Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are hubs of false advertising, anti-abortion organizations that try to trick people into thinking they’re clinics offering abortion or abortion referrals—when in reality, they offer drugstore pregnancy tests and pressure to continue the pregnancy. They’re about to get much, much more sophisticated in that mission.
One Corpus Christi CPC is planning a massive expansion to a 20,000-square-foot facility with a coffee shop, thrift store, and “a ‘man cave’ with a pool table, where men will be approached by a certified marriage counselor as they wait for the women they impregnated,” The Washington Post reports. (Are you vomiting yet?)
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Part of the mission seems to be getting gauzy write-ups in which Jana Pinson, the executive director of the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend, says, “Post-Roe needs to have prenatal. We’re taking care of the whole woman.” Unspoken at the end of “the whole woman” is “who we’re trying to pressure and manipulate into carrying a pregnancy and having a child she may not want, despite the known long-term poor outcomes for those who want and are unable to obtain abortions.”
It’s only very late in the more than 3,000-word piece that we get to see who Pinson really, really is, when she says, “I’ve seen a lot of 13-year-olds do phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal. It doesn’t have to be a negative thing.” Child rape leading to pregnancy doesn’t have to be negative, she says. That seems like information that could have come early on in the piece.
To be fair, the Post does describe the extent of the lies Pinson, a former marketing executive, has been honing to draw in what she calls “AMs,” short for “abortion-minded” people concerned they’re pregnant. Thanks to Pinson’s spending on Google ads, “whenever someone in Corpus Christi searches for phrases like ‘need an abortion’ or ‘abortion cost Texas,’ the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend is regularly the first item on the list.”
Crisis pregnancy centers sometimes deny that they intentionally try to mislead people into believing that they provide abortion services. Pinson has gone hard in the opposite direction: “Patients who visit the center’s homepage today can click on ‘I Want An Abortion,’ which directs to a page that says: ‘CONFIDENTIAL ABORTION CONSULTATION—NO COST TO YOU.’ There are detailed descriptions of both surgical and medication abortions, estimated costs, and several buttons that allow you to schedule an appointment.”
The new anti-abortion palace Pinson is planning to use to lie to and manipulate people will be funded largely by the state of Texas, which in 2021 passed $100 million in funding for crisis pregnancy centers.
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