Pregnancy "options" counselors: Give birth!

Students visit crisis pregnancy centers and expose them as the sham that they are

Published June 18, 2009 10:01PM (EDT)

Plucky pro-life activists like Lila Rose, the 20-year-old University of California Los Angeles junior behind repeated hit-pieces on Planned Parenthood, aren't the only ones who can stage undercover campaigns. Plucky pro-choice UCLA students can, too! So, there.

The Feminist Majority Foundation recently kicked off a campaign to expose dishonest crisis pregnancy centers, and UCLA's Feminists for Equality has joined the cause, as student Myra Duran reports on RH Reality Check. It's quite simple: Students visit these sham clinics seeking so-called "pregnancy options counseling" and then share their experience. The result is a slew of first-hand accounts that have all the elements of a good thriller: Lies, manipulation and dangerous deception. That won't come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about these politically-motivated "medical" centers, which have been heaped with millions of federal dollars over the years.

When Duran visited a local crisis pregnancy center, she was counseled by the center's receptionist -- yes, the receptionist -- and the director of the clinic. (The center announces in teeny-tiny fine print on required paperwork that its staff is mostly made up of volunteers, not actual medical professionals.) She writes of the "options" counseling that preceded the pregnancy test: "It felt like a two-on-one tag team and I was their prey." Duran wasn't presented with options, so much as she was told there was a single correct choice: Not having an abortion. Worse yet, after her pregnancy test resulted in a negative, Duran asked for birth control to avoid future scares and she was told: "We don't get funding for that." When she asked for condoms, the response was the same. "There was only one prevention method she mentioned: avoid having sex altogether," she says.

Ah, but friends, there are even more disturbing stories out there -- of lies that threaten women's health and refusals to even explain how a condom is used. Just watch the video below.

Our Reality: A Look at Crisis Pregnancy Centers from RH Reality Check on Vimeo.


By Tracy Clark-Flory

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