The Daily Campus

Issue date: 3/19/07 Section: Commentary

Time magazine recently featured a story on the so-called crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) that have been cropping up around the U.S. Although these CPCs have actually been around for a few decades, they have grown in number and are now receiving extra attention from the Bush administration, which views them as a mark of compassionate conservatism. What sets CPCs apart from regular health clinics is that CPCs do not offer abortion counseling or information about abortion or birth control. Many CPCs are also religiously motivated, and their goal is to deter women from having abortions. One popular method for achieving this goal is to simply show the woman an ultrasound. Clinic workers often feel that the woman forms a greater attachment with the fetus when she sees it on the screen.

Unfortunately, many CPCs also work by offering incomplete or misleading information about abortion to deter women. While many of these clinics will fixate on the potential negative after-effects of abortions, few will mention that the risk of dying during childbirth is 12 times higher than dying as a result of abortion. Sometimes, CPC workers will even show women plastic fetuses, telling them, "This is what your baby looks like right now." CPCs even occasionally use misleading advertising to trick women into believing they offer abortion or abortion counseling. Crisis pregnancy centers are also known for promoting abstinence-only education, as opposed to emphasizing a woman's options for birth control if she chooses not to be abstinent. Because this is salient to the missions of most CPCs, they are eligible for the federal dollars allocated to abstinence-only education.

Abstinence-only education has proven ineffective and false, at best, in American public schools, and such programs should not be granted taxpayers' dollars - whether in schools or at pregnancy clinics. Over the last decade, as public spending on family planning has waned, unplanned pregnancy rates have increased by 29 percent among poorer women. A pregnant woman who comes to a CPC and wants to know how to prevent another pregnancy will hear only one word - abstinence. Another major problem with CPCs is that, although many offer free ultrasounds, those ultrasounds are conducted by workers who have only very limited training as well as a fixed agenda.

This is not to say that CPCs are entirely harmful. Many also offer some assistance to women struggling to make it through a pregnancy and child-rearing, and that is admirable. However, CPCs that push an abstinence-only agenda, offer false information on abortion or use psychological tactics on women contemplating abortion, should not be rewarded with taxpayers' money. Women facing unplanned pregnancies need the whole story, and they need support for whatever decision they make.

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