtoms which implicitely suggests she seek medical treatment. BTW, a similar occurrance can and does happen at centers that offer pregnancy and contraceptive counciling and do refer for abortions- just because they offer a pregnancy test (which doesn’t require any medical training) doesn’t mean they have anyone around to test and interpret diagnosis for a UTI. It is actually a very normal structure to keep the medical personnel/abortionists in a seperate corporate structure in order to be able to get restricted contraceptive funding. I absolutely know of women who have been directed to go back to a primary care physician for review of their possible UTI. So it doesn’t speak well for the honest of the narrator to want to “make something” of a CPC doing the same thing.
And I don’t trust Planned Parenthood to be any closer to offering truthfulness about a young woman’s options than I do a CPC. Are there PP centers that are honest and truthful? I’m sure there are. Are there CPC’s that avoid dishonesty? I’m equally sure there are. A useful purpose would be to involve both the PP’s and the CPCs with those kind of best practices in developing a model of honesty that an ideal responder could provide prior to providing their particular guidance. The “they lie more than we do” model just makes the whole world blind… or something like that.
BTW, part of my perspective comes from having been employed with a federally-funded contraceptive program in the United States.
loafingcactus, if you can point me to a Planned Parenthood that suggests to young women they’ll help with a crisis pregnancy, but uses the visit to try and frighten those women out of childbirth with graphic pictures of fistulas, pamphlets with completely unproven “facts” about the “dangers” of pregnancy and childbirth, and an absolute refusal to provide any prenatal services, then I’ll agree entirely that such a center is equivalent to a anti-abortion “Crisis Pregnancy Center”.
Hugo, it’s amazing how these people also seem to think that only young unmarried girls get pregnant when they don’t want to be. Apparently married couples never have sex, or never have contraception fail, or never get pregnant except when they want to be, and can always make room for one more baby.
Somehow, it hadn’t crossed my mind that these centers (or, at least the ones we are reading about in the article) really aren’t providing medical services (or in the case of Nina Lopez, even a referal!) Really, no matter what one’s opinion on abortion itself is, I can’t see why someone would justify this fact. It really needs to be reiterated more often.
A question that I think needs raised is how far does an agenda go? I talked with one of the CPCs in my college town and they tried their best to inform me that Plan B, (morning-after pill) was ILLEGAL in my state and that I shouldn’t be asking for it here and I had better leave. All of that is trash, Plan B just made it to over-the-counter status a few months before I went in to ask questions. Yeah, I went in to ask questions about their establishment and all I had to show for it was a headache and plenty of lies.
Carl Rennie: “[A crisis pregnancy center is] more like someone opening a vegan restaurant called MacDonald’s (replete with a giant golden NN as its symbol) and telling anyone who walks inside that cheeseburgers will kill them. ‘Crisis pregnancy centers’ bill themselves as helping people cope with an unexpected pregnancy, not as an anti-abortion advocacy center.”
Your extension of Hector’s/Sam’s analogy fails, because nothing in the phrase “crisis pregnancy center” mentions anything about abortion (regardless of what other complaints you may have about CPCs). If you go into a CPC thinking that “we’ll help you with your crisis pregnancy” means “we’ll provide you with an abortion” then that reveals your own way of thinking, not evidence of deception on the CPC’s part.
In fact, “Planned Parenthood” is a far more deceptive phrase than “crisis pregnancy center,” because “Planned Parenthood” suggests that it specializes in helping people who are planning on becoming parents soon to make it happen.
It does? I thought it suggested that they help people decide when and how they will become parents, if they want to, but clearly I am fooled by their schemes in a way you are not.
If a CPC up front tells women seeking their services “we are a pro-life organization; we do not help you choose abortion and we will not refer you to anyone who will; but if you are intending to continue your pregnancy we will assist you,” that’s one thing.