Showing posts with label fake pregnancy centres/centers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fake pregnancy centres/centers. Show all posts

Sunday, 17 October 2010

Making progress against fake pregnancy clinics




If you look hard, there are signs of sanity in the Excited States over abortion.

First up, Florida.

Since 2004, fake pregnancy clinics, aka 'crisis pregnancy centres', have been receiving state funding -- to the tune of $8 million so far.

The Florida Independent has taken an interest.

Last month, it reported on the lies these outfits tell.
Crisis Pregnancy Centers, funded by the state of Florida, are distributing brochures that suggest abortion causes mental illness, including depression, addiction and suicide. In the best case, the information handed out is biased; in the worst case, sources say, it is wrong.

Oh, and look whose work they're citing -- our pal David Reardon of the we-will-change-our-name-to-anything-a-really-big-donor-wants, Elliot Institute.
This brochure cites several authors — including, again, Reardon, an important source of information distributed by pregnancy centers.

“This situation reminds me of the religious-based abstinence-only sex education in public schools,” says Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “As a general rule, government should not be in the business of furthering religion.”

“Nobody disputes their right to exist, but if state money is involved we think they should be up front about their goals,” Boston adds.

Florida Pregnancy Care Network Executive Director Susan Grimsley would not answer questions about the brochures, directing all queries regarding the state crisis pregnancy program to the Department of Health.

Rob Hayes, the DOH of communications office, has indicated answers will be forthcoming, but after more than a week, The Florida Independent has not received any further response.

The Florida Independent stayed on the story. The Florida fake clinics are run by two groups, the nonprofit Florida Pregnancy Care Network and the for-profit Uzzell Group.

What the heck is the Uzzell Group? the Independent wondered. And looked into it.
The Florida Pregnancy Care Network manages 55 of these state-funded pregnancy clinics, but according to Department of Health information, another 17 are handled by The Uzzell Group, a Tallahassee-based marketing and advertising firm. Why is a marketing company managing pregnancy clinics? The firm wouldn’t answer our questions.

The Florida Independent spoke with Erica Uzzell, identified as the person in charge of The Uzzell Group’s clinics, how the company manages those pregnancy centers. She said, “Any questions about the program will be answered by the Department of Health communication office.” We were also told to visit the Uzzell website to learn more about the company. The site is currently being remodeled: There is no information there aside from a phone and fax number and an email address.

The story goes on to document all kinds of interesting ties between the Uzzells and the state of Florida. The couple seems to be, shall we say, very well connected politically. (The Uzzell website is still under construction.)

Staying with the story, last week the paper reported that the Department of Health has no fucking clue what is being done with taxpayer money.
Department of Health records obtained by The Florida Independent show that oversight of Florida’s state-funded crisis pregnancy clinic chain mainly rests in the hands of the two organizations contracted by the state to run those clinics — the nonprofit Florida Pregnancy Care Network and the for-profit Uzzell Group.

That means the Department of Health has little direct insight into how public money is being spent at 79 crisis pregnancy centers around the state, and if those dollars are being used to disseminate disputed science on abortion or to promote religious content.

Fishy, yes? But then, running fake clinics is an excellent racket, especially when the racketeers are feeding at the public trough.

Stay on it, Independent. I'll be following the story.

Next up, New York City.

Following the excellent lead taken by Baltimore and Austin, Texas, New York is going to force the fake clinics to tell the truth.
The City Council plans to unveil legislation Tuesday that would establish strict disclosure requirements for crisis-pregnancy centers, some of which, abortion-rights advocates charge, deceive women into believing they're full-serve reproductive health facilities by masking their antiabortion agenda.

The legislation, backed by Speaker Christine Quinn, would require the centers to disclose to clients that they do not provide abortion services or contraceptive devices, or make referrals to organizations that do. Centers that don't have licensed medical providers onsite would also have to disclose that information.

Great. Also on Tuesday NARAL Pro-Choice New York will release a year-in-the-making report on what they call the 'lies, manipulations and privacy violations' of these centres.

We've heard it all before, of course, but as progressive places investigate the lying liars and then act to restrict the damage they do, more people will hear about this form of fetus fetishizing racketeering.

Wednesday, 3 February 2010

Fake Clinics and Licence Plates

(Still in catching-up mode.)

Good news from the Excited States on the anti-fake-pregnancy-clinic campaign.

Following Baltimore's lead in forcing fake clinics (aka 'crisis pregnancy centers') to tell the truth, legislators in Virginia and Washington are working on truth bills.

In Virginia, the local chapter of the National Abortion Rights League carried out an undercover study of the state's fake clinics and found:
The National Abortion Rights League found more 35 of the 52 pregnancy counseling centers in the state were giving out inaccurate information on infertility, miscarriage, abortion, mental health, cancer, contraception and sexually transmitted diseases. The unlicensed facilities, often run by abortion rights opponents, receive some funding through the state's "Choose Life" license plates.

NARAL says 35 of the clinics do not have medically trained or supervised personnel on staff.

The misinformation passed along to women seeking information included being told that abortions cause cancer and that when a doctor performed an abortion he could accidentally take out a woman's intestines.

We'll be following developments.

In related news, it seems there might be some jiggery-pokery going on with the funding from those 'Choose Life' licence plates.

More than 20 USian states offer these automotive statements of misogyny, with some dough going to the fake clinics. As far as I could find out, no province in Canada offers such things -- not even New Brunswick. Ontario calls them graphic license plates and there are more than 60 available. (The things one finds out when blogging. . . )

Back to the jiggery-pokery.
When a Virginia driver purchases a specialty "Choose Life" anti-abortion license plate, $15 of the $25 processing fee goes to Heartbeat International, a Christian group that distributes the money to pregnancy resource centers located across the state.

Critics say the license plate program doesn't do enough to determine whether a clinic is qualified for the money. One pregnancy center listed by several anti-abortion groups as a certified clinic -- the Mattingly Test Center in Loudoun County -- is a two-story brick house owned by Linda Mattingly, a former director at Care Net, a Leesburg-based pregnancy network. There are no signs in front indicating it is a clinic, the Internal Revenue Service has no record of it as a 503(c) nonprofit, and it is not registered as a corporation with the Virginia secretary of state.

A woman who answered the door of the Ashburn house last week said pregnancy services had been, but no longer were, provided there. She did not give her name before closing the door. The Washington Post tried to reach Mattingly by phone, but messages were not returned.

. . .

As of Tuesday, 1,678 of the license plates had been purchased, and $10,170 has been earmarked for Heartbeat, said Melanie Stokes, a DMV spokeswoman, and Heartbeat officials.

Pro-choice forces in Virginia want in on the action. There's a move to create pro-choice plates. If any Virginians are reading this, here's where to order one. They must pre-sell 350 of them before the state will issue them.

The so-called Culture War is fought on many (weird) battlegrounds.

Friday, 1 January 2010

Arson and Abortion

I'll see your fake pregnancy clinic arson (completely unwarrantedly attributed to some unknown pro-choicer), and raise you two vandal attacks on California synagogues.
Vandals have hit two Sacramento synagogues -- including one that had previously been destroyed by arsonists and rebuilt.

But what does that have to do with abortion, you ask?
The [Kenesset Israel Torah] Center reopened in 2006 after being destroyed by arson in 1999. Two brothers, Benjamin and James Williams were convicted in that attack as well as fires at two other synagogues and an abortion clinic.

Oooh. Quelle surprise. Anti-choice and anti-semitic. Probably with a couple of white sheets in their trunk. All purpose haters, those people.

And paranoid too.

Sunday, 4 October 2009

MSM: All the facts that fit our agenda

Here we go again with the fake pregnancy centres.

From The Globe and Mail (links added):
The William H. Donner Awards for Excellence in the Delivery of Social Services will be presented in Toronto on Oct. 16. The awards are hard to get: More than 500 social services agencies entered this year's competition, which will issue nine prizes worth a total of $60,000.

The Fraser Institute, the Vancouver-based think tank that administers the awards on behalf of the Donner Foundation, subjects contenders to rigorous assessment, grading them on 10 attributes (among them: the volunteers they use and the results they get).

The finalists in the category 'Counselling/Crisis Services' are:
Calgary Pregnancy Care Centre offers support and assistance to anyone "facing an unplanned pregnancy or experiencing post-abortion stress."

London Crisis Pregnancy Centre* in Ontario provides "practical and spiritual help" to women with an unplanned pregnancy, including abortion alternatives.

Sarnia-Lambton Rebound, in Ontario, operates court-approved programs for young people in trouble with the law.

OK, with the frikken Fraser Institute involved, this information about The Donner Canadian Foundation shouldn't come as a surprise:
The Donner Canadian Foundation was established in 1950 and for 43 years was a typical, uncontroversial Canadian charitable fund. In 1993, the conservative American Donner heirs who control the foundation changed its primary focus to that of supporting conservative research. From 1993 to 1999, under the leadership of executive directors Devon Gaffney Cross and then Patrick Luciani, the foundation provided the seed money to start several conservative Canadian think-tanks and publications, and became the "lifeblood of conservative research" in Canada. In 1999, the American Donner heirs who control the foundation began donating more of its money to land and wildlife conservation, international development, medical research and the arts, reducing funding of conservative research (though it is still one of the most generous benefactors to the right in Canada).

It would be nice, wouldn't it, if the dam MSM would mention the little fact that this is not a 'typical, uncontroversial Canadian charitable fund'?

(I left a comment at the Globe link. First time for me and I hadda register. I was so agitated, I didn't proofread properly. From now on, look for comments by 'fer nill'. *headslap*)

BTW, Calgary Pregnancy Care won a Donner award last year.

*That link for the London outfit is just a page-holder without a 'mission' statement. But it is listed here.

Saturday, 29 August 2009

Fake Pregnancy Centres Create Fake Orphans

We admit it. Here at DAMMIT JANET! and back at Birth Pangs, we've been a tad obsessed with Crisis Pregnancy Centers/Centres.

We -- OK, who am I trying to kid? it's mostly moi -- blog regularly about the lying and deception and manipulation these Christofascists perpetrate on vulnerable women. (And of course, just to blow our own horn a little, we did have a helluva good time helping persuade the Ottawa Senators to pull financial support from one of the lying-liar outfits.)

But it seems there is a whole other ugly side to these fakers, even though I did blog once about a crisis pregnancy centre in Ireland that was convicted of running an illegal adoption agency.

So, I should not have been surprised to read today that 'Christian Organizations Shame and Coerce Women Into Giving Up Their Children'. It's a longish article by Kathryn Joyce, author of 'Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement'.

Using good old shame and guilt, they pressure single pregnant women into giving up their children to 'good' Christian families. And with their usual disregard for truthiness, they lie to women about the terms of 'open' adoption. Women think they'll be able to see their children only to find out, oopsie, no, you can't honey.

Pregnant women are housed with 'shepherding' families, isolated from friends and family who may offer other advice.

After delivery, women are rushed into surrenders. Taken to states with shorter 'change one's mind' periods. Paperwork is delayed until the 'change one's mind' period is just about up.

And such shenanigans go back a ways:
In 1984 Leslee Unruh, founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, established a CPC in South Dakota called the Alpha Center. The first center had opened in 1967, but in 1984 Unruh's CPC was still a relatively new idea. In 1987 the state attorney's office investigated complaints that Unruh had offered young women money to carry their pregnancies to term and then relinquish their babies for adoption.

"There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children," then-state attorney Tim Wilka told the Argus Leader, that the governor asked him to take the case. The Alpha Center pleaded no contest to five counts of unlicensed adoption and foster care practices; nineteen other charges were dropped, including four felonies. But where Unruh left off, many CPCs and antiabortion groups have taken up in her place.

(Read more about Leslee Unruh in an article by Amanda Robb, niece of murdered abortion provider Dr Bernard Slepian.)

In a sadly ironic twist, the crap works best on religious, anti-choice women.
Religious women may be particularly susceptible to CPC coercion, argues Mari Gallion, a 39-year-old Alaska mother who founded the support group SinglePregnancy.com after a CPC unsuccessfully pressured her to relinquish her child ten years ago. Gallion, who has worked with nearly 3,000 women with unplanned pregnancies, calls CPCs "adoption rings" with a multistep agenda: evangelizing; discovering and exploiting women's insecurities about age, finances or parenting; then hard-selling adoption, portraying parenting as a selfish, immature choice. "The women who are easier to coerce in these situations are those who subscribe to conservative Christian views," says Gallion. "They'll come in and be told that, You've done wrong, but God will forgive you if you do the right thing."

Mirah Riben, vice president of communications for the birth mother group Origins-USA [which calls itself 'The voice of mothers who lost children to adoption'], as well as author of The Stork Market: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry, says that many mothers struggle for decades with the fallout of "a brainwashing process" that persuades them to choose adoption and often deny for years--or until their adoptions become closed--that they were pressured into it. "I see a lot of justification among the young mothers. If their adoption is remaining open, they need to be compliant, good birth mothers and toe the line. They can't afford to be angry or bitter, because if they are, the door will close and they won't see the kid."

. . . .

There were nineteen lawsuits against CPCs between 1983 and 1996, but coercive practices persist. Joe Soll, a psychotherapist and adoption reform activist, says that CPCs "funnel people to adoption agencies who put them in maternity homes," where ambivalent mothers are subjected to moralistic and financial pressure: warned that if they don't give up their babies, they'll have to pay for their spot at the home, and given conflicted legal counsel from agency-retained lawyers. Watchdog group Crisis Pregnancy Center Watch described an Indiana woman misled into delaying an abortion past her state's legal window and subsequently pressured into adoption.


As they say, go read the whole thing, though if you want to check out the other links, you'll have to do it from here since I put them in.

BONUS: The first commenter, Amy Adoptee, has a blog. Go read, especially this one.

Sunday, 12 July 2009

Fake Pregnancy Centres Closing

The pro-liars celebrate when an abortion clinic closes for whatever reason because, by their lights, the closure is due to their prayer assaults, candlelight vigils, acts of gord, yadayada. (Not never nohow due to violence, arson, vandalism, sheer weariness with the daily stress. Nope.)

Well, perhaps we normal people should also celebrate the closure of fake pregnancy centres, aka 'crisis pregnancy centres', like these in Montana.
The Mexico Open Arms facility was officially closed on March 31, pending possible sale, and sites in Fulton, Jefferson City and Moberly were closed on July 2. The Columbia site is the only agency that remains open.

An aside: The closures really really annoyed a Ms Buffington who wanted her own ministry to take them over. So annoyed was she that she launched the 'A-bomb' at the culprits:
"What they are doing feels like a plundering; even worse, an abortion," Buffington told The Ledger Tuesday. "Do I believe that this was an honorable thing for Life Network to do. No, I do not believe that it was an honorable thing to do to our community, and to God most of all. They had someone who was willing to try and carry it on, and that was already making a huge difference."

Zow. That's gotta hurt.

Why did the Montana outfits have to fold tents?

Lack of money. *snerk*

And there's going to be a lot more of this, because the grown-ups are in charge of a whack of that dough -- the millions flushed down the toilet in the decade-long scam known as 'abstinence-only' programs.

But don't expect the lying scam-artists to go away quietly. No sirree. They want that dough.

What they are doing is rebranding.
Sex educators -- and parents -- have been breathing a sigh of relief. Obama's administration has axed a hefty sum of the abstinence-only sex education funding from the 2010 budget. But if you think it's time to kick back and relax on sex ed, think again. Abstinence-only advocates have been long organizing a comeback, rebranding themselves as science-based and holistic. So serious is this undertaking that organizations like the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA) have publicly made this new abstinence message a strategic objective.

It's laughable until you realize that attempting to be more mainstream -- giving the illusion that you're like the successful, evidence-based comprehensive sex education programs -- may just work. Take NAEA's attempts to rework their image and messaging by calling their renamed curricula "abstinence centered" -- one that supposedly utilizes 'holistic approaches' to 'healthy lifestyle choices.' Like comprehensive sex education, they insist that they will be equipping youth with all of the information they need to make healthy decisions.

Sounds great, until you remember that this group of powerful virginity zealots, religious leaders, and legislators are driven by regressive social values. These are the antifeminist, anti-gay people who actively and vehemently seek to reinforce gender stereotypes, sexual "purity," and negative sex messaging. In light of the government finally accepting the fact that the $1.5 billion we've poured into abstinence-only-until-marriage programs has been a waste, these purity pushers are having to do an about face. They must promise to preach more than sexual morality with their "just say no" messaging if they expect to survive. Unfortunately, given their track record, we can't expect their take on "holistic" and "healthy" to be anything like that of comprehensive sex education.

But your average citizen will have trouble deciphering what makes the comprehensive versus abstinence-centered efforts so different.

At the HuffPo link, you'll find some suggestions for fighting back against the lying scam-artists, including a campaign by Advocates for Youth.

In the meantime, let's celebrate!