For the last five years or so, pregnancy clinics have been growing in number around the country even as abortion clinics have been shutting down. What the Right lacked in legal standing, in order to make pro-life advocacy powerful again, they made up for in a culture-meets-policy movement that has slowly been sweeping the country: Abortion clinics now must (usually) meet health standards, many states started regulating abortions, and last year states started blocking Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood.
Naturally, abortion advocates started fighting back, this time against the pregnancy clinics themselves. Just consider Becerra v. National Institute of Family Life Advocates, NIFLA.
Even though the Left doesn’t exactly appear to be winning these battles, it costs pregnancy clinics precious time and resources. Still, the very skirmishes themselves, whether they’re litigated and settled or fought all the way to the Supreme Court, show just how much the nation is still divided on abortion rights. At the same time, pregnancy clinics are often private organizations and should be left alone as much as any other. In fact, if statistics show anything, it’s that pregnancy centers are the new cake bakers — their goals, livelihood, and intentions are all up for misinterpretation and outright maligning. After so many cases that have popped up this year, it’s time to press the Left: For the love of God, can’t we leave pregnancy clinics alone?
Allure magazine, that bastion of political discourse, took pregnancy centers to task in a piece entitled, “All the Bull—- Ways Those ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ Keep Women From Getting Abortions.” In the piece, inspired by the recent oral arguments in Becerra v. NIFLA, author Hayley MacMillen said crisis pregnancy centers are “what appear to be clinics with comprehensive pregnancy-related care.” Women are told “not only is abortion dangerous, there’s a good chance you’ll regret having one for the rest of your life.” She opines that this is false. In another similar piece, Rolling Stone‘s David S. Cohen argued, “There is as yet no quantitative evidence that women are actually deceived into not having abortions when they go to these centers, but there is much anecdotal evidence that women who go to them are shamed and lied to.”
Not only do crisis pregnancy centers, as a general practice, abstain from lying to their clients about pregnancies or the reality of abortions, many actually fill a very important gap that the ones that initially sprouted, in response to Roe v. Wade, failed to fill: Caring for mom and baby.
In preparation for the above-referenced NIFLA case, the Catholic Association filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief that interviewed 13 women about the lifelong impact pregnancy clinics, like the ones Allure and Rolling Stone malign, had on their lives and their babies.
Many of these crisis pregnancy centers do tell women about the devastating, emotional consequences of abortion. And if a mother who enters their offices refrains from getting one, these centers will often care for mom and baby’s emotional, physical, and spiritual needs. Much like NIFLA, there’s another group of pregnancy centers — these are specifically medical clinics, called Support Circle Pregnancy Clinics — that are getting a lot of heat for supporting a woman’s choice to choose life for her baby. Support Circle provides pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, medical care, emotional support, and a network of community services such as housing, job training, and financial counseling to women in the San Francisco Bay Area. Because of their belief that abortion is harmful both to women and their unborn children, Support Circle does not offer or refer for abortions.
In 2011, the city of San Francisco introduced an ordinance that prohibits “limited services pregnancy centers” from making false or misleading statements to the public about the services they offer. Since Support Circle is considered a “limited service” pregnancy center because it does not provide or make referrals for abortion, the ordinance affected them, so they sued. They’re catching a lot of flak from the Left, and in response recently released a beautiful video showing just how powerful this organization is, and how much they help both mom and baby during a pivotal time.
That the Left would systematically attempt to shut down such organizations, under the guise of discrimination or anything else, shows just how disingenuous they really are about helping women and how much they feel the “right” of abortion is under attack.
“My Body, My Choice,” should apply to all women, not just the ones who want abortions. If the Left really believed that, they would stop trying to essentially pillage the very places that help women make choices about their bodies, at a rate far beyond that which abortion clinics provide.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
