(LifeSiteNews) — The pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) is striking back at an abortion lobby campaign to delegitimize pro-life pregnancy centers in New Jersey with a new report refuting claims about the quality of care that women can expect when seeking alternatives to abortion.
As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, New Jersey Democrat Attorney General Matt Platkin issued a consumer alert in 2022 branding pro-life crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) as “seek(ing) to prevent people from accessing comprehensive reproductive health care”; it was later revealed that his office collaborated with America’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood, on the final draft of the alert.
As part of its campaign against pro-life competition, Planned Parenthood Action Fund of New Jersey (PPAFNJ) released a report the following year purporting to detail how CPCs “mislead individuals seeking reproductive health care,” deter individuals from accessing abortion services,” and “advertise testing for sexually transmitted infections (STIs)” despite not being “licensed, regulated medical facilities.”
On December 10, CLI published a direct response to the report that it panned as “riddled with speculative claims, unfounded assertions, incomplete research, and flawed reasoning.”
First, it cites as “evidence” the aforementioned consumer alert from Platkin’s office, despite that alert “contain(ing) no citations or references to substantiate its accusations”; in fact, a number of CPCs centers sued the state for the documents behind its allegations, and the state was eventually forced to admit it had none.
The report also “contains numerous misleading accusations,” CLI continues. “One such example is the assertion that ‘(pregnancy centers) have a history of providing incorrect ultrasound dating, leading a client to believe they are earlier or later in their pregnancies than they actually are,’” but “supports this assertion with only one citation, referencing a single article from The New York Times. However, this New York Times article focuses on a specific pregnancy center organization located in Texas, which has no presence whatsoever in New Jersey.”
Planned Parenthood also “fails to cite any specific state or federal law or regulation that pregnancy centers have allegedly violated,” neglects to “make the effort to verify whether pregnancy centers have obtained the necessary waiver (from regulations that would apply to clinical laboratories) and are reporting in accordance with New Jersey laws,” and “fails to acknowledge that, while pregnancy centers are in full compliance with the law related to the limited medical services they provide, most have voluntarily chosen to operate under higher standards of medical care.”
The pro-abortion report only cites one peer-reviewed study about CPC practices, and it was a study that, on top of “lack(ing) experimental rigor, and (being) contradicted by other research” in CLI’s view, was more than a decade old and concerned a small handful of CPCs in North Carolina, not New Jersey.
Crisis pregnancy centers have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. For that reason, they have long been a target of left-wing rage, with attacks often focusing on claims that they “deceive” women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
Despite labeling itself “pro-choice,” the abortion movement is notoriously hostile to any and all types of alternatives to abortion, from publicity campaigns maligning crisis pregnancy centers to attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors to violence and threats against pregnancy centers that are less likely to be prosecuted than purported cases of anti-abortion violence.