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NYT gets it wrong on "crisis pregnancy centers"
Well into the story, Leland mentions that crisis pregnancy centers "have long been criticized" for posing as health clinics to lure in women seeking abortions, only to present them with inaccurate information to scare them into carrying their pregnancies to term. And he notes that "courts have limited the terms they can use to pitch their services." But as the NARAL Foundation's May 2005 report, The Truth About Crisis Pregnancy Centers, documents, centers in New York, Ohio, Louisiana, and California have faced injunctions and other legal action to stop their practices of fraud and deception. "CPCs may list themselves in the yellow pages of phone directories under the headings `abortion,' `abortion alternatives,' `abortion services,' `family planning information centers,' or `women's organizations' even though the only `abortion service' they provide is anti-abortion persuasion," reads the NARAL report. One crisis pregnancy center training manual explicitly encourages staffers to hide their pro-life ideology from inquiring callers. Another refers to pregnant girls as potential "killers" and described the centers as engaged in a fight against Satan. Pregnant women and girls who are drawn into these centers are typically shown gory videos of late-term aborted fetuses and told lies about the consequences of abortion--that they will end up with breast cancer, sterile, depressed, or dead. Leland says there are now up to 3,500 of these centers nationwide (though he fails to cite a source for this data, I suspect he's relying on potentially overblown numbers from Focus on the Family and other pro-life groups). Yet he's oblivious to the fact that Bush administration largesse is a chief factor in this growth. As I document in my book, With God on Their Side, Bush's abstinence-only initiative has become a gravy train for these deceptive centers, many of whom, with no legitimate background in health education or sex education, have become leading grant recipients. In 2001, Health and Human Services gave $1.1 million to at least four crisis pregnancy centers. In 2002, that number rose to $2.2 million and at least seven centers. In 2003, the grants totaled $2.8 million to at least six crisis pregnancy centers--or one in every five grantees. And so on.
And though the federal government doesn't track which groups receive federal abstinence dollars through block grants to the states, a glance at the Tennessee record echoes the pattern at HHS: five of that state's 22 federally funded abstinence programs are at crisis pregnancy centers, or nearly one of every four grantees. These abstinence grants have taken small, volunteer-run organizations and turned them into substantial institutions; one crisis pregnancy center in Boston, A Woman's Concern, received a $488,000 grant that allowed the group to bump its staff up from two to 12. "Basically," says Adrienne Verrilli, a spokesperson for the sex education group SIECUS, "they have created an industry."
NYT gets it wrong on "crisis pregnancy centers" | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)
NYT gets it wrong on "crisis pregnancy centers" | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)
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