Before the overturning of Roe v. Wade a little more than a week ago, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) were considered by mainstream media to be the dregs of the pro-life movement, one of the last stories that anyone wanted to cover.
Now that abortion access is heading toward the deep-blue coastal regions with a few blue islands in the middle, a villain must be found. And voilà; the once despised CPCs are to blame for it all. Now, CPCs are worse than a non-story.
Apparently these places are pretty effective, judging from the editorial hate being poured down on them. They’re the bricks and mortar of the pro-life movement. Instead of reporting about how these CPCs — and the churches that tend to support them — have been defaced, set on fire or otherwise attacked, we have hit pieces like this Associated Press article about a “so-called” crisis pregnancy center in Charleston, WV.
The piece is so front-loaded with trash quotes from its opponents — with no rejoinder allowed from leaders or volunteers at the CPC itself — that you almost miss the story about the woman who visited the center back in 2014 planning to abort her child. She was (very reluctantly) dissuaded from doing so and now is “very happily” raising her 7-year-old son.
So, what’s the moral of this story? That this particular mother should have decided that this kid should be dead? The two reporters who did this disaster of a story don't want to go there.
Considering the invective tossed at these CPCs by places like Planned Parenthood, why aren’t reporters treating this more like a business story?
Like, the CPCs have outwitted the abortion clinics when it comes to figuring out what many pregnant women really want and it’s clear the abortion facilities have suffered financial losses as a result. How about asking people at the latter hard questions about the clients they’ve lost to the CPCs and whose bad marketing decision that was?
Hint: It might have to do with the free ultrasounds offered by the CPCs. Offering this service was a trend that began a decade or more ago and it really cried out for coverage. But, you know. That wasn’t news.
Do ultrasound machines matter? One pro-life group estimates that 80% of abortion-minded women change their minds when they see their offspring on the monitor.
But no, most reporters aren’t in an investigative mood when it comes to covering the pro-abortion rights side of this story.
The New York Times is another outlet that’s suddenly discovered these places in the past two months since Politico tipped us all off on May 3 that Roe v. Wade was in dire peril. That gave journalists more than six weeks (until June 24) to go find stories about Who Is To Blame for all this –- besides President Donald Trump, the six justices, etc.
The Times has learned that these dreaded CPCs are far more numerous in the Big Apple, in terms of their approach to working with patients, than are abortion clinics. Obviously the pro-lifers have been at work over the years at seeding them in the five boroughs, so the Times went and profiled one in the South Bronx.
If you can call the piece a profile, that is.
Once again, voices from the opposition are allowed to define these CPCs, which is blatantly unfair and the Times knows it. For instance:
The centers are designed to draw in pregnant women considering abortion, but their primary purpose is to counsel them against ending their pregnancies, abortion rights advocates say.
Pregnant women have been told that abortions can cause cancer and sterility, and other claims that are medically unproven, said Elizabeth Estrada of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice.
She added that expectant mothers are promised help, like in finding affordable housing, and are offered material resources like diapers. Often this aid will come through, but ultimately, women are left to fend for themselves once they give birth, Ms. Estrada said.
Says who? Once again, where are the voices on the other side of that debate?
As someone who benefited from a lot of goodies, including a crib from a northern Virginia CPC when I adopted my daughter, that’s not true. Did the reporter bother asking the CPC folks themselves if Estrada was correct? Did anyone think to ask to see some documentation on the care that was offered and what care was accepted?
Not until the end of the article, by which time a lot of readers have moved on to something else. You have the expectant mother saying no one gave her supplies or money. Then you have the director of the clinic saying they give away supplies all the time, but did the mother ask? And, after a reporter called the director, did anything happen?
I hope we have better coverage of CPCs in this new post-Dobbs world, but I’m not optimistic. What’s discouraging is the lack of basic reporting (and outrage) about the CPCs and churches that have been vandalized or set fire to in the past few weeks. Now, if this was a Black Lives Matter affair, the media would be up in arms.
Here’s a partial list, already out of date, from Newsweek, on some of the vandalism. Religion News Service also ran this piece on vandalized CPCs, but such coverage is a drop in the bucket.
What’s ironic about the vandalized churches is that the Catholic church in the Seattle area, St. Louise parish, is widely known for its grants to causes for the homeless (a huge issue in Seattle). This is a church that walks its talk.
Instead of journalists pointing such things out, you get hit pieces like this mess of a diatribe-made-to-look-like-a-news-story piece in The Olympian that Tmatt critiqued last week. And 30 miles to the north, the Seattle Times wasn’t about to be outdone. It was running updates on where the latest abortion-rights demonstrations were taking place. Do you think they gave similar coverage to pro-life demonstrations throughout the years? In your dreams.
As for their St. Louise vandalism coverage, it was minimal. Be sure to watch the EWTN video atop this post and see how you’d feel about being attacked by the nutcase who’s throwing the rocks.
Another pet peeve of mine has been the inaccuracies, as in the headlines framing our “constitutional right to an abortion” being removed, which in peoples’ minds brings up everything from freedom of speech to gun rights.
But Justice Samuel Alito expressly said in his opinion there is no constitutional right to an abortion –- and there never was. At the very least, reporters need to —accurately — say that Dobbs overturned the previous court’s claim that such a right existed.
I never thought I’d see the day when reporters would openly ignore a Supreme Court ruling’s wording on a given topic, but what we have here is what Tmatt has long referred to as Kellerism — named after retired New York Times editor Bill Keller. It’s the philosophy that when it comes to covering cultural, more and religious issues like abortion, fairness, accuracy and objectivity go out the window because only one side has a legitimate argument. The other side’s POV isn’t worth repeating.
Then there’s Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s contention that giving birth is 14 times more dangerous than abortion, an argument she lifted from a long-discounted 2012 analysis. See here for the counter argument because you won’t read it in the media. Reporters have repeated Sotomayor’s statistic endlessly — without question. Where are the inquiring minds, or are they just put on the shelf when it come to this issue?
CPCs will continue to be vilified — and worse — I’m afraid, and coverage of the arson and vandalism will be minimal.
Fortunately, there are a few articles out there that give the other side, such as this New York Times piece this past weekend, by religion beat pro Ruth Graham, on the young women who opposed Roe. Now that was the kind of piece too few reporters were writing.
Often pointed to by anti-abortion leaders as the face of the movement, a new generation of activists say they are poised to continue the fight in a post-Roe nation.
Many, but not all of them, are Christian conservatives, the demographic that has long formed the core of the anti-abortion movement. Others are secular and view their efforts against abortion as part of a progressive quest for human rights.
Fortunately she put Kristan Hawkins near the top of the piece.
“It’s always been a movement of youth,” said Kristan Hawkins, who became the president of Students for Life of America in 2006, when she was 21. She recalled a line she heard from the conservative activist Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King Jr. who is a frequent presence at anti-abortion events: “When young people join your movement, you know victory is on its way.”
Ms. Hawkins’s organization — which supports a near-total ban on abortion starting at conception and opposes oral contraceptives — now claims 1,250 groups on campuses across the country, from middle schools to graduate schools. Its signs reading “I Am the Pro-Life Generation” are ubiquitous at anti-abortion demonstrations.
Be sure to read further down in the piece about the feminist/atheist/leftist Kristin Turner, founder of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, one of the newer kids on the block in pro-life activism. Turner, 20, is going the 1960s route in terms of sit-ins, a punk band and anti-capitalist rhetoric when it comes to opposing abortion. And she’s based in San Francisco; either she’s crazy or really brave.
The move to overturn Roe didn’t come out of a vacuum. It’s time reporters actually treat its opponents as real people with real arguments and worthwhile stories instead of simply demonizing them. Why not listen to voices on both sides of this culture-shaking story?
FIRST IMAGE: Publicity photo with the Ethics & Religious Liberty Center feature entitled “A brief history of pregnancy resource centers.”