Democrats Must Stop Their War on Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers
Imagine having such an absolutist position on abortion that you feel it is your duty to attack community organizations that offer women free ultrasounds and strollers. Imagine being so comfortable in your government sinecure that you conclude public funds are best spent harassing doctors and nurses who work or volunteer in the provision of pregnancy help for the poor. Imagine having so little regard for equal justice under law that you will send armed FBI agents to arrest a father of seven who protested outside an abortion facility, but disregard dozens of attacks causing millions of dollars in damage to pregnancy resource centers and churches.
Well, no imagination is needed, because these exact travesties are happening right now under state and federal regimes that like to think of themselves as liberal.
Here are some examples just from the past two years.
In 2022, two researchers at the University of Georgia College of Public Health devised a map that shows where pregnancy centers can be found, under a derisive rubric that reads, “CPC Map identifies crisis pregnancy centers (also known as ‘fake women’s health centers’) in your area. CPCs primarily aim to prevent people from having abortions.” Setting aside this crude description of the centers’ support services, vandals have used the map to encourage and conduct violent attacks on these nonprofits.
In June of that year, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a breathless warrior against pregnancy centers and their effrontery in offering women prenatal care and baby clothing, joined Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and others in introducing a bill requiring the Federal Trade Commission to “crack down” (Warren’s words, used three times in one release) on the centers because they do not offer abortion to the clients who come through their doors.
Many state legislators were just as hostile. Last year, legal abortion advocates in the states advanced at least 26 bills designed to hinder the work of pregnancy centers that support the use of progesterone to rescue pregnancies in which babies are intentionally starved by the drug mifepristone, or advise women on what the medical literature says about potential mental and physical harms of induced abortion.
In September 2023, the attorney general of California filed suit against Heartbeat International and RealOptions Obria Medical Clinics in Northern California, seeking to bar them from offering a course of progesterone when women act to reverse the effects of the abortion drug.
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Earlier this month, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued a number of pregnancy centers in New York state, likewise accusing them of offering misleading information about abortion pill reversal, ignoring the rapidly accumulating accounts by women themselves of how the treatment rescued their babies from death. Statistics gathered by the Abortion Pill Rescue Network show the number of babies saved is now above 5,000.
In April, a progressive group filed a vague and unsubstantiated complaint with five state attorneys general asking them to investigate pregnancy centers regarding their privacy practices for women who seek their services. The complaints don’t “allege misuse of private health information” but say that the centers “may” violate consumer protection laws. The complaints have no basis and constitute harassment of the centers, which are transparent about the fact that they provide alternatives to abortion—once the mission of all of Hippocratic medicine.
These frantic efforts to stand between women and their own children have so far failed to stop pregnancy centers from offering help to women in need. A new report from Charlotte Lozier Institute, based on surveys compiled from the nation’s leading pregnancy centers, documents the dramatic expansion of the centers’ contributions. In 2022, U.S. centers, themselves part of a vast international network, conducted more than 16 million individual client sessions, provided more than $367 million worth of goods and services free to clients, and deployed the services of 4,779 paid medical staff and 5,396 licensed medical volunteers.
These centers both improve and save lives. A separate study by Lozier Institute scholars Moira Gaul, MPH, and Jeanneane Maxon, JD, determined that U.S. pregnancy centers saved more than 828,000 lives in the five-year period from 2016 to 2020. Critics decry that these centers “deny” people abortion “care,” but the mothers helped at these centers overwhelmingly say otherwise. In 2022, a full 97.4 percent of women and men served at pro-life centers reported having had a “positive experience.”
Americans continue to deeply disagree over abortion and its impact on our families and society. But it’s time for the assault on pregnancy centers, and attacks on women who want to reverse the effects of abortion drugs, to end. These attacks are aimed at people and services who are part of the cure for our nation’s spasms of violence against the unborn and their mothers. It’s time we offered hope, not more despair, for a new generation.
LifeNews Note: Charles A. “Chuck” Donovan is president of Charlotte Lozier Institute, which conducts peer-reviewed research on science and statistics for life.