Exposing Anti-Choice Abortion Clinics

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.