Free Abortion, On Demand, Without Apology!
“The best client you ever get is one that thinks they’re walking into an abortion clinic.” Abby Johnson, a pregnancy center movement leader, said at a training held in support of Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs).
According to NARAL Pro-Choice America’s “End the Lies” campaign, however, this is one of the main ways that CPCs operate to restrict access to reproductive healthcare—through deception.
What Are CPCs?
What are CPCs, though, and why have they become the focus of the Quiet Corner Connecticut DSA’s Socalist Feminist organizing efforts? Generaly speaking, CPCs are anti-abortion organizations that lie to, shame, and mislead pregnant people about their reproductive healthcare options to block them from accessing abortion care. They are not certified healthcare clinics, do not follow privacy laws protecting personal and health information, and are often religiously affiliated.
CPCs advertise as women’s health clinics, co-opt the language of the feminist movement, and specifically target low-income and racially minoritized pregnant people. They promise free ultrasounds, STI testing, and family planning services to manipulate pregnant people into scheduling appointments. Once inside, they often mislead patients about abortions, delay and cancel appointments to push people past legal limits for in-clinic abortions, and implement other practices intended to prevent pregnant people from making informed choices about their own reproductive health. The deceptive strategies used by these groups are pervasive and strategic. On their face, they don’t appear overly threatening or concerning. The inconspicuousness is what makes CPCs a serious and insidious threat to reproductive freedom.
CPCs Are a Socialist Issue
While organizing in Connecticut and building coalitions to combat the threat of CPCs to reproductive freedom, we found ourselves having to explain time and time again why CPCs are a socialist issue. So we want to make it very clear: CPCs are a socialist issue. All people deserve immediate, unobstructed access to comprehensive healthcare resources that will allow them to keep their families and themselves safe and healthy. Every person has the right to decide the number, spacing, and timing of their children, and each individual has the right to birth and raise their children in a safe and healthy way regardless of the intersecting oppressions that impact their life.
CPCs are not just organizations of people in the community advancing their personal or group religious beliefs. CPCs are funded by national right-wing organizations. The little fake clinics in our communities are hooked into a huge network of capitalist power and control. CPCs are quietly operating in all of our communities and are insidiously oppressing people.
Quiet Corner’s Anti CPC Campaign
For our chapter, organizing started last year when the City of Hartford adopted an ordinance prohibiting CPCs from engaging in false or deceptive advertising practices and requiring them to disclose whether their staff carry medical licenses. Caring Families, a CPC located in Willimantic, CT, also operates a mobile CPC that drives around the state. In April 2019, they filed a federal lawsuit against Hartford based on the new city ordinance—suing the city because they didn’t want to be honest with pregnant people about what they are really doing. Our members had seen the Caring Families mobile CPC on university campuses and local events, and had noticed the prominent address of Caring Families’ permanent location, the “Women’s Center of Eastern Connecticut” on Main Street. This was obviously a harmful organization with a wide reach in our community.
To organize against CPCs in Eastern Connecticut, we conducted research by drawing on resources from other DSA chapters, tapping into the great work that NARAL Connecticut was doing in our area, and conducting additional independent research about Caring Families and the Women’s Center of Eastern Connecticut. We started with an educational zine about CPCs created by Pittsburgh DSA and adapted by Central Iowa DSA; it was a great moment of national solidarity between Socialist Feminist groups, and the tools and support they lent us were invaluable. It helped us to understand and frame the issue of CPCs on a broad level and consider how to discuss CPCs as a socialist issue. We then turned to a thorough report and resources developed by NARAL Connecticut on CPCs in our state and went on to identify what kind of licenses the facilities have and how they were affiliated with larger parent organizations. We also familiarized ourselves with the ongoing court case.
Our research helped us develop the central priority of our campaign: -to raise public awareness about the true nature of the Caring Families van and the Women’s Center of Eastern Connecticut in our area of the state. Thus far, we have worked toward this goal with several specific actions:
Handing out literature about CPCs in our area at local events in Willimantic;
Conducting a demonstration outside of the Women’s Center during a busy weekday afternoon;
Partnering with several other local organizations to protest outside of a Caring Families Fundraiser at a local university campus;
Sharing educational resources and information with our local YDSA chapter to help them organize against the van that frequents their campus;
Engaging local press about the issue in connection with our demonstrations.
Looking Forward
As we continue to organize against CPCs in our community and encourage others to do the same, we offer a few important considerations. It is crucial to be really clear about why CPCs are an issue—many of them don’t openly purport to provide abortions or state on their websites that they don’t offer or refer for abortions. As organizers, we must examine the idea of what deception really looks like, how power and vulnerability influence a situation, and how people can seem pretty nice but obstruct access to reproductive justice at the same time. We realize that CPCs may not seem like the most obvious threat to reproductive justice in your community—aren’t those nasty protestors outside of the real abortion clinic more of a problem? However, what makes CPCs such a threat is that they seem neutral, or “nice,” or not that bad.
We argue that we need to be more concerned about reproductive oppressions that are normalized and operating in seemingly neutral ways. We argue that we need to organize in ways that expose these sources of power and control. And we implore that others recognize the real impact these oppressions have on the people in our communities.
References
“The Deceptive Lies.” End the Lies, http://endthelies.com/about/the-deceptive-lies/
By Ash Braun & Ashley Robinson, Quiet Corner DSA