At Think Progress, Amanda Michelle Gomez writes about Savannah Low, a pro-choice advocate who mistakenly volunteered for a crisis pregnancy center in Sherman, Texas. These centers are propaganda fronts for the forced-birther movement whose one major goal is to keep women from obtaining abortions. Staff at these clinics rarely include any medical personal, tell lies about the impacts of abortion, falsely advertise their services, will often not discuss contraception, and will not refer women who come through the door to clinics that offer abortions. Here’s Gomez:
Even when people don’t want an abortion, the clinic isn’t very helpful. “Women come in asking to use [the ultrasound machine] to see if their baby is healthy and find out the sex. She turns them down because the only purpose of that ultrasound machine is to convince people not to have an abortion. They provide no medical service,” Low said. True Options staff told ThinkProgress that their nurses aren’t trained to determine a baby’s sex, and are only able to identify if a person is pregnant.
Low isn’t the only one who has been misled. It’s easy to get tripped up, as these anti-choice centers masquerade as family planning clinics that offer comprehensive medical services and advice. They do not inform visitors upfront that their clinics don’t provide abortions. And the result could be hours of wasted time for pregnant people seeking abortions — at perhaps the most time-sensitive moment in their lives.
Crisis pregnancy centers aren’t confined to Texas. Nationwide, there are about 2,500 such centers. In Texas, Virginia, South Dakota, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania … indeed, in 34 states, CPCs get taxpayer money to tell their lie. The money is diverted from federal abstinence-only programs, from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, from funding that used to go to Planned Parenthood centers, and in Texas, even from an environmental quality program.
The centers aren’t new. The first one was launched half a century ago in Hawai’i. Today, there are thousands of them across America, far more than clinics that offer abortion as part of their reproductive health services. Robert Pearson gave birth to them and the deceptive techniques they use.
In 1994, his ideology in the matter was made clear to his audience: “Obviously, we’re fighting Satan [...] A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby. Therefore, when she calls and says, ‘Do you do abortions?’ we do not tell her, No, we don’t do abortions.”
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