The Crisis of Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Exploring the Hidden Weapon of the Pro-Life Movement

Abstract

Within nearly every town in the United States, the most prevalent form of pro-life advocacy lives unregulated in strip malls, medical buildings, buses, and small office complexes. The crisis pregnancy center evangelical movement encompasses more volunteers, volunteer hours, and organizations than all other forms of pro-life activism in the United States combined.1 With free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, in conjunction with free materials and parenting classes, pro-life pregnancy centers are playing an increasingly crucial role in the debate around abortions. Pregnancy centers are regularly affiliated with evangelical Christian networks and national pro-life groups, who advertise services using neutral medical language to the public and images to present themselves as comprehensive health centers. The majority of centers are part of an evangelical pro-life movement, which designed their strategy under the assumption that meeting the material, emotional, and spiritual needs of pregnant people with unwanted pregnancies will convince them to forgo their abortion desires. In many ways, crisis pregnancy centers are the pro-life movement. These pro‐life clinics are an important venue for the debate around reproductive health, yet academic scholars, politicians, doctors, and ordinary people know little about these influential political mechanisms. CPCs do not provide or refer for abortion or contraception; however, they publicize in ways that give the appearance that they provide abortions, without disclosing their biased religious nature and limitations of their family-planning services.