False Advertising Dangerous

To the Editors:

An ad in the Sept. 7 issue of the Review called out to female readers, “Pregnant? Worried? Birthright can help! We are an alternative to abortion!” The “confidential and caring” alternative to abortion that Birthright provides is in fact a dangerous threat to women’s reproductive health. Although it markets itself as a legitimate women’s health clinic, Birthright is one of many Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) across the country and around the world that, as the “medical” arm of the anti-choice movement, are working to deny women access to the full range of reproductive health services.
According to the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, CPCs were known in the 1980s and early ’90s for fraudulent business practices such as advertising in the Yellow Pages under Abortion and Birth Control (legislation has been passed prohibiting such false advertising) and for “counseling” techniques such as showing gruesome anti-choice videos like the “Silent Scream” to women considering abortion. In recent years, CPCs have worked to streamline their image and now put forth one of providing women with benign and supportive reproductive health care. Despite the makeover, the goal of CPCs remains the same: to limit women’s access to abortion and contraception and in some cases, to the medically accurate information that women need in order to make informed decisions about unplanned pregnancies and their reproductive health care.
Among the strategies used today by CPCs to advance their anti-choice agenda is “counseling” that omits any discussion of abortion or that presents abortion as an unhealthy and dangerous option. Scare tactics may be used against young women; counselors may deliberately give them terrifying and wholly inaccurate information about abortion such as the idea that the procedure involves cutting up the fetus with a razor. Many CPCs also promote the myth of the post-abortion syndrome, a medically unfounded claim that following abortion, women experience emotions similar to those that occur in post-traumatic stress disorder. And at many CPCs, some of which are not even medically licensed, the “free” pregnancy test that they advertise is provided only after such counseling and in many cases, involves handing a woman an over-the-counter-type test and telling her how to perform it herself.
CPCs pose a particularly great threat to rural women’s health care. While just over 86 percent of U.S. counties do not have an abortion provider (Family Planning Perspectives, Nov/Dec 1998), that figure rises in predominantly rural states. For example, in Ohio, 91 percent of counties do not have an abortion provider. This grim statistic is even more frightening in light of the rapid pace at which CPCs are spreading across the state. According to a study conducted in Dec. 2000 by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, there are 37 legitimate women’s health clinics in Ohio, compared to 181 CPCs. And as many states already allocate funds for CPCs, they may soon also receive federal funding under the Women’s and Children’s Resources Act. The disparity between legitimate women’s health clinics and CPCs is growing.
About half of pregnancies in the United States are unintended (FPP, Jan/Feb 1998) and it is therefore imperative that women be fully informed of their reproductive health services options. While the Review does not censor advertisements based on their political content — and I do not argue that it should — it is crucial that women in Oberlin be made aware of the danger that local CPCs may pose to their reproductive health.

–Marianna Leavy-Sperounis
College junior