Pregnancy centers vs. abortion businesses: Who truly offers ‘limited services’?

Pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) have helped countless women experiencing unplanned pregnancies, providing women and their babies with diapers, clothing, car seats, housing, access to childcare, access to health care, educational opportunities, and more — free of charge. Yet abortion advocates nationally and locally — including Senator Elizabeth Warren — have increased their attacks against PRCs, claiming that the pro-life volunteers and staff at these centers lie to women and only offer “limited services” — and should therefore be investigated and shut down.

The media bias is working to hide the truth from Americans: PRCs exist to serve families.

“Limited Services”

PRCs offer specific services for their particular clientele. This is quite normal. Most centers offer free pregnancy tests, STD testing, and ultrasounds. Beyond that, some PRCs are licensed medical centers offering more involved prenatal care — and some offer expanded services that include housing, education, material goods, and other support. They don’t “trick” women into having their babies and then walk away. Women who want the help of a PRC will find that the PRC and the volunteers will stick by them throughout their pregnancy, their child’s birth, the first few years of their child’s life, and perhaps even beyond.

In short, PRCs build actual relationships with their clients and their families.

 

Despite all of these services for women who want to choose life, abortion proponents and the media have labeled these life-affirming centers as “limited services” centers because the centers do not commit or refer for abortion. The state of Connecticut has defined a “limited services pregnancy center” as “a pregnancy services center that does not directly provide, or provide referrals for, abortions or emergency contraception.”

In 2022, in the wake of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, pregnancy centers came under attack. But even as they faced vandalism and firebombing, it was the centers that faced investigations, not those who burned down the buildings or covered them in graffiti.

States that have largely ignored abortion business wrong-doings — from illegal sales of fetal body parts to sex abuse cover-up and botched abortions — have begun to draft legislation to stop PRCs from helping women.

READ: City of Columbus goes after pregnancy resource centers, gives $1 million to abortion groups

“In Massachusetts, so-called crisis pregnancy centers outnumber legitimate abortion care providers 3 to 1,” said Warren. “I strongly commend Attorney General Healey and community partners for their efforts to crack down on these deceptive organizations to protect residents and women coming to Massachusetts seeking abortion care. I’ll keep fighting in Congress to stop these harmful practices nationwide.”

Yet, abortion facilities offer fewer services than PRCs do, and many of them only offer abortion.

For example, the Dupont Clinic in Washington, D.C., lists its services as only the following: “first-trimester in-clinic abortion, abortion from 15-26 weeks, abortion from 26-31 weeks 6 days.”

Another facility, The Women’s Centers, has five locations, but only one offers any services beyond abortion. Four out of five list abortion as their sole service in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Georgia.

In New Jersey:

In Atlanta:

In Upland, PA:

 

But the list of clinics that offer limited services doesn’t stop there. EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Kentucky purports online to offer only abortion and birth control (for one year), Southwestern Women’s Options in New Mexico offers only abortion on its website, and CARE clinics in Nebraska and Maryland only list abortion and birth control as services.

It’s more than obvious that while PRCs offer a range of services including practical help, abortion facilities are primarily focused on one service: abortion.

Still, abortion advocates want to force pregnancy centers to refer to abortion businesses, and to advertise that they don’t commit abortion. Yet abortion facilities are not required to refer women to adoption agencies, PRCs, or advertise which services they don’t provide. In addition, in 2018, The Supreme Court said in NIFLA v. Becerra that forcing pregnancy centers to promote abortion through government-mandated messaging (as California’s “Reproductive FACT Act” aimed to do) “likely violates the First Amendment.”

Misleading information

Activists are also claiming that PRCs give women misleading and deceptive information about fetal development and abortion. In July, Sen. Warren went after PRCs, tweeting, “Crisis pregnancy centers outnumber legitimate abortion care providers 3 to 1 in Massachusetts. @MassAGO Healey is sounding the alarm about their deceptive practices. We must do everything we can to protect Americans seeking reproductive care.”

PRCs aren’t actively working to prevent access to abortion facilities. They are helping women who want to choose life, or aren’t sure what they are going to do regarding their unplanned babies. To carry out this service, they inform women about abortion procedures and risks, and fetal development — something abortion facilities have been caught lying about.

Like many PRCs, Clearway Clinic, a PRC in Worcester, Massachusetts, gives information about abortion on its website, accurately describing each procedure, as well as the documented known physical and emotional risks. Research supports this information, as do Live Action undercover investigations which have exposed the lies Planned Parenthood tells women about the risks they face.

READ: Massachusetts city bans pregnancy resource centers that offer free help to parents in crisis

In addition, abortion facilities such as Early Options — which only offers abortion — mislead women about what they will actually be experiencing. Early Options tells women that a first-trimester suction abortion simply ‘brings down their missed period‘ rather than telling them that a suction device tears their tiny baby apart. They also tell women that the abortion pill “causes your uterus to contract and release your missed period.” (emphasis added)

In reality, the drug cocktail starves the baby of nutrients. Women have reported experiencing horrific pain during this procedure. The drug regimen comes with a risk of severe bleeding, infection, and death.

Here is how Early Options describes a chemical abortion:

 

 

And here’s a video of former abortionist Dr. Noreen Johnson explaining the abortion pill honestly:

 

As for fetal development, Choices Pregnancy Center in Minnesota offers an example of how a PRC accurately informs women about the development of their baby.

Meanwhile, Live Action’s multi-state undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood revealed that they used unscientific and fabricated medical information to coerce women into abortions. Those videos led embryologists to denounce Planned Parenthood’s conduct as “absurd and scientifically erroneous.”

Planned Parenthood was caught on camera telling a woman who was 17 weeks pregnant, “There’s not a baby at this point. You wouldn’t be able to identify any parts of the fetus whatsoever. … [A]t this point there’s nothing developed at all. There’s no legs, no arms, no brain, no heart.”

As anyone who has ever been pregnant or seen an ultrasound would know, this was a lie.

Here is an Early Options false image of an embryo at nine weeks, followed by an accurate image of an embryo at nine weeks – and a video of a child in the womb at nine weeks:

Post-abortive women have testified that abortion workers have lied to them about their babies. Linda Keener Thomas was 20 weeks along, and recalled her conversation with an abortion worker:

Abortion seemed to be my only choice. It would solve everything. So I called a clinic for information and asked the lady, “Is it a baby?”

“No, honey, it’s just tissue. After all, you want to finish school, don’t you?”

Women deserve the truth. PRCs are acting to serve women with free-of-charge services to ease their fears about having a baby they didn’t plan. On the contrary, abortion facilities financially profit from women’s desperation. Why would they ever encourage women to seek out the resources and support that exist through community and government programs if they choose to give birth? Former abortion industry employees have said the industry’s goal is to sell abortion, and to do this, they have lied about fetal development and potential risks in order to convince women that abortion is both moral and safe.

The evidence is clear as to who really misleads women and offers extremely limited “services.” It’s time for women, and all Americans, to know the truth.

Editor’s Note 8/13/22: This article was updated with information on NIFLA v. Becerra.

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