By Selene Cerankosky - Special to the Family Beacon
Minnesota has defunded pregnancy resource centers (PRCs), leaving droves of vulnerable women and families out to dry. With proponents celebrating the blow this strikes to PRCs, it is important to distinguish the reality of what these centers offer from the fantasy that they are “fake clinics.” This is best done by people who have actually set foot in a center.
While engaged in pro-life political and legislative work, I believed this was the most crucial way to advocate for women and unborn children. I believed the legal restriction of abortion led to the most sweeping pro-life results. However, through working in and with pregnancy resource centers, I realized that while legal restrictions on abortion are necessary and important, the unique work pregnancy resource centers do is in many ways the compassionate bedrock of the pro-life movement.
PRCs are crucial because they provide truthful and thorough counsel during life-changing events. When a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy enters a PRC, she is often being pressured to abort her baby by the male partner or parent accompanying her, so a staff counselor takes her into a room individually to discuss her options. Despite pro-abortion activists’ claims about PRCs manipulating women into a pregnancy decision, the very first step we take clients through is a literal insulation from subjective influence. In the counseling room, the staff member takes time to thoroughly learn about the client’s circumstances. This is a consequential difference from the way abortion clinics rush their clients through an abortion counseling appointment with one destructive aim in mind.
With PRCs’ truthfulness comes professionalism. Whenever abortion makes the news, pro-abortion individuals will take to Google reviews to attempt to smear the legitimacy of PRCs without ever visiting one. I doubt that Governor Walz, who killed the Positive Alternatives to Abortion Act (PAAA) which funded PRCs across Minnesota, is any different. Despite what opponents claim about our lack of medical legitimacy, PRCs are overseen by medical boards – and employ staff teams frequently made up of OBGYNs, nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, registered nurses, and more. Many pregnancy centers do not allow so much as the administration of a urine pregnancy test if it is not by a licensed medical professional. The staff “dressing up” in lab coats and scrubs are not doing so because they want to deceive – they’re doing so because these staff are medical professionals. As a non-medical employee at two PRCs in two different states, I never wore medical attire – none of our non-medical staff did.
The accusation that PRCs are attempting to trick women by designing their interiors to look like abortion clinics is, again, largely coming from individuals who have never been to one of these centers. PRCs often have internal policies requiring staff to explicitly state that the center does not perform nor refer for abortions during the very first phone call with a potential client – or have this disclaimer on their websites. Trust me when I say that every last PRC employee hates abortion – and we have no desire to look anything like Planned Parenthood.
PRCs also provide ultrasounds, where technicians thoroughly point out the body parts of a client’s baby, his gestational age, his heart rate, and the conditions of the amniotic and yolk sacs. Many abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood, merely perform an ultrasound so they can determine how big the baby is – to then determine how much money to charge his mother to abort him. Women even report that abortion clinic staff does not allow them to see their babies on ultrasounds, lest they reconsider their abortion decision. If there are any “deceptive” practices to be concerned with, they’re in abortion clinics, whose entire business model rests on never giving women information that would raise hard questions about abortion.
This story puts our supposedly devious strategy into perspective. I worked in one PRC that had a 99% Excellence rating, calculated through anonymous forms by clients following their appointments. I was assigned a young client who was planning to abort her baby, who was at the end of the second trimester, but then changed her mind. I took her through parenting classes for several weeks, and during one appointment, she asked me if our center had any job openings. This sweet and encouraging question was ultimately more telling than we thought, as we soon found an earlier social media post essentially stating that if she found out anyone she knew was against abortion, she would cut them out of her life immediately. Here was an aggressively pro-abortion client so well-served by an entity accused of being manipulative in opposition of abortion that she was asking to work for us.
Every service a PRC provides is free. It is why the thirty-three centers which were supported by Minnesota taxpayers through the PAAA needed this funding. Even DFL Representative Liz Olson and Executive Director of Gender Justice, Megan Peterson, acknowledged that the ninety PRCs in Minnesota are often women’s only accessible entity for prenatal necessities. The central justification for Governor Walz’s defunding of PRCs was the lie that they fail to provide “accurate reproductive information and health care.” However, PRCs must present clients with information about abortion methods and its effects on body and health to maintain accuracy, especially because abortion clinics aren’t doing so. This level of transparency is a given for every other medical procedure in America, but when the procedure is abortion, providing ample information is somehow manipulative and deceptive. This is a standard Minnesota ought to be ashamed of.
Due to the defunding of Minnesota’s PRCs, it is possible that roughly a third of the centers reaching desperate women in this state will disappear. This means that the women and children whom Minnesota claims to champion will be robbed of generous, truthful, and crucial care they quite literally cannot get anywhere else.
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Selene is a rising second year law student at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law. This summer she is clerking as a Blackstone Legal Fellow, assisting public interest lawyers at Upper Midwest Law Center and True North Legal. As an experienced and passionate pro-life advocate, she has a heart for pregnancy resource centers and the women they serve.
