If you’re holding your breath until abortion advocates such as NARAL Pro-Choice America trot out the first-ever woman who’s been harmed by a pro-life pregnancy center, here’s some good news: The smelling salt is on its way.
The latest campaign from NARAL still has nothing to back up its long-winded slander against pro-life pregnancy help centers. Here’s how we know.
NARAL is currently preparing for National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well doom its legislative agenda a decade in the making. Part of those preparations involved the launch last week of EndTheLies.com, a site dedicated to railing against the nation’s 2,700 locally funded pregnancy centers that offer free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, options consultations, parenting education, and post-abortive support, as well as material goods like diapers, car seats, toys, and baby food.
Pregnancy help centers and ultrasound-equipped medical clinics are so dangerous to women’s health, NARAL’s argument goes, that it’s necessary to trample their First Amendment right to free speech by forcing them to advertise abortions in their waiting rooms, as the California law currently under First Amendment challenge tries to require.
That’s what EndTheLies.com is all about — making the case that pro-life centers aren’t worthy of First Amendment protection because of they bamboozle unsuspecting pregnant women into keeping their babies.
Quite tellingly, one thing you won’t find at NARAL’s new home for pixelated libel is any real-life woman claiming she’s been mistreated, tricked, or misled in any way by a pregnancy help center.
NARAL’s inability to produce even one witness or shred of evidence against pregnancy centers is painfully obvious from its new Real Women’s Stories page, which, through its first week, still includes only the three entries it had when it first launched. Two are from abortionists. The third is rather puzzling: It is a short testimonial from someone named “Lauren” who complains, and I quote, “I literally just Googled ‘pregnancy help’ and a pregnancy help center was the first result.” It’s telling that the woman giving this testimony is actually a communications professional for a progressive activist group in Connecticut.
So weak is their story about pregnancy help centers that they couldn’t even drag up a real person outside their own activist community to tell it.
A sore subject for NARAL and the deep-pocketed abortion industry, pregnancy centers are far more successful at reaching women online than their despair-peddling counterparts. And so, NARAL has been on the warpath for over a decade, trying desperately to close down pregnancy centers that cut into the abortion industry’s bottom line. Having seized the levers of power in Democratic cities like Baltimore, New York, San Francisco, and Oakland, the group is using its rented politicians to attack the constitutional rights of those who help vulnerable women every day, and who each day prove wrong the slander that pro-lifers stop caring for babies after they are born.
In Baltimore — where taxpayers unwittingly paid out a court-ordered $330,000 due to NARAL’s marionetting of local politicians — the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a longstanding attempt to crack down on pregnancy centers in late 2017. The reason? After seven years and close to 1,300 pages of documentation, NARAL couldn’t find even one woman who’d ever been tricked or misled by a pregnancy center.
Then, in its crowning achievement so far, NARAL sent an “undercover investigator” to various unidentified pregnancy centers in California in 2014. Though the “investigation” yielded not one derogatory fact about these centers, it led not only to a friendly piece in the liberal Los Angeles Times, but also state legislation called the Reproductive FACT Act. Although the FACT Act has been upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on its way to the Supreme Court, it has been halted for now by a state court as a violation of the free speech rights that a gaggle of gold-panners set to paper in California’s 1849 Declaration of Rights.
Among its many and obvious flaws, the act accepts as gospel truth the false narrative from NARAL that pregnancy centers mislead women. This flies in the face of thousands of first-hand accounts from women who’ve been served at pregnancy centers — 99 percent of whom reported a positive experience, and 0 percent of whom seem to have provided NARAL with a credible story of how they were harmed.
So, with NIFLA v. Becerra on the near horizon, now’s the time for NARAL to produce its first-ever witness. We’re all waiting, but we’re not exactly holding our breath.
Jay Hobbs is director of communications for Heartbeat International, the world’s largest network of locally funded pregnancy help organizations.
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