Abortion-rights groups have compiled numerous accounts by women who have felt deceived by CPCs. Most victims don't want their names used, but one who doesn't mind is Sean Sweet, a 33-year-old Philadelphia woman whose experience helped to politicize her -- she later went to work for NARAL in Pennsylvania.
Seven years ago, Sweet was traveling through central Pennsylvania on the way home from a New Orleans road trip when she realized she might be pregnant. She looked in the phone book and found a center offering free pregnancy tests.
"I took the pregnancy test. They said, 'We want you to wait in this room and we're going to show you a video about abortion.' I thought it would be about my options," she recalls. "Instead, there were these horrible images of disfigured babies and aborted fetuses, looking very large like they were almost to term. Then there was a little segment where the woman was supposed to be thrashing around and screaming during her abortion."
Sweet had had an abortion when she was 14, and she knew she was being lied to. She wanted to leave, but she also wanted the results of her test. It turned out she was pregnant, and though the counselors tried to stop her, she stormed out and later had an abortion. Not knowing she'd ended her pregnancy, a counselor from the center called her three times to tell her, "God loves your baby."
When Sweet learned that her tax money was going to CPCs, she was appalled. "These are Stepford Wives hanging out waiting to pounce on somebody. There was nobody medical there. Those are lies on those tapes. That the state or the government might actually fund it, that's outrageous to me."
Sweet is correct that Real Alternatives counselors often don't have any medical training -- in fact, the agency's contract with the government doesn't specify any sort of standards or qualifications for CPC personnel. While Planned Parenthood says the money it received from the state last year allowed certified health workers to care for 260,000 patients, according to its own filings, Real Alternatives spent the same amount for a mostly volunteer staff with no medical training to counsel 11,000 women. One Real Alternatives program paid for a woman to visit pregnant prisoners and give them models of 12-week-old fetuses. According to a report filed with the state government, "The women make small cribs for the 'babies,' paint hair on them, and cover them with tiny blankets."
Real Alternatives staff didn't return numerous phone calls, and several of its affiliated pregnancy centers refused to talk about their operations. But its own publications prove that the organization promotes misinformation. The Real Alternatives Web site offers a "Sexual Health Quiz" designed to show the uselessness of condoms and other contraceptives. One true-or-false question reads, "Condoms prevent the transmission of the most common STD's (sic)."
According to the site, the correct answer is false. "A U.S. Government study released recently reveals no proof that condoms prevent the transmission of the most common STDs, including gonorrhea, chlamydial infection, trichomoniasis, genital herpes, syphilis, chancroid, and HPV-associated diseases," it says, citing a 2001 Department of Health and Human Services report.
That statement is deceptive -- the actual report says, "Beyond mutual lifelong monogamy among uninfected couples, condom use is the only method for reducing the risk of HIV infection and STDs available to sexually active individuals." The quiz writers twisted the report's findings that there wasn't enough data available to quantify how much protection condoms offered against each disease, in order to give the false impression that condoms simply don't work.
CPCs operating under the Real Alternatives umbrella also offer medically misleading information. The Women's Care Center, a chain of seven CPCs in Erie, Pa., that receives both direct state funding and $262,357 in federal abstinence-only funding, identifies itself as a "ministry" on its Web site. The centers warn women that abortion might result in post-abortion syndrome, and they offer counseling through a program called "Healing the Emotions of Abortion Related Trauma," or HEART.
"In his studies, Dr. [Vincent] Rue found similarities between the post-traumatic stress syndrome experienced by Vietnam vets and post-abortion syndrome," the Women's Care Center Web site says. Symptoms, the site says, include depression, "psychological numbing" and flashbacks.
Rue is the foremost champion of post-abortion syndrome and a star in the pro-life movement. He's also on the fringes of medical opinion. While most people would agree that abortion can be a terrible experience, and psychologically troubling, there's no evidence that it does long-term psychological damage. 1997, the American Psychological Association reported that an eight-year study of 5,200 women showed that "The availability of legal abortion is not associated with long-term psychological distress in women who use it ... Even highly religious women are not at significantly greater risk of psychological distress because they had an abortion." In 1987, President Reagan ordered C. Everett Koop, his surgeon general, to document the existence of post-abortion syndrome. Koop couldn't, and later testified before Congress that the psychological problems caused by abortion are "minuscule from a public health perspective."
But as CPCs are religious, rather than medical, institutions, faith trumps science there. In a 1994 speech, Robert Pearson, who opened America's first crisis-pregnancy center in 1967 and authored a manual for CPCs, was unapologetic about lying to patients. "Obviously, we're fighting Satan," he said. "A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby."
In the past, it was just scared women who paid the price when people like Pearson posed as medical counselors. Now that the government has gotten into the business of supporting these programs, we're all paying for it.
About the writer
Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for Salon based in New York.
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)