Crisis Pregnancy Center Con lowering the bar for Women's Health Care.

 Hey, "there's so much good they do" for women, why not spend our taxpayer dollars on this...PBSWIS: 

According to Choose Life Wisconsin, there are more than 70 pregnancy resource centers like Life’s Connection around the state. And because of their prenatal support and the fact that these organizations don’t refer pregnant people for abortions and do actively discourage abortions, some Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin think they should receive state taxpayer funding.

State Senator Romaine Robert Quinn has introduced legislation toT fund these centers, (with) $1 million per year funneled to the centers through grants administered by Choose Life Wisconsin. The senator says the state should provide the money because "there’s so much good they do."

Here's a clip:

Another MAGA Republican Con-Crisis Pregnancy Centers: The stream of nonstop unregulated "do-it-yourself" opportunities by the MAGA grifting class is getting ridiculous. After reading about taxpayer voucher money nationally going to "education" centers that don't have teachers but do baby sit kids while their parents are at work, I came across this amazing grift about Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Since Republicans love this kind of stuff, they'll recklessly throw money at it. The Big But?: 

Most Crisis Pregnancy Centers are not licensed medical clinics. Most of their staff, likewise, does not include medical professionals (Bryant & Swartz, 2018). According to a report from the pro-life Lozier Foundation, Crisis Pregnancy Centers across the United States have had around 67,400 volunteers. 7,500 of those volunteers have been medical professionals, meaning only roughly 11 percent of Crisis Pregnancy Center staff are medical professionals (Charlotte Lozier Institute, 2018).

The con starts at the door...Wisconsin Examiner (Sept 2019):

“These so-called resource centers are designed to mislead women and to be deceptive,” says Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison). “Women are tricked into entering facilities thinking they are accessing a legitimate health clinic offering services based on factually accurate medical information.” One group specifically stated their goal was to go in the wrong door,’ accessing their group when they were looking for a Planned Parenthood or other clinic with a full range of reproductive health options.

With something this important, you would have thought Sen. Romain Quinn would have looked into the history of Crisis Pregnancy Centers? Nope: 

A student in Wisconsin was told the abortion pill would render her infertile and a sophomore seeking STD testing was encouraged to sign a chastity pledge and told various horror stories about sex (Gerson, 2019).

Downgrading Womens Health Care? Anecdotal health care treatment and advice is a growing right-wing industry:

Sara Finger, the founder and executive director of the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health: “The Republican majority is out of touch with what women in Wisconsin need. We are perfectly capable of making healthcare decisions for ourselves. What we need is access to accurate information and affordable quality healthcare.”

Here are more bizarre politically motivated Facts about Crisis Pregnancy Centers: These centers gained legitimacy via the conservative Roberts court and chaos Czar Justice Thomas: 

There has been legislation, such as California’s FACT Act, that has attempted to require Crisis Pregnancy Centers to meet certain standards of accountability - like telling patients that the state offers services including family planning services, prenatal care, and abortion. The Supreme Court struck down this legislation in a 5 - 4 decision. The majority opinion, written by Justice Thomas, argued that such legislation was a violation of Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ freedom of speech.     Justice Breyer argued in the dissenting opinion: “If a state can lawfully require a doctor to tell a woman seeking an abortion about adoption services, why should it not be able, as here, to require a medical counselor to tell a woman seeking prenatal care or other reproductive healthcare about childbirth and abortion services?” (Barnes, 2018).

...more...

1. Heartbeat International also published a “List of Major Psychological Effects of Abortion” that claims that women suffer from “Post-Abortion Syndrome” after they terminate their pregnancy (Heartbeat International, 1997). Investigators called 25 crisis pregnancy centers that received federal funding and found that 87% of the centers “provided false or misleading information about the health effects of abortion” on subjects such as the risk of breast cancer, fertility, and mental health effects of abortion (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, 2006).

2. The guide, “A Pro-Active Strategy to Defend Your Pregnancy Center Against Legislative Attacks”, was meant to be a confidential resource but was easily accessible in an online PDF. In it, they state a key part of the messaging and strategy of CPCs have been purposefully obscuring their connection to pro-life political activism as to not scare away those who are seeking an abortion. As more and more research and attention have been brought to these centers, they made a turn to instead proactively present themselves to state elected officials “[f]or the sake of God’s glory and protecting the ongoing work of pregnancy centers” (CareNet, NIFLA, Heartbeat International, 2008). A big part of this initiative was counteracting plans to regulate or shut down Crisis Pregnancy Centers

3. The largest adoption agency in the nation, Bethany Christian Services is notorious for manipulating women to keep their pregnancies and treating “birth mothers” terribly. Bethany Christain Services run a CPC-like pregnancy counseling apparatus. Critics argue that they artificially produce orphans even for women that want to carry their pregnancy to term and parent and make tens of thousands from adoptive parents.

And no surprise, Crisis Pregnancy Centers have failed:

There is no evidence that Crisis Pregnancy Centers are even fulfilling their missions. A study published in 2018 found that there was no “evidence that pregnant women regularly seek CPC services or that CPCs persuade women who are certain abortion is the right decision for them to continue their pregnancies”. Prenatal patients reported receiving inaccurate information, and patients generally recognized that these centers were not medical clinics. Only 3 of the 383 people surveyed reported visiting a CPC that impacted their decisions regarding abortion. For organizations that center their operations on persuading women not to go through with abortion, their tactics do not seem to be very effective (Kimport, Kriz, & Roberts, 2018) As organizations that receive government assistance and taxpayer funding both federally and in a long list of states, it is fair to demand accountability from Crisis Pregnancy Centers. The mission of Crisis Pregnancy Centers is not to provide resources or information to women seeking to carry to term. They are extensions of a larger political apparatus.