Women’s Space

When a young woman named Jessica wrote to me on Scarleteen to ask whether women who are pregnant should visit a crisis pregnancy center for resources and support, I warned her that CPCs are non-medical establishments that provide false information to women in order to scare them away from abortion as an option. I explained how easy it can be to be fooled by CPCs, even when you’re savvy, aware of practices CPCs typically employ — even, I soon learned, when you’re writing an article in protest of them. And then I offered Jessica a link to the American Pregnancy Helpline as an option for women looking for support sustaining a pregnancy and as an alternative to a CPC.

I proved my own point too well.

At first blush, Helpline’s website presents itself as supportive of all pregnancy options. I found several sites I know to be reputable and fully supportive of choice linking to the Helpline. But I should know to be wary of any sites offering aid to pregnant women. If I had, I would have found that the American Pregnancy Helpline is affiliated with a larger organization, the American Pregnancy Association (APA), whose site is linked to even by such organizations as the National Abortion Federation, the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog, the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, WebMD, RAINN, the Feminist Majority Foundation, and, perhaps most disturbingly, MedlinePlus, a well-vetted consumer health site that is a project of the National Library of Medicine — all of whom are likely unaware of the extent of the APA’s connection to anti-choice causes. Once I found the link between the Helpline and the American Pregnancy Association, I found a whole lot more.

By the end of a day of deep digging, I discovered that both the American Pregnancy Helpline and the American Pregnancy Association and their founders have no record of being supportive of all reproductive options. In fact, the organizations both trace their origins to a crisis pregnancy center. I found misleading and medically incorrect information on both organization’s sites, including references to “partial-birth abortion” and the suggestion that future fertility or breast cancer has anything at all to do with having had an abortion. I learned that the Helpline is widely linked in CPC and anti-choice directories. And I soon noticed the strange absence of any information on contraception at the site for teens, while links to sites pushing ab-only proliferate. (I emailed the site immediately asking a few basic questions about their stance and background early but have yet to get any response.)

“As a longtime options and abortion counselor, I am blown away to learn that this place has sneaked under the radar to this extent,” says Parker Dockray, executive director of the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom and the RH Reality Check reader who first questioned my link to the American Pregnancy Association. “I think it is a wake up call for the pro-choice community that we cannot rely on circular referrals without doing our own due diligence every single time we find a new hotline purporting to do unbiased abortion or pregnancy options counseling.” After being informed of APA’s biases, the National Abortion Federation’s Vicki Saporta wrote, “This site is a prime example of how well some crisis pregnancy centers masquerade as legitimate reproductive health care organizations. Imagine how difficult it must be for a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy to determine which sites and centers provide full options counseling and comprehensive reproductive health care services…We no longer link to this organization.”

A waltz through the Helpline’s web archives reveals that the organization was founded as a textbook CPC. At that time it was called America’s Crisis Pregnancy Helpline and didn’t claim any sort of medical accuracy or affiliation. To its credit, the organization’s information page did once admit that it doesn’t provide referrals to abortion services; the organization no longer makes that statement anywhere on the current site.

Misleading Readers Since 1999

This 1999 page demonstrates a clear bias. Note that the questions about finances, about “long-term physical and emotional effects,” knowledge of procedures, pressuring, changing one’s mind or “looking down on” women are asked about abortion but not about parenting or adoption. Parenting is a lifelong endeavor, so why does the options page pose no questions at all about readiness, desire or ability to parent? Same goes with adoption: no questions are posed; only a list of possible benefits is presented.

Abortion gets a list of “possible emotional side effects,” but none is listed for parenting or adoption, despite the fact that abortion “side effects” also commonly occur to women who parent or give children up for adoption. If you’re considering an abortion, the Helpline prods you to ask yourself, “What would an adoption plan look like?” but there is no such question about parenting, nor do the lists for adoption or parenting ask what an abortion plan would look like.

Apparently, only “when it comes to abortion” — not parenting or adoption — “there are many issues to consider when making a decision.”

The Helpline’s current online pregnancy test — which reports that you may be pregnant no matter how you respond — offers you the opportunity to see a “baby” in the womb “at every stage,” though that link leads to a page with no gestation dates listed for the few select photos it provides. It suggests access to free pregnancy testing through the Helpline but does not instruct readers to purchase a home test or to see a healthcare provider for a test.

Read the rest of the article here.

H/T to Heather Corinna, who wrote this expose and who asks that we spread the word.

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