Breaking: Crisis-Pregnancy Centers Help Women Avoid Abortion

[Valin]

National Review/The Corner

Alexandra DeSanctis

August 6, 2021

A new research paper has found that pregnant women who are considering abortion and visit a crisis-pregnancy center (CPC) are about 30 percent less likely to choose abortion than pregnant women who don’t visit one.

For those of us familiar with the work of these centers — and who are inclined to believe the wealth of statistics suggesting that most pregnant women don’t view abortion as their primary or most desirable option, even for a unplanned pregnancy — this result isn’t especially surprising.

The entire purpose of a CPC is to help women consider abortion alternatives and obtain the assistance they need to make it easier for them to continue pregnancy and give birth to their child. For some mothers, this means considering and choosing adoption. For others, it looks more like offering financial or material support that the mother isn’t receiving from the child’s father or from her family. For others, it might simply be counseling and encouragement, the assurance that motherhood is a worthwhile choice and one that the woman is capable of undertaking.

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This is hardly the first time that CPCs have been accused, with no evidence, of  providing fraudulent information to women and thereby convincing them not to abort. A few years back, abortion-advocacy organization NARAL Pro-Choice America conducted an undercover “investigation” into CPCs called “Unmasking Fake Clinics,” in which the group accused these centers of misleading women with “lies” such as this one: “More than 67% of the locations intentionally referred to the fetus as ‘baby’ and told our investigator she was already a mother because she was already pregnant.”

A pro-life perspective, to be sure. But also a factually accurate one, and hardly an example of fraud or medical misinformation.

Nevertheless, supporters of abortion have long been fixated on CPCs, even going so far as to lobby California to pass a law requiring CPCs to advertise for the state’s free or low-cost abortion program — an explicit violation not only of their pro-life mission but also of their free-speech rights. The law was subsequently struck down by the Supreme Court.

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