The mainstream media can’t manage to say anything positive about the more than 2,700 U.S. pro-life pregnancy resource centers that give tangible aid to women and families every single day. But when a former abortion facility in pro-life Alabama begins to switch gears and moves toward providing pregnant women and families with actual support, the same media puts forth nothing but praise. The motives behind the former abortion facility’s change in focus, however, are questionable.
When you can’t kill babies… pivot?
Robin Marty has never been quiet about her disdain for pro-life pregnancy centers. As the former communications director and current director of operations for the West Alabama Women’s Center, now known as WAWC Healthcare (WAWC) — as well as the author of “Handbook for a Post-Roe America” — she’s spent her career promoting abortion as a societal and individual good for women, and spreading the false narrative that pregnancy centers lie to women.
She has also minimized and criticized the work of pro-life organizations that help women overcome the challenges pushing them toward unwanted abortions. Now that most preborn children are protected from abortion in Alabama, Marty has helped reinvent WAWC into a center that offers some of the same services that the allegedly ‘misleading‘ pregnancy centers do. However, while WAWC may be willing to hand out diapers for babies, it also doesn’t hesitate to offer mothers information on how and where to have their babies killed (while posting a disclaimer saying WAWC “does not perform elective abortions and does not encourage anyone to obtain abortions that do not adhere to Alabama law….“).
The WAWC website also claims on its pregnancy services page:
The state of Alabama has banned nearly all abortions. While we at West Alabama Women’s Center strongly believe that EVERY pregnancy poses harm to a patient’s health and life and that no person should be forced to continue a pregnancy or give birth against their will, Alabama law prevents pregnant people from obtaining an abortion to protect their health or life in nearly all instances.
We also know that the state of Alabama has a variety of ways of criminalizing a pregnant person.
That final sentence is posted without further explanation.
Screenshot: WAWC
The Washington Post recently promoted WAWC (where, prior to current state abortion restrictions, one woman received an abortion and died) along with Marty, calling the facility “an unlikely safety-net provider” that “now offers midwives, formula and housing help.” This support (in addition to material goods, parenting classes, and assistance with educational and career goals) has been offered by pro-life pregnancy centers for decades — but when pro-lifers do it, Marty calls it ‘manipulative‘ and ‘abusive.’ When she and her fellow pro-abortion advocates do it, it’s called a “safety net.”
It seems that unless a center is willing to openly offer a woman options to kill her preborn child, it is seen as “manipulative.”
Rummaging for their needs
“Under towering pines, the front lawn of the West Alabama Women’s Center turns into a rummage bonanza — with baby formula, children’s clothes and shoes, toys and other donations spread out on blankets,” wrote Molly Hennessy-Fiske for The Post. A woman picking through the items told her that she works for a trucking company, but her husband is unemployed. “We can’t afford to buy all our kids’ clothes at Wal-Mart. Diapers, wipes, food: The economy of it! It’s so expensive to afford children,” Keilani Camara explained.
Rummaging through items tossed on blankets outside a former abortion business doesn’t exactly give off the same vibe as pro-life organizations that give away maternity and children’s items in neatly organized rooms where women can “shop” for the items they need, instead of picking through items on the ground. Pregnancy centers work to provide for families’ specific material needs.
For example, Real Life Pregnancy Center in Alberville, Alabama, offers support for women that includes parenting classes and the Baby Boutique. The boutique offers newborn through 4T clothing as well as maternity clothes, car seats, formula, breast pumps, and more — all neatly organized and free of cost. Real Life Pregnancy Center was there helping women and families, even as Marty and the WAWC were aborting babies.
Yet, Hennessy-Fiske writes, “In the post-Roe world, the clinic has become an unlikely safety-net provider…” as if no one had been providing a (much more welcoming and dignified) safety net until now.
A focus on abortion
Marty asks, “What happens when we have a government that decides it doesn’t need to take care of its poor? We are a great net and we are very strong, but we can only hold so much.”
Historically, the former abortion business was just that — an abortion business. The Post claims it was originally supposed to be a “full-service operation” (presumably health care) for women. “But,” said Marty, “there was so much need for abortion that we were never able to really expand.”
In other words, the facility was all about abortion based on the supply and demand principle of economics and business. Its staff knew where the money was, but not where the need was. It was seeing “several hundred patients” each month who just “evaporated overnight” when pro-life laws took effect in the state — because its true business was not offering actual health services or support for families. That is, not until abortion was no longer legal.
Other abortion businesses in the state either shut down or jumped ship to pro-abortion states — but not WAWC.
Reinvention in the image of the pro-life organizations she criticized
Since the fall of Roe, the WAWC has begun to offer resources such as a community outreach coordinator, a mental health counselor, doulas, and midwives, and is expecting to be able to deliver babies in a birthing center converted from a former abortion recovery room. It offers testing for HIV and other STDs, counsels on substance abuse, and offers gas cards, help with emergency housing, and has a “makeshift food pantry.” It also holds pop-up events featuring blood pressure checks, ultrasounds, and pregnancy tests.
“We get a lot of unhoused population who come through here. How are you going to raise a child if you don’t have stable housing?” Marty said.
Jean Browning Maternity Home has been providing housing for mothers since 2003 and is the only transitional home in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, for expectant mothers and their children. It offers women alternatives to abortion and helps them make plans for their futures. It is pro-life individuals and organizations that typically set up, operate, and support these types of maternity homes. They require funding to operate, and more are needed.
Where are the maternity homes operated and funded by pro-abortion/”pro-choice” groups? (Or is there only one “choice” that they support?)
Marty’s answer to raising a child without stable housing up to this point has been abortion — which hasn’t solved the problem of homelessness; it has simply killed the preborn children of the “unhoused population,” as Marty puts it.
Marty also realized, “You can’t take a baby home from a hospital if you don’t have a car seat. What are you going to do? That’s one of the reasons we make sure everybody has car seats.” Though Marty seems to present this as a revelation, this is no surprise to pro-life pregnancy centers, which have been providing car seats for decades.
The WAWC community outreach director, Crystina Hughes, is also a doula who used to bring her friends to the center for abortions. Now, she organizes mothers’ groups and food giveaways — after one patient told her that the only food she had to eat was her children’s leftovers. “I’m creating all these events so people don’t feel shame and come and get help,” she said. “If we’re doing a visit and you’re like, ‘My lights might get cut off this month’ or ‘I don’t have food to feed my kids,’ those needs have to get met first.”
This is exactly the need that the pro-life community has seen and attempted to meet for 50+ years — meeting the true needs of pregnant women so they don’t feel their best or only option is to kill their preborn children! And yet, this is one of the reasons why Marty views pregnancy centers as ‘manipulative.’
If abortion were still legal in Alabama, what would Marty have recommended to a homeless pregnant woman? Would she have offered tangible assistance, or death for an innocent human being? Now, when abortion is no longer an option, she has taken a cue from those (allegedly ‘manipulative’) pregnancy centers.
Still helping women get abortions
“The only vestige of the past is a small sticker on the front-desk window: ‘Need to be unpregnant?'” wrote The Post.
Marty explained, “We can’t get it off.”
But that’s not really the “only vestige” of the center’s relationship with abortion. It does still offer resources for abortion. While the website states, “We do not offer elective abortions,” the center still gives pro-abortion resources to women seeking abortion. This could mean help with travel out of state for an abortion or help accessing the abortion pill online or through an out-of-state abortion facility — just as Marty encourages in her book.
The WAWC is also offering to provide post-abortion care to women despite the claim that abortion is ‘safe’ and that women can manage abortions on their own at home. A recent study suggests that the rate of serious adverse events from the abortion pill is 22 times higher than the .05% rate listed on the mifepristone (200mg) label.
WAWC is not the first abortion business to change course since Roe fell. One new abortion industry tactic is ensuring that women keep coming through the doors for post-abortion care and ultrasounds in states that have pro-life protections in place. Interestingly enough, these abortion businesses were against pro-life laws that required ultrasounds before abortions. Now they are using ultrasounds to get women through the door, where they could be pointing them toward abortion options outside of their pro-life states. And in at least one state, a pro-abortion governor is attempting to divert women from pregnancy centers after defunding them — by starting a pilot program that mirrors the same services offered by pregnancy centers (minus any pro-life ethic, of course).
Many women may be choosing life when Marty and her colleagues would have otherwise helped them choose death. But after years of criticizing pro-life centers for providing this same support to women, it seems disingenuous for the center to offer those same supports only because the state is now protecting preborn babies from abortion.
Where were these compassionate services before, when the WAWC’s main (and highly lucrative) business was killing preborn children?
Are these new offerings truly out of love for women and their children, or is this move self-serving? After all, Marty and her staff want the intentional killing of preborn children to be legal again.
If Alabama ever allowed induced abortion again, would WAWC continue to help women give birth to and care for their babies, or would it quickly revert to being a profitable abortion facility?
