April 2006: False ‘Crisis Pregnancy Center’ Allows Anti-Abortion Activists to Harass, Pressure Pregnant Teen

An Indiana mother and her 17-year-old daughter visit what they think is a Planned Parenthood (PP) clinic to receive counseling about the daughter’s pregnancy. The facility is actually a “crisis pregnancy clinic,” or CPC, operated by anti-abortion activists. The CPC is near the Planned Parenthood clinic, and shares a parking lot with it. According to a PP email alert, the CPC is one of a number of false clinics “designed expressly to lure Planned Parenthood patients and deceive them.” In this case, the CPC staff, pretending to be PP clinic officials, record the girl’s confidential information and make a false “appointment” for her that is to take place in the “other office”—the actual PP clinic. When the girl returns for her appointment, the PP clinicians have no record of her. Moreover, she is met by police, who have been told by the CPC staff that the girl is a minor being forced to have an abortion against her will. In the days and weeks following the encounter, the girl and her family are harassed and stalked by anti-abortion activists. The activists come to her home and call her father’s workplace to “counsel” the family against having an abortion. The PP clinic director later says the girl was “scared to death to leave her house.” The activists even go to the girl’s school and urge her classmates to pressure her not to have an abortion. PP warns that anti-abortion organizations around the country are setting up CPCs (see May 1, 2006), many of which pass themselves off as non-partisan women’s health clinics offering a full range of reproductive services, but in actuality are fronts for those organizations, providing no health services but instead disseminating pamphlets and other information. PP accuses these CPCs of trafficking in “propaganda and intimidation,” and writes: “[A]ccording to The New York Times, there are currently more of these centers in the US than there are actual abortion providers! What’s more, these centers have received $60 million of government grants. They’re being funded by our tax dollars.” The PP blog entry featuring the email alert is later removed from the organization’s site, but is preserved on another Web site. [Planned Parenthood, 4/21/2006] The story is later verified by Planned Parenthood official Jennifer Jorczak. [AlterNet, 5/1/2006]