Pregnancy Resource Centers

[Dale_M]

Time Magazine has an interesting, if lengthy, look at the controversy surrounding Pregnancy Resource Centers, sometimes called Crisis Pregnancy Centers.
time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1590444-1,00.html

It’s easy to support the goal: helping women facing an unplanned pregnancy. What critics challenge are the means, the information these centers give, the methods they use and the costs they ignore. Even among pro-life activists, there’s an argument about emphasis: Do you focus on fear and guilt, to make choosing an abortion harder, or on hope and support, to make “choosing life” easier? Either way, the pregnancy-center movement takes the fight over abortion deep inside some of the most intimate conversations a woman ever has.

The heat of the national battle, however, doesn’t capture what is happening on the front lines. In North Carolina, Abortion Clinics OnLine lists eight abortion providers, but the state has more than 70 pregnancy centers. NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina was so concerned about their practices that it recruited volunteers to call centers and record the information they were given. NARAL reported that in the course of promoting abstinence, a counselor told an investigator that “all condoms are defective and have slots and holes in them.” Another warned that “9 out of 10 couples that go through an abortion split up.”

Towards the end of the article is an interesting look at how the local abortion provider and pro-life activists began a dialogue which changed how both sides addressed the matter.