New story at Ms. magazine:
The deceptive tactics of many of the country’s CPCs— which are estimated to total between 2,300 and 4,000 centers nationwide—have been well-documented: They often mislead women about whether they perform abortions, mimicking the style or names of abortion clinics and operating in close proximity to them. Some provide misinformation about women’s pregnancy status or due date, or suggest unproven links between abortion and cancer, infertility or suicide. A 2006 congressional report requested by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) found that 87 percent of CPCs that receive federal funding provide false information—prompting both local and proposed federal legislation to mandate truth-in-advertising standards for CPCs.
Despite these fraudulent practices, CPCs have received millions in funding from both federal and state coffers and enjoy support from certain politicians and churches. CPCs present a public persona that is woman-friendly, compassionate and “empowering”—a love-bombing alternative to public images of angry protestors berating women entering abortion clinics.
However, this image is belied by the reality at a number of the nation’s most heavily-targeted abortion clinics, where neighboring CPCs have close ties with extremists and sidewalk counselors, who function as an outreach arm that works, with or without acknowledgement, to draw CPC clients in. In Roeder’s testimony linking the work of anti-abortion sidewalk counselors—the unofficial foot soldiers of the CPC movement—with his own violent vigilantism, he bared the troubling intersection of some of these seemingly innocuous centers with a number of the anti-abortion movement’s most notorious members.
