For some time now, I’ve been asking if it’s possible for The New Yorker to deliver a fair assessment of any conservative Christian group or person, which is why I was interested in a recent piece on crisis pregnancy clinics.
CPCs, as they are also called, aren’t always Christian although they tend to be.
They are 100 percent founded and run by the devout, who consider it a ministry to run them. These places make no money, really, and are sued, attacked, lied about or mischaracterized (as what happened in this outrageously biased NPR story) all the time.
The New Yorker’s religion reporter, Eliza Griswold, was sent on several visits to center in Terre Haute, Indiana. CPCs get their motives questioned in ways that Planned Parenthood clinics never are, so I was interested in how Griswold would approach the topic.
On the door of a white R.V. that serves as the Wabash Valley Crisis Pregnancy Center’s mobile unit are the stencilled words “No Cash, No Narcotics.” The center, in Terre Haute, Indiana, is one of more than twenty-five hundred such C.P.C.s in the U.S.—Christian organizations that provide services including free pregnancy testing, low-cost S.T.D. testing, parenting classes, and ultrasounds. Sharon Carey, the executive director of the Wabash Valley center, acquired the van in January, 2018, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, after finding a company that retrofits secondhand vehicles with medical equipment. That May, Carey began to dispatch the van to rural towns whose residents often cannot afford the gas needed to drive to the C.P.C. or to a hospital.
The subhed for this story: “As rural health care flounders, crisis pregnancy centers are gaining ground,” so it’s clear where this article is headed.
The C.P.C. movement took off in the late sixties, as states considered repealing laws criminalizing abortion. Robert Pearson, a Catholic carpenter, founded one of the first centers, in Honolulu, and then set up a foundation for C.P.C. owners, providing them with training sessions, pamphlets, and slide shows, many of which featured gory images of fetal remains. C.P.C.s employed various deceptive techniques to attract women, often advertising themselves as abortion providers.
Where is the proof of these allegations?
It would only be fair to add that CPCs have every right to advertise themselves as “abortion alternatives” or “family planning centers” just as Planned Parenthood advertises itself as providing for women’s health needs. One could argue that the latter doesn’t provide for the needs of unborn women.
Centers were sometimes established next to abortion clinics and were designed to resemble them. Until the seventies, abortion had mostly been a Catholic issue, but following Roe v. Wade, in 1973, evangelical Christians began to join the pro-life movement. In 1978, the Southern Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell partnered with the conservative activist Paul Weyrich in an effort to register and organize religious voters, and they seized on the issue of abortion as a mobilizing cause.
Let it be noted that Falwell was an independent Baptist, not part of the Southern Baptist Convention, back in those days. And Reformed theologian Francis Schaeffer did way more than Falwell or Weyrich, a Catholic deacon, to alert Christians on abortion.
The Supreme Court had passed Roe vs. Wade in 1973, throwing down the gauntlet in forcing all 50 states to allow abortions. And somehow, people weren’t supposed to react to that?
In the eighties, some pro-life activism became associated with violence, when groups such as Operation Rescue staged sit-ins at abortion clinics and incited attacks against abortion providers. Several doctors were assassinated. C.P.C.s, under increasing scrutiny, were hit with a wave of lawsuits. Following a congressional investigation in 1991 that condemned C.P.C.s for committing consumer fraud and for publishing misleading advertising, the national anti-abortion organizations Heartbeat International and Care Net standardized C.P.C.s’ training and materials, attempting to transform them into institutions that offered advice and support.
Where is the proof that Operation Rescue incited violence against abortion clinics? They certainly protested in front of them, as was their right. But when did they tell abortion opponents to kill? Can the reporter document this? Any on-the-record sources there?
Here’s a pattern that fair-minded reporters will recall from that era: The protesters who resorted to violence were often people who had been forced OUT of mainstream pro-life organizations after they had rejected requirements to practice peaceful civil disobedience.
These days, as few as four per cent of the women who visit C.P.C.s are pregnant and undecided about whether to have an abortion. Most come for social services, including the pregnancy verification required to sign up for maternal and infant Medicaid. In the past decade, C.P.C.s, which are at the forefront of the grassroots anti-abortion movement, have identified a new sense of mission and authority as rural health-care providers have struggled with a lack of funding.
The next few paragraphs go after the former governor of Indiana, Mike Pence, now vice president. He has “attempted to reshape the country’s reproductive-health-care policies according to his religious ideology,” it says.
True enough. But President Barack Obama attempted to reshape U.S. reproductive health care polices according to his liberal Protestant ideology. I don’t hear the New Yorker complaining about that.
Then the article quotes a NARAL Pro Choice America spokeswoman as saying CPCs are a deceptive, lying lot. By this time, I’m starting to give up on this piece. Does Griswold truly believe that any NARAL investigation of CPCs could be legit? Might there be some kind of bias there?
I trudged through more of the article. Another paragraph quotes a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman trashing CPCs. Is this a surprise or something new? A gynecologist is quoted as saying CPCs “violate the Hippocratic oath” because they don’t have the “wellbeing of the woman seeking care from them as their primary interest.”
That this kind of stunning accusation is allowed to remain in this piece with no response from a pro-lifer (who would argue that abortionists who terminate the unborn violate the Hippocratic oath in far greater intensity) is amazing. Does the New Yorker even try to follow basic journalistic practice these days?
Nope. Not on this subject.
Then — midway through — the scene switches back to Terre Haute and we readers get a lot of info as to how the clinic works. We read how sometimes the CPC workers pray with people, but other times they don’t; that religion may be offered at these facilities, but it’s not pushed down peoples’ throats. There were interesting anecdotes, like the woman who had an abortion and now collects pets only to give them away when she tires of them.
The piece did quote a sociologist who alleged that CPCs actually don’t dissuade many women from having abortions, but didn’t get a rejoinder from the CPCs themselves. I think some in the pro-life movement would disagree that CPCs are that useless, so I would have appreciated seeing some statistics on the efficacy — or not — of CPCs (especially those equipped with ultrasound equipment).
If the New Yorker had hoped to persuade readers that CPCs are the “new front line” in the anti-abortion movement, it surely failed. The impression was that typically, CPCs are clumsy at best at getting out their message. Yet, abortion providers are very much threatened by them.
This article would have worked so much better had it not been front-loaded in the first half with CPC opponents, buttressed with allegations meant to make CPCs look outdated and useless. If folks are so upset that CPCs are showing up in rural areas to talk folks out of abortions, then they should criticize Planned Parenthood for closing clinics in those same areas. CPCs can’t be criticized for filling a vacuum.
But when you run an article on the premise that CPCs can — and should be — criticized for basically everything, who needs fairness or a level playing field? Who needs debate? Who needs basic journalism?
It’s not going to happen with the New Yorker any time soon. Not on this subject, for sure.