Choosing Life: Crisis Pregnancy Centers and their enemies - Statistical Data Included

Marilyn Vega, 23, was almost a New York abortion statistic. In 1978, when her immigrant mother became pregnant with her, doctors advised abortion. The mother, a factory worker with a third-grade education, was in her late thirties-an age at which child-bearing carries a risk of birth defects. Besides, she and her husband, also a laborer, were struggling to raise the five children they already had in a Brooklyn tenement.

The Vegas are evangelical Christians, however; they did not believe in abortion. Mrs. Vega had her baby. "Maybe I didn't have a house in the Hamptons growing up, but my life is no less special because of that," Marilyn says today. "Every child has potential. It's totally wrong to say that because of a person's circumstances, it's all right to kill a child. This is America. There's help for women like my mom."

Marilyn Vega knows better than most. She's a part-time counselor at Pregnancy Resource Center, a newly opened crisis pregnancy center (CPC) in midtown Manhattan. Like other not-for-profit CPCs nationwide, this one helps pregnant women who wish to keep their babies find prenatal care and other resources. And its counselors-some of whom are volunteers-attempt to convince women undecided about abortion to choose to carry the baby to term.

In the Empire State, this is a daunting task: New York has an abortion rate higher than that of any state but California. In 1999, there was roughly one abortion for every two live births in the state, with the ratio in New York City being closer to even. For every ten children born in New York City, eight die at the hands of abortionists.

It's a gruesome statistic, and the numbers only get worse when the focus turns to the black population. Statewide, in 1999, slightly more black children were aborted than were born.

What does this mean in terms of raw numbers? In 1999, 132,681 unborn children died in New York abortion clinics-10 percent of the total number of abortions in the nation, and enough to populate a mid-sized American city, such as Flint, Mich. Of these abortions, 96,000 occurred in New York City, with 78,000 of them abortions of either black or Hispanic children.

You would think that even pro-choice advocates would be eager to reduce these appalling numbers. But that's emphatically not the case, as the state's relatively small number of CPCs can attest. Eliot Spitzer, the state attorney general and an ally of abortion-rights organizations, is conducting a civil investigation to determine whether they are practicing medicine without a license, and also whether they are intentionally misleading women into thinking they can obtain abortions at the centers. The attorney general's office subpoenaed the records of nine CPC operations, but withdrew them under protest and legal challenge by CPC lawyers, who are representing the money-strapped centers for free.

Spitzer spokesman Darren Dopp says the attorney general's "Reproductive Rights Unit," which instigated the investigation, merely wants to make sure these centers are not violating the law. "We don't regard these people as criminals. Our goal all along was to change their conduct, not shut these facilities down. Right now, we're in the mode of trying to do this cooperatively."

That's not how lawyers for the New York centers see it. Anne Downey, who represents the Crisis Pregnancy Center of Western New York, says, "There certainly seems to be a political motivation" behind the attorney general's investigation: "We have never been given any specifics about this alleged violation at our center. We don't know if there's even a factual basis for this significant intrusion into our activities." Downey also complains that the investigators "keep coming back and narrowing what we are allowed to say"; for example, the attorney general wants CPCs to put up signs on their doors explicitly saying the centers are not abortion clinics.

In terms of political power, the struggle between abortion providers and CPCs is a mismatch. "In the city, there are about ten abortion providers for every crisis pregnancy center," says Peggy Hartshorne of Heartbeat International, a national pro-life organization. "There really is a gigantic need in New York City for more pregnancy centers. This whole campaign by the attorney general is designed to stop that."

Most centers are heavily staffed by religious believers who work on a volunteer basis. Services to clients are free, and budgets are bare- bones. One Manhattan-based expert who advises these centers on administrative problems estimates that it takes between $150,000 and $250,000 a year just to keep a center's doors open in New York City. Though Congress has made noise about making money available to these organizations, at this point they still operate entirely on private contributions.

What do CPCs do that so offends abortion-rights proponents? "The charade is that they provide alternatives, when they don't provide alternatives, they frighten women with horror films about abortion, they lie about the psychological impact of abortion; they have even been known to lie about whether a woman is pregnant," Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt told the Washington Post. Even worse, from the abortion-rights point of view, CPCs are getting savvier about employing ultrasound technology to "trick" pregnant women into having their babies instead of aborting them. An increasing number of CPCs offer sonograms for pregnant women who visit them-and they report that women, once they see their babies moving in their wombs, overwhelmingly choose to carry the pregnancy to term. Fumed one Long Island abortion provider in the New York Times: "The bottom line is no woman is going to want an abortion after she sees a sonogram."