Time and abortion

The cover story of Time magazine’s new (2/26) issue is called “The Abortion Campaign You Never Hear About”, and the sub-head is “Crisis pregnancy centers are working to win over one woman at a time. But are they playing fair?” In the print version, the story inside is called “1 Woman At a Time,” but that same story online is titled “The Grassroots Abortion War.” Why they changed the name is intriguing, because they imply two different things.

‘One woman at a time’ is a good description of the central focus of the article, which is the prolific spread of crisis pregnancy centers around the country and how they work with pregnant woman to give assistance and information at a most vulnerable time. Through pregnancy assistance, information and resources, they hope to help more women choose to keep their babies and reduce the ravages of abortion.

These crisis pregnancy centers have become a force around the country in changing the whole pro-life dynamic to a ‘woman’s health’ focus. The CPCs are the frontline of the pro-life movement and their drive for ‘informed consent’ in abortions - and truly giving women a choice – have produced the most success so far in the 34 years since Roe.

Planned Parenthood and pro-abortion activists see these successes, like the groundbreaking work in South Dakota, as the beginning of the end of their era, so they’ve started a campaign to hold onto their power and profit. The strategy is to get out in front of this rollling wave of awareness in crisis pregnancy care centers and discredit their work, and their findings that abortion ravages women.

The New York Times planted seeds of doubt in its Sunday Magazine cover story “Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome?” back in January. Here’s the most recent post relating to its calculated disinformation. This is going to continue, so it’s no surprise to see Time devote a cover story to it. Since it was written by Nancy Gibbs, I expected fairness and accuracy. She’s the one at Time who got a story up online about the South Dakota abortion task force report, and the new dynamic coming out of the legislation there.

So how does Gibbs and Time handle this story, soon on the heels of the NYT piece questioning the findings of crisis pregnancy centers? It covers the work of a particular crisis pregnancy center pretty well, and then goes on to…question the information at some of the crisis pregnancy centers.

At least it gets inside a CPC and lets the reader know how they work with women.

The pregnancy-center clinic, with its new ultrasound machine, has been open only since December, but already the staff can count the women who came in considering an abortion and changed their minds: five women converted, six lives saved, they declare, since one was carrying twins. “They connected,” nurse Joyce Wilson says, recalling the reaction of the women who saw the filmy image of their fetus onscreen. “They bonded. You could just see it. One girl got off the table and said, ‘That’s my baby.'”

“Another got up,” Deborah Wood says, “and said, ‘This changes everything.'”

That’s why CPCs are making such a difference. They’re changing everything that has gone on for 34 years since Roe, and it’s about time the major media get on the story.

Wood is the CEO of Asheville Pregnancy Support Services in Asheville, North Carolina, one of the thousands of crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S. that are working to end abortion. Hers is the new face of an old movement: kind, calm, nonjudgmental, a special-forces soldier in the abortion wars who is fighting her battles one conscience at a time. Her center helps women navigate the social-service bureaucracy, sign up for Medicaid and begin prenatal care. She helps pregnant girls find emergency housing if their parents threaten to throw them out. Free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds are just the latest service.

“They’ve been fed these lies, that it’s just a bunch of cells that’s not worth anything,” Wilson says. “But those limbs are moving. That heart is beating. You don’t have to say anything …”

That’s precisely the intent of crisis pregnancy centers–let the women be fully informed, and let them make their own choices.

Information has been the flashpoint between the pro-life and pro-abortion movements.

About half of American women will face an unplanned pregnancy, according to the nonprofit Guttmacher Institute, and at current rates more than one-third will have an abortion by the time they are 45.

Let’s be clear. The Guttmacher Institute is an arm of Planned Parenthood.

Since Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure in 1973, no other issue has so contorted U.S. politics or confounded values. When does life begin? Who should decide? And is there anything that can be agreed on to make the hard choices less painful? Much of the antiabortion movement remains focused on changing laws, tightening restrictions one by one, state by state. But Wood and her team talk of changing hearts. They are part of a whole other strategy that is more personal and more pastoral, although to some people it’s every bit as controversial.

Of course it is, to abortion providers and activists, because it’s centered on women’s health and informed consent. It’s the personal and pastoral strategy of the pro-life movement that is breaking new ground and promisinig (threatening, to some) to end Roe.

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 CPC movement not only takes pains, and trains workers, to avoid using fear and guilt in the counseling process, they work to eliminate fear and avoid guilt in these women. This reporting is misrepresentative. But Gibbs is right about that intimate conversation with women, and it’s one they’re not getting in the abortion clinics.

The South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion report pretty well covers the scenario, when a woman goes for an abortion. They heard testimony of about 2,000 women with detailed accounts that virtually all pointed to the findings and conclusions of this report. That accounts for the rise of crisis pregnancy centers.

At least the Time article gets the information out there about what they are.

The centers are typically Christian charities, often under the umbrella of one of three national groups: Care Net, Heartbeat International and the U.S. National Institute of Family and Life Advocates. No one can say precisely how many pregnancy centers there are, since some aren’t affiliated with any national group. Care Net puts the figure at around 2,300, though that does not include traditional maternity homes, adoption agencies or Catholic Charities. Care Net and Heartbeat International also operate Option Line, a 24/7 call center based in Columbus, Ohio, that women can contact for information and referral to a CPC near them.

Last year Care Net spent $4 million on marketing, including more than $2 million on billboards alone (PREGNANT AND SCARED? 1-800-395-HELP. WE’RE HERE 24/7). The Internet has become a tool for outreach as well. Care Net has got into bidding wars with abortion providers over who would receive top placement in the sponsored-links sections on Yahoo! and Google when someone searches for abortion.

That’s intersting.

Pregnancy centers offer everything from emergency food and formula to strollers and baby clothes to help with the month’s rent. “We’re willing to offer $200, $300, $400 on the spot, no strings attached,” says Pat Foley, who runs the Wakota Life Care Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. “No life should end because of money.”

So the abortion industry is worried about the growth of CPCs and their rise in visibility.

The growth in the movement has raised other alarms with pro-choice groups. They point out that while counselors at crisis pregnancy centers lay out the physical and psychological risks associated with abortion, they don’t mention that the risk of death in childbirth is 12 times as high and that many women who get abortions experience only relief.

Both bogus claims. There’s so much information out there now with the truth, these myths can’t endure much longer.

Here’s another one, a big one.

After years of debate about breast cancer and abortion, the U.S. National Cancer Institute in February 2003 gathered the world’s leading experts to review the data and assess the risk. They stated that their conclusion that “induced abortion is not associated with an increase in breast cancer risk”was “well established,” the institute’s highest rating for research findings.

They stated that after changing their position under pressure. Here is just one comprehensive report with both the science, and the explanation of the coverup, of the abortion/breast cancer link. Here’s a source for more. And here’s another.

Overall, the Time cover story did a better job than most mainstream media reporting on the subject. And it highlighted a coalition in North Carolina of pro-abortion and pro-life forces who meet regularly and talk. That’s a start.

Now they are out to show how people who disagree violently can debate civilly, even lovingly, and find some common ground. They know they won’t change one another’s core beliefs, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t changed.

Friends or not, it took a year to come up with a common-ground statement of goals: to decrease abortions, relieve the social and economic conditions that lead women to consider abortion, make adoption easier, condemn violence and keep talking. “One of the principles is the importance of factual information,” says Lynn von Unwerth, a nurse at Asheville Planned Parenthood who has been attending the meetings from the start. And then she pauses: “That’s something we’re still wrestling with.”

Sounds like it’s still a ‘your facts vs. my facts’ dilemma.

“It’s been a real education about the scientific facts and data and who are reliable sources,” (Christian pastor Jeff) Hutchinson says. “That gets to the heart of the divide. If we as a society can’t agree on who is the gold-standard source of medical information, that just reveals we’ve really got problems.”

We do, especially as long as campaigns of disinformation like the one launched in South Dakota turn some voters against laws protecting women and life. But that can’t last much longer, with all the information out there. And the women who know the truth are speaking out themselves.