Pregnancy centers: *exist*

Pro-choice people: “You’re manipulating women!”

On the one hand, that’s a little bit of a caricature—I’ve never seen a conversation quite that blatant. But on the other hand, I do see pro-choice people make both of those comments online a lot, and I get why that’s frustrating to pro-lifers: Pro-choice people say we don’t want to help women, we point out the many, many volunteered hours and donated dollars the pro-life movement pours into helping women, and then pro-choice people reject that obvious proof that we want to help women by saying our help is actually just a guise for manipulation. It can come across as frustrating, ad hoc, or even duplicitous.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

But here’s the thing—if you’re pro-choice and you find yourself nodding along with both of those comments, I get it: You don’t trust our motives. That makes sense, for several reasons. 

1. We’re on opposite sides of what we can all agree is an extremely important human rights issue. It can be hard to see people who disagree about something so fundamental as reasonable or caring.
2. Unfortunately there are a lot of pro-life people who really are deeply uncaring and unempathetic. And there also really are bad, manipulative pregnancy centers. It’s fair to call them out—just like it’s fair for pro-lifers to call out bad behavior on the pro-choice side—and it can also be really difficult to resist painting everyone on the other side with the same brush, especially if you don’t have relationships with real, three-dimensional people in your life who are on the other side.
3. To be passionately pro-life and run a pregnancy center that’s genuinely giving women information non-manipulatively, even though you really, really want her not to have an abortion, might sound almost psychologically impossible.

But if you’re pro-choice, just imagine for a second what it would be like if most pregnancy centers really do what they say they do: give women who are in the middle of trauma a chance to breathe, be seen, have a safe place to think through their own desires and values, receive non-manipulative, medically accurate information about all of their options if they want it, and receive practical and relational support that makes it feel like abortion isn’t their only option. Maybe you think no pregnancy centers actually do that. But just imagine with me for a second, what if they did? Would that be something you could wholeheartedly get behind? If you’re truly pro-choice, I think it should be. Many, many women who have abortions don’t walk into the abortion clinic because they want to be there, but because they feel like they have no other choice. Both pro-life and pro-choice people should agree that if a woman really doesn’t want an abortion, abortion feels like her only choice, and there’s practical or relational support she could be given that would make it not feel like her only choice, we should really want her to have that support. So if a pregnancy center does what they say they do, pro-choice people should be just as excited about it as pro-lifers are.

And my experience is, a whole lot of pregnancy centers really do do that. I’ve talked with a pregnancy center director who intentionally refuses to keep track of the number of “babies saved,” or clients who decided not to abort, at her clinic—even though it would be an incredibly useful fundraising tool with pro-life donors—because she wants to make sure her clinic is laser-focused on caring for women, not on preventing abortions. A lower abortion rate might be a side effect that her donors are happy about, but her central goal is to provide genuine, high-quality information and care to her clients.

You and I can argue over whether pregnancy centers like hers are the exception or the rule, but in a sense it doesn’t matter, because you don’t have to take my word for it. The thing to do is to go find out—go tour your own local pregnancy center and see what you think of their approach. If you’re worried they’ll try to manipulate you or misrepresent what they do, you don’t even have to tell them you’re pro-choice. Just tell them you want to learn more about what they do and ask for a tour. I can just about guarantee you they’ll say yes. Then ask open-ended questions about what happens when a woman comes in and how they would engage with her. It’s important to check, because there really are bad pregnancy centers in the world. But there are also a whole lot of good ones.

I actually did this with my own local pregnancy center a few years ago. Some of the green flags I saw that helped me conclude it was trustworthy were:

• There weren’t any baby pictures, religious images, or religious quotes on the walls.
• There weren’t visible fetal development models or pictures. The director explained that they have 3D fetal models, but they only show them if a woman wants to see them.
• The director described her job in a conversation with a pregnant woman as being to honor the woman’s agency by giving her space that she may not have been able to get elsewhere to think through her own values.

If you do find a good pregnancy center near you, whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, consider volunteering or donating. Because pro-life or pro-choice, we should all want women who don’t want abortions to have access to other options.

The post Dear Pro-Choice People, Give Pregnancy Centers a Chance. originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.” 

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