Expectant Mother Care

Abortion Battle: Prenatal Care or Pressure Tactics?
'Crisis Pregnancy Centers' Expand and Draw Criticism By Alan Cooperman
Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, February 21, 2002; Page A01 NEW YORK -- The latest front in America's battle over abortion runs down the middle of East 149th Street in the South Bronx.

On one side, behind a metal detector and a steel door in a building without a sign, is a Planned Parenthood clinic where Jeanine Costley, a certified social worker, counsels mostly young, working poor, Hispanic women about contraceptives and abortions.

Directly across the street, under a 50-foot yellow sign asking "Unplanned Pregnancy?" and blue neon lights urging "Plan Your Parenthood," are the offices of Expectant Mother Care. Here, Liz Nazario, a Catholic volunteer, counsels similar women about abstinence and adoptions.

Costley wears a white lab coat and stethoscope. Nazario carries photographs of fetuses with button noses and tiny fingers. They have never met. But they are among the foot soldiers in a long-running confrontation that is heating up in New York and across the nation, with significant moves on both sides.

Following complaints from abortion rights advocates, the attorney general of New York is investigating whether Expectant Mother Care and other "crisis pregnancy centers" use deceptive advertising or practice medicine without a license. The centers have responded aggressively, contesting the attorney general's subpoenas and rallying nationwide opposition to the probe.

More broadly, hundreds of crisis pregnancy centers throughout the United States are expanding their services -- and trying to protect themselves against accusations of practicing medicine illegally -- by converting their facilities into medical clinics with ultrasound machines and part-time physicians and nurses.

To help pay for such investments, the centers increasingly are turning to the federal and state governments. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) introduced legislation this month to authorize the Department of Health and Human Services to dole out $3 million in federal grants for ultrasound equipment to "community-based pregnancy help medical clinics."

Four states -- Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina -- also have created "Choose Life" license plates as a fundraising mechanism for crisis pregnancy centers. Abortion rights groups are challenging these programs in the courts, arguing that the plates violate the constitutional separation of church and state. They have won a temporary injunction against Louisiana's plates, which show a stork carrying a baby.
But 10 more state legislatures are considering similar bills.
Gruesome Realities
Organizations promoting "abortion alternatives" first appeared in Canada in the late 1960s, spread to the United States in the '70s, and grew rapidly through the '80s and '90s, according to activists in the movement.

Across the country, about 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers are arrayed against an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 family planning clinics and abortion providers.

The antiabortion centers, usually funded by church groups and staffed by Roman Catholic and evangelical Christian volunteers, say their primary aim is to provide moral support and hope. But they make no apologies for confronting young women with what they believe are the gruesome realities of abortion.

"A lot of times when a girl comes in and says she wants an abortion, she's just being selfish," Nazario explained. "She's really not thinking about the baby. She's thinking about herself."

To shake that complacency, Nazario said, she begins by showing black-and-white pictures of the rapidly developing fingers of a fetus at five, six, seven and eight weeks. Next she pulls out a big, color photo of a five-week fetus with closed eyes and a smile.

Then she flips to another full-page, color picture: bloody fetuses in a trash bin.
"Some girls will go like this," Nazario said, covering her eyes with her hands. "I say, 'You're just seeing it. It hasn't been done to you yet.' "

Nazario also shows women a room full of donated baby clothes, toys, infant formula and diapers that Expectant Mother Care gives away to those in need.

Sometimes she takes them into a tiny chapel to pray before a marble altar. Always, she said, she invites them to watch a videotape on a big-screen TV.

"I like to use 'Abortion Procedures.' It explains second- and third-trimester abortions," she said, referring to relatively rare and traumatic procedures. "Some girls need 'Silent Scream.' 'Silent Scream' is softer. I like to go gradually because these girls -- even with four or five abortions, some of them -- it's the first time they've heard about the risks, the possibility of breast cancer or their uterus being perforated."

Although counseling at crisis pregnancy centers varies widely, Nazario's description appears to be typical; counselors at other centers in New York and Washington, and women who have gone to them, gave similar accounts.

Katie Kaplan and Karen Hauptman, 17-year-old seniors at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, visited the Rockville Pregnancy Center in December on assignment for their school newspaper. Even though they were only pretending to be pregnant, the graphic videotapes and photographs they were shown "upset me to the point where I was on the verge of tears, which is very unusual for me," Kaplan said. "I felt almost in a daze at the experience and how truly wrong I knew what they were doing to be."

Kaplan and Hauptman poured their indignation into an article headlined "Pregnancy Center Misleads Teenagers," which ended with a declaration that the student newspaper would no longer run the center's advertisements.
Wall of Heroes
Some women, however, are immensely grateful to crisis pregnancy centers. At Expectant Mother Care's Brooklyn office, counselor Linda Marzulla displays a "wall of heroes": hundreds of ultrasound images of fetuses saved from abortion.

Cynthia Doricent, 26, is delighted that her baby will be among them. Now six months pregnant, she originally came to the center seeking an abortion.

"I looked in the Yellow Pages and it said 'abortion alternatives,' but I was a little clueless about that. I didn't know that meant no abortions," Doricent said.

Her main problem, she said, was that her boyfriend, who already had three children by other women, was pressuring her to terminate the pregnancy.

"His whole plan was, it was an abortion place. But Linda said no. . . . Linda explained [to him] that if a woman has an abortion, she'll hate you for it forever. She told him that an abortion, for a woman, is like a man ripping out his manhood," Doricent said.

Since then, Doricent said, her boyfriend has stopped pressuring her and is beginning to act excited about the upcoming birth.

Such methods infuriate abortion rights groups.

"The charade is that they provide alternatives, when they don't provide alternatives, they frighten women with horror films about abortion, they lie about the psychological impact of abortion; they have even been known to lie about whether a woman is pregnant," said Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Feldt added that she believes pregnancy crisis centers deliberately choose locations near abortion providers and run ambiguous advertisements to confuse women.

"They are integrating increasing numbers of medical services in what they do, offering free pregnancy tests and low-cost testing for sexually transmitted diseases and sonographs. . . . [But] if they are going to practice medicine -- and as they add these tests they are practicing medicine -- they either need to practice it legitimately or cut out the charade," she said.

Chris Slattery, a former leader of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue who founded Expectant Mother Care in 1985, has been a pioneer in converting pregnancy crisis centers into medical clinics. All five of his facilities offer ultrasound, and his Bronx center has a $120,000, three-dimensional sonograph machine, which he described as "a wonderful way to show a woman the full humanity of her unborn child."

Slattery also has a board-certified obstetrician, a certified sonographer and several volunteer nurses who rotate among his centers. "We are being accused of shoddy operations, of operating without medical professionals, when the irony is the exact opposite. The abortion industry in this country has gotten away without scrutiny for years," he said.

Slattery denies any deceptive advertising, noting that pregnancy crisis centers advertise under "abortion alternatives" in the New York phone book, rather than in the "abortion services" section, in compliance with consent decrees signed with two former state attorneys general, Robert Abrams in 1987 and Dennis Vacco in 1995.

The investigation by the current attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, "is a political gambit made in an election year by an attorney general who wants to please his pro-abortion constituents," Slattery said.

Last week, Slattery and other crisis pregnancy center directors across New York filed motions in court seeking to quash the attorney general's subpoenas for their records.
Spitzer's spokesman, Darren Dopp, said crisis pregnancy centers "often do good work, and we recognize that." But, he said, the attorney general's office has received some serious complaints and is obligated to look into them, despite pressure from antiabortion groups, religious leaders and the attorney general of South Carolina, who urged his New York colleague to drop the matter.

While declining to specify the complaints, Dopp said they include misrepresentation of the range of services provided, improper medical advice and, in one case, an allegation by a woman that she was kept in a closed room while her father, pastor and employer were informed that she was pregnant.

"We will go wherever the facts lead us," Dopp said. "Should the complaints be substantiated, what would we seek? We would say, probably, 'Look, you've got to modify the way you present yourselves.' Nobody is talking about shutting them down."