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Crisis Pregnancy Centers Don't Dissaude Most Women From Having Abortions


Cleopatra7

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If you've spent any amount of time on fundie media or in reproductive rights circles, then you know about crisis pregnancy centers, these religiously motivated establishments that pretend to be abortion clinics so they can convince women to not have abortions. CPCs are controversial, not just because they are operating under false pretenses, but also because in many states they receive taxpayer money. As it turns out, CPCs aren't even sucessful at convincing women not to have abortions:

https://rewire.news/article/2016/05/10/crisis-pregnancy-centers-pretty-bad-dissuading-people-seeking-abortion/

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Of the 2.6 million clients who visited crisis pregnancy centers since 2004, 3.52 percent, or 92,679 people, decided against having an abortion. The statistics come from eKYROS.com, Inc., an anti-choice, Texas-based software company, which says more than 1,200 CPCs use its software to track clients and measure results.

The publicly available data, as the eKYROS website explains, reflects “clients who came to the center with initial intentions of Abortion or Undecided and then changed their mind to carry baby to term.”

...

Care Net in its most recent annual report said it “saved” 73,000 lives in 2014. eKYROS, however, reported 3,476 births in 2014 from “clients who came to the center with initial intentions of Abortion or Undecided and then changed their mind to carry baby to term and the pregnancy outcome was confirmed as a birth by the center.”

Anti-choice groups typically equate preventing abortions to “saving lives,” so the basis for the 69,524 “lives” discrepancy is unclear.

Kimberly Kelly, who has studied CPCs for a decade and is associate professor of sociology and director of gender studies at Mississippi State University, told Rewire in an interview that the centers frequently count both the pregnant person and the fetus as “saved lives,” essentially double counting.

It seems to me that if the goal of CPCs is to actually reduce abortions, then they are doing a terrible job of it. I think many women see through the rhetoric of CPCs and word of mouth online and in real life helps prevent those who are absolutely certain that they want abortions to avoid such places. The article mentions one problem with CPCs is that they tend to be staffed by middle class religiously conservative white women who have difficulty relating to women of different races who have had different experiences from themselves. In other words, CPC volunteers are so blinkered by their self-righteousness, it interferes with their stated goals. If I was anti-abortion,  I would take this article to mean that my money, not to mention taxpayer money, is wasted supporting CPCs, but I doubt may will see it that way, and will instead claim that it is difficult for CPCs to compete with "Big Abortion," even though many CPCs already receive a lot of state funding.

I'd also like to point you towards this article about how some CPCs promise pregnant women help with childcare and related expenditures, and then refuse to provide any aid when the baby comes:

https://psmag.com/hollow-promises-lifetime-choices-the-appalling-duplicity-of-pro-life-crisis-pregnancy-centers-23d613c5ceb3#.f0jk7mcsl

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[Los Angeles Pregnancy Services's] tax return from 2013, the most recent year available, shows that of the $353,261 the organization spent, 16 percent, or $57,954, went to “advertising/promotion,” while four percent, or $14,461, went to “client support.” The center spent the balance on what appears to be rent, wages, and administration. I asked Gutierrez, why does the center appear to spend less on clients than ads? She replied in an email that “client support refers directly to a benevolent fund (cash) that we dispense to help some of our clients with utility bills and rent. Of course the majority of our funds goes to client programs.”

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Three years ago, when the Texas Observer, a nonprofit political watchdog, investigated CPC spending, it found that the pro-life Texas Pregnancy Care Network cost the state an average of $237 per client, compared to $160 per client for family planning clinics unaffiliated with pro-life groups. The Observer described how the Texas Pregnancy Care Network in 2012 spent $90,000 on advertising. Yet the state continues to funnel millions to pro-life CPCs.

“They are taking money away from family planning and giving it to centers that are dealing with the aftermath, with people who are already pregnant,” Dr. Carla Ortique, a Houston obstetrician and a member of the Texas Medical Association told the Observer. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

 

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Sadly I doubt these places are going anywhere. "Smug preaching" is the favorite form of "charity" for a lot of religious shitheads in this country, and they rarely let reality interfere with a nice ego boost.

 

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I have never experienced a CPC pretending to be an abortion clinic or even a medical clinic. My own mother started one in the 80s, not to dissuade women from having abortions necessarily, but because she was seeing many young mothers in her family practice office who chose to have the baby starting their parenting life with very little information and very little anything. The babies were being born, she wanted to make sure there were resources available for them. That place provided space for prenatal classes, parenting classes, helped with connecting those women to social services available, and collected and distributed material necessities. That is still how it operates 30 years later. The one in the town where I live operates the same way. Zero pretense of being a medical office. They offer emotional, educational, and material support for women who have already made the decision not to abort and need help giving their baby a good start in life. They don't go to the abortion clinic and try to divert women. They are there, they make their information available via pamphlets and word of mouth, and their philosophy is that those who want their help will come to them.

I can imagine that there are plenty of money-eating organizations out there, including CPCs, and actually I see a whole lot of evangelical organizations as basically money-collection machines rather than helping the people they are supposedly intended to help. And I think that happens more the larger the organization is and the more power they have in the evangelical community. I'm partial to centers that are community based and community run, and offer help for those who want it rather than try to recruit women away from abortion.

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Agreeing with the above post. The church I attended for years was closely affiliated with our local crisis pregnancy center, which has never pretended to be an abortion clinic.  The center provides support groups, educational materials, pre-natal classes, referrals, plus clothes, diapers, car seats, etc., to women who need them.  The women I knew who volunteered there were caring, dedicated, compassionate people and certainly not "shitheads."

 

 

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