Carenet Baby Bottle Campaign 2017 Carenet Baby Bottle 2017
GREELEY — Isabel Serafin hid the "pregnant pee" under her wearing apparel, sealed in a glass container surrounded by hand-warmers. She kept her phone in her pocket, recording sound, equally she walked into the pregnancy center waiting room.
The Academy of Northern Colorado student was on an undercover mission to discover out what happens when a young woman who fears she is pregnant visits The Resource Center, a religious-based, anti-abortion nonprofit that looks like a typical medical dispensary or medico'due south office.
The center, a few blocks from the UNC campus, advertises free pregnancy and STD tests in the University Eye and hands out water bottles begetting its slogan: "Tests4Greeley." Bus benches only across the sidewalk from the higher describe a worried-looking daughter with the question in bold: "Meaning?"
"Free tests. Private. Medical," the benches and a billboard say, making no mention that the center is Christian-based or that its mission is to counsel women to carry babies to term. The eye considers itself a medical clinic considering information technology has licensed nurses and a medical manager who is a physician, simply information technology does not offering birth control, gynecology or prenatal care — only pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and prenatal vitamins.
It's this perceived deception that is now evoking outrage and has ignited a boxing betwixt the 40-yr-old pregnancy centre and a group of young women, including Serafin, a twenty-year-quondam international affairs student at UNC. The northern Colorado town is the state's new ground zero in abortion-rights groups' war on "simulated clinics," defined by the movement as religous counseling centers that endeavour to lure young women through their doors by portraying themselves as full-service medical clinics.
Colorado has more than than l religious-based pregnancy centers that encourage women to keep their babies or link them with adoption agencies. That compares with 18 Planned Parenthood clinics — x of which offering abortion services — and 76 state-funded health clinic locations that offer low-cost nascence command.
In 5 rural counties, the only pregnancy center or clinic is a faith-based i, according to a Colorado Dominicus analysis.
Abortion TRENDS
The ballgame charge per unit is declining in Colorado and nationwide. There was a 10% driblet in the abortion charge per unit in this state from 2014 to 2017 — that is 12.1 abortions per 1,000 women in 2014, compared with ten.9 abortions per 1,000 women in 2017.
Nationally, the rate dropped to xiii.5 abortions per 1,000 women age xv-44 in 2017, co-ordinate to the Guttmacher Institute. This is the lowest rate on record since abortion was legalized in 1973. Most abortions — 95% — occurred in clinics, while five% occured in dr.'south offices or hospitals.
Women in their 20s deemed for the majority of abortions in 2016, according to the Centers for Affliction Command and Prevention, and 91% of abortions occured at 13 weeks or earlier.
It's not wrong to counsel meaning women away from abortion or offer support to assistance them to keep their babies, say those opposed to the religious-based centers. Many of the centers provide everything from diapers and automobile seats to help finding housing and prenatal care. At the centre of the controversy, however, is whether the centers are disingenuous in their advertising.
"I have no problem at all with organizations helping women who determine to proceed their pregnancies," said Lisa Radelet, spokeswoman for Boulder Valley Women'south Wellness, which provides nascence control and ballgame. "The trouble with these places is they're deceptive, intentionally deceptive. They promote themselves as offering services they actually don't, like gynecology."
Abigail Hutchings, who graduated from UNC in May and is now an intern at NARAL Pro-Option Colorado, created a website this fall titled "Truth4Greeley" — a wordplay attack on "Tests4Greeley." She is collecting and posting stories of students who went to the Greeley pregnancy center not realizing it was an anti-abortion counseling centre.
"If the Resources Center isn't going to exist upfront most who they are and what they do, nosotros should let people know," Hutchings said.
Her website demands anti-ballgame counseling centers "be held accountable for abusing the trust of the communities they serve."
Hutchings and other young activists are making plans to enquire the UNC Lath of Trustees to enact a stricter policy for community groups that want to advertise on campus — religious clinics should identify themselves as such, they say. If the process works in Greeley, they desire to do the same in other college towns beyond Colorado.
In response to the "Truth4Greeley" website and flyers the immature women dispersed on campus, the Resource Center said information technology hired an chaser to review the Truth4Greeley site for defamation. The center's website now includes this question: "Are we a imitation clinic? People with differing opinions nearly your sexual health decisions may warn yous to be careful of FAKE medical clinics."
An abortion video, an ultrasound offer, and prayer
The center's executive director, Gail Holmes, said she wanted to give The Colorado Sun a tour of the middle'south medical lab and equipment just was advised confronting it by the nonprofit'due south chaser.
The centre's website bills its facility equally a "community-funded medical eye" and says its staff includes licensed registered nurses, who perform ultrasounds. The center besides has "medical-grade urine" pregnancy tests and an advisory board that includes local doctors.
Its waiting room looks similar to a doctor's office, with a receptionist, chairs and magazines. A sign above the doors leading into the ultrasound and lab area says, "Medical Wing."
In an email, Holmes said that if "our opponents would just terminate past to run across what is here they might be embarrassed to have promoted such inaccurate information."
During Serafin's sting performance in October, a Resource Center worker showed her a video of a surgical ballgame, asked about her religious groundwork and her relationship with the baby's begetter. The adult female, who counseled Serafin in an office, said she has a daughter who chose to keep a baby even though the child was conceived during a rape, according to a transcript of the date.
After nearly an hour of talk about the benefits of adoption, the risks of abortion and Biblical references to adoption, Serafin went to the bathroom to take a pregnancy exam. It was positive, thank you to the urine taken from a meaning friend and concealed in Serafin's wearing apparel. The centre staffer offered Serafin an ultrasound — Serafin declined — and asked if they could pray together. The staffer led a "repeat-after-me prayer" as she placed her hand on Serafin's head, Serafin said.
The college pupil walked out stunned. "If y'all were significant and you were scared, it would be totally overwhelming," Serafin said. "It really worries me about the freshmen coming in here. I retrieve it's appalling that the university is assuasive them to advertise on campus.
"I think this poses a serious medical risk to students at UNC," she said, describing a lack of "real medical communication." Serafin worries that "the shame" heart employees "put on sexually active students could also be harmful to their mental health."
The Resource Eye, like to other pregnancy centers in Colorado, is free to clients and does not accept insurance. This means it is non bailiwick to HIPAA — federal law that requires confidentiality of medical information.
Academy spokesman Nate Haas said organizations that rent tables in the Academy Center are required to identify themselves but that the university does not regulate their messaging. He as well noted the academy'southward Student Health Center offers low-cost services, including nativity control and pregnancy and STD testing.
Another young adult female, a recent graduate of UNC who spoke on status of anonymity and so she could speak freely about her medical and sexual history, went to the pregnancy center for a free STD exam after she learned her boyfriend was not monogamous. She got the test, merely merely afterward "a lot of prying questions" nearly whether she had a relationship with God and why she was having premarital sexual practice, the woman said in an interview with The Sun.
She thought it was odd the staff member did not discuss birth command options and was disappointed the center tested for only ii sexually transmitted diseases, gonorrhea and chlamydia, via urine sample. She had hoped for a full screen including for HIV and syphilis.
The staff member prayed over her after request permission, the now 23-year-erstwhile said. She described the prayer as "grandma is praying for you considering they truly want you lot to be good and have expert in the world."
"Information technology'due south truly coming from a place of wanting to aid," the woman told The Sun, "but information technology'south misguided."
A mobile "Stork" unit offers ultrasounds in Pueblo neighborhoods, rural areas
Until the past few years, centers that encourage women not to terminate their pregnancies called themselves "crunch pregnancy centers." The word "crisis" was dropped and many at present use the words "resource" or "choices" or "alternatives."
"We don't consider a baby a crisis," said Connie Weiskopf, executive director of the newly opened Boulder Pregnancy Resource Center and a Christian speaker and writer. "Even though a woman might be feeling a crisis at the moment, the pregnancy itself isn't a crisis. The state of affairs might be. We tin come aslope her and provide the resources so information technology'southward non a crisis."
The bulk of Colorado's religious-based pregnancy centers opened in the 1980s, 1990s and early on 2000s, though several opened or expanded services in the past few years. The Resource Center in Greeley, for instance, recently opened a second location, in Windsor.
Nigh are affiliated with at least one national anti-abortion grouping, including CareNet, Heartbeat International and National Found of Family and Life Advocates. Some are near Planned Parenthood or other abortion providers. For case, a Focus on the Family unit article about the new Bedrock heart noted its proximity only blocks from a clinic that performs tardily-term abortions.
Pueblo's pregnancy heart opened 35 years ago near the old location of the metropolis'due south Planned Parenthood, which closed in 2015. In the early on 1980s, a Pueblo woman persuaded the elders in a local church to open a crisis pregnancy middle so women would take a place to get if they needed help keeping their babies.
The original, church-based center that offered simply mentoring somewhen became A Caring Pregnancy Center. The middle evolved through the years to help clients apply for food stamps and other government-assistance programs or to observe doctors and housing. In 2007, information technology added lab testing, registered nurses and ultrasounds, Executive Manager Tamra Axworthy said. No nativity command is provided.
Final year, the center added a mobile unit purchased from the national group Save the Storks. The van with ultrasound equipment travels to pregnancy back up centers in Walsenburg, La Junta, Westcliffe and Cañon Metropolis. "We are able to leave there and provide that first touch," Axworthy said.
The Stork unit parks nigh a Family Dollar store in Pueblo and makes the rounds in the low-income neighborhood of Dog Patch and the Colorado Country University-Pueblo campus. The typical client is a 19- to 24-year-old Latina, and 78% of clients fall below the federal poverty level, Axworthy said. Younger teenagers choosing to keep their babies typically are getting help from their grandmothers, mothers or other relatives, she said.
The Pueblo centre's website makes its mission articulate: "Nosotros exist to empower women and families … to choose life and thrive," it says at the pinnacle of the folio.
"We don't want to mislead anyone," Axworthy said. "We also desire them to know it's a comfortable identify where they are going to be treated as humans."
Just, like many centers, A Caring Pregnancy Center is wary of the press. Before granting an interview with Axworthy, a center employee requested The Dominicus go through a vetting procedure, in which she asked who else The Sun was interviewing for the story. The Sun did not provide names.
National organizations, including Heartbeat International, CareNet and NIFLA, did not respond to interview requests or wanted to know who else The Sun was talking to for this story and a list of questions in advance.
Axworthy said the centers feel under attack in the divided political climate and noted that a 2018 bluster by comedian John Oliver most crisis pregnancy centers prompted backlash. "Everybody is just beingness really cautious. A lot of centers accept been burned," Axworthy said, noting she was "smeared" in a recent story well-nigh the invitee speaker for the middle's fundraising banquet.
The speaker, Abby Johnson, is a former Planned Parenthood managing director turned anti-abortion activist who has come under fire for suggesting anti-abortion centers should "announced neutral" about women's health care until getting clients through the door.
The Pueblo centre was as well the target of online attacks afterward its mobile unit went to the Colorado Country Off-white in 2018, and it has had fake clients who pretended they were pregnant simply were really abortion-rights activists, Axworthy said. Their policy is to answer questions the aforementioned mode every bit usual, fifty-fifty if staff suspects a customer is not 18-carat, she said.
The Pueblo centre does not show a video of abortion to clients "unless they ask," and does not pray with them unless the appointment leads in a spiritual direction, Axworthy said. "Our staff aren't the ones out protesting and showing awful, graphic pictures," she said. "We are hither to help the patients, not cause a frenzy."
The Pueblo eye — which touts "206 families rescued from abortion" in 2018 — is almost entirely funded by donors and churches, relieve for a few grants. A fundraising banquet earlier this month had more than 900 attendees — and then was basically "the biggest event in Pueblo," Axworthy said. "That'southward huge for Pueblo, and that's huge for our centre."
Kiera Hatton, who is NARAL Pro-Option'southward southern Colorado liaison, said she tin feel the pregnancy center gaining force politically in her area.
"This move is growing. It'south deeply worrisome," she said, like-minded that 900 people at i outcome is similar the "biggest affair in Pueblo that ever happened."
Role of Hatton'south job is to help women who call her asking where they tin can get an abortion and, sometimes, whether she can help them pay for it. Hatton knows of a handful of doctors in the Pueblo area who provide abortions, but they don't advertise. "Unless someone finds me, they won't know who they are," she said.
She also sends women to the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. For those who need fiscal assist to pay for an ballgame, Hatton helps them apply to the Women's Freedom Fund, which is now managed by NARAL only was started by Start Universalist Church building of Denver in 1984 — the year Colorado voters ended Medicaid funding for abortions.
Hatton, who was pregnant as a teenager and gave birth to a daughter who is now 18, does not consider the Pueblo pregnancy middle a "fake clinic" because it does provide some medical care. But she calls its version of health care "overwhelming and deceiving."
Immature women who find out they are significant need the total array of choices explained to them past a dr., the way Hatton'south doctor did when she was a teenager, she said. Non doing so is wrong, she charged.
"Whether or not information technology'south illegal, it is morally reprehensible," she said.
Allies in banning tardily-term abortion in Colorado
Pregnancy centers accept a strong marry in Colorado — the proponents of a proposed ballot measure to restrict late-term ballgame in the state.
Staff and volunteers from several Colorado pregnancy centers are helping collect signatures for the initiative, which would ban late-term abortions, said Keri Ebel, with the Coalition for Women and Children and the "Due Date Likewise Tardily" campaign to ban tardily-term abortions.
The measure, called Initiative 120, would prohibit abortions after 22 weeks, except when the female parent's life is at take a chance.
Pregnancy resources centers "empower women to see how information technology is possible to give life to their child," Ebel said. "Also ofttimes, abortion clinics teach the mantra that women merely can't find success in life with an unplanned child. We disagree."
Pregnancy centers are 1 of the few places where women can get gratis ultrasounds, she said, a fundamental resources in making an informed choice.
"We meet a cultural shift in views on ballgame, partly due to improvements in technology looking inside the womb," Ebel said. "Millennials and Gen Z take grown up with detailed iii-D ultrasound pictures of their unborn siblings on the refrigerator. They see a infant."
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains has closed a scattering of health centers in recent years. The Parker and Longmont locations shut their doors in 2017. And, in 2013, the La Junta and east Colorado Springs centers merged. The decisions were fabricated based on "long-term sustainability," said Neta Meltzer, strategic communications director.
The organization, along with NARAL Pro-Pick Colorado, has worked to expose what it terms "fake clinics."
"Simulated clinics fail to provide full and accurate information to patients about their health care options and are engaged in a violation of the patient-provider human relationship," Meltzer said. "Coloradans deserve better."
Baby-bottle fundraisers and millions in donations
Pregnancy centers report raising money in a diversity of ways, from galas with prominent speakers to pledge walks to "babe-bottle" fundraisers that encourage supporters to keep a infant bottle in their home and fill it with money to donate. 1 center held a shooting competition to raise money in 2018.
A September gala held by the new Boulder Pregnancy Resource Center raised nearly $154,000, according to an e-mail sent to supporters. The effect featured former Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow'due south mother, Pam Tebow, who said she was encouraged to have an abortion when she was pregnant with Tim.
"Information technology was awesome," said Weiskopf, the center's director. "Pam Tebow was fabulous. She's just very passionate."
A review of nonprofit income tax filings for 28 of the pregnancy centers in Colorado, several of which operate multiple sites, showed nearly $ten.v million in donations in 2017. Spending for those 28 centers — for ultrasounds, pregnancy tests, STD tests, post-pregnancy counseling and educational activity — totaled $ix.6 one thousand thousand. Tax documents for several smaller centers weren't available.
Several of the centers are affiliated with churches or part of larger nonprofit groups. For example, Denver's Riverside Church, part of the Southern Baptist denomination, operates Riverside Pregnancy Center.
Bella Natural Women's Health, which has an Englewood clinic and also operates Marisol Health in Lafayette and Denver, reported about $two one thousand thousand in revenue in 2017. Marisol Health is funded through Catholic Charities, which described the centers equally "fully equipped to help women make informed decisions about their reproductive wellness."
Unlike another pregnancy centers, Marisol is a medical clinic — information technology has physicians on staff and provides prenatal care and gynecological care for women of all ages. It provides abortion pill reversals for women who take taken medications to terminate a pregnancy but then changed their listen. The reversal pill is controversial — a inquiry study in California was halted this twelvemonth later on three women had such severe vaginal haemorrhage they required ambulances.
The Marisol clinics do not provide birth control but teach patients to rail their fertility cycle for natural family planning.
Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains brought in $45 1000000 and spent $42.5 million in fiscal 2017. It reported serving more 93,000 people in 29 clinics in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Wyoming that year.
Besides abortion clinics and religious-based pregnancy centers, Colorado has 76 health clinics that participate in a state-funded family-planning programme, which offers gratuitous or low-cost intrauterine devices, birth control pills and contraceptive shots. Because of federal rules that went into issue this year, those clinics cannot refer patients for an abortion if they have the federal dollars.
Of Colorado's 64 counties, 46 accept at least i clinic offering nascence control or a pregnancy resource center that offers pregnancy testing. Five counties – Custer, Fremont, Las Animas, Otero and Rio Blanco – accept pregnancy resource centers but no land or federally funded nascence-command options for low-income women.
The religious-based centers rely on donations for support, and much of that comes from other nonprofits. The Sun identified near $2.half dozen million in grants from other nonprofits reported on taxation documents betwixt 2016 and 2018 for well-nigh 30 of the clinic operations. About $944,000 of that went to Bella Natural Women's Health, more a 3rd of which came from Catholic Charities of Denver in 2016.
The Martin Family Foundation of Casper, Wyoming, was the biggest donor, giving $477,000 to Bella and Alternatives over three years. Customs Start Foundation of Arvada, which operates Colorado Gives Solar day, donated more $471,000 to half dozen of the pregnancy centers via donors who use that foundation equally a conduit. The National Christian Charitable Foundation gave nearly $355,000 to 15 of the centers.
Gunnison area has no Planned Parenthood, four religious pregnancy centers
Ballgame-rights advocates are concerned about what they run into equally an assault on ballgame nationally. An Alabama police, now tied up in the court system, would ban virtually abortions. A handful of states, including Georgia and Ohio, passed measures this yr outlawing ballgame beyond six weeks of pregnancy — before many women would know they were pregnant.
In Colorado, voters could decide next yr whether to ban abortion subsequently 22 weeks, if supporters are able to collect enough signatures to brand the ballot. For at present, the decades-old battle is playing out in one town at a fourth dimension — on church lawns dotted with pink and blue flags to represent aborted babies and on websites where religious-based pregnancy centers are accused of deception.
In Gunnison, Ava Godhardt is waging her own battle against the local pregnancy centre, called Lighthouse. As a student at Western Colorado University, Godhardt noticed a affiche for the pregnancy center tacked to a bathroom wall. Information technology offered a phone number for students who thought they were pregnant.
Godhardt, an abortion-rights supporter who volition graduate next bound with an anthropology degree, started asking questions almost Lighthouse Pregnancy Heart. She worried that college students in item who were new to town would not realize the 5-year-old center was religious-based and get there thinking they would go "non-judgmental, unbiased, accurate data," she said.
She set out to enlighten the boondocks. "For a while it was them putting upward posters and me taking them down," Godhardt said. Then she helped NARAL agree a barbecue beyond the street from Lighthouse, handing out abortion-rights buttons and T-shirts. She dug into the Lighthouse's website and posted its policies on a local word-of-oral cavity Facebook group final yr, until she was blocked from the page.
"If these clinics want to exist and want to be pro-life, that's fine, they only need to be upfront with it," Godhardt said. "Their perfect client is one who doesn't know any amend."
The Lighthouse Pregnancy Middle executive director Sara Wood said in an email that the eye is "very clear concerning our services and our advertising is ever straightforward." Lighthouse provides self-administered pregnancy tests, infant supplies, referrals for off-site ultrasounds and post-abortion counseling. Its website notes that it doesn't offer nativity control or referrals for abortions.
The center was created by a pocket-sized group of Gunnison women who wanted to assist higher students and others with unexpected pregnancies, according to the website for Legacy Family Ministries, which fix the pregnancy centre. Information technology is affiliated with the national anti-abortion group CareNet, which does not refer single women for contraceptives and says that married women who want birth command "should be urged to seek counsel, forth with their husbands, from their pastor or md."
Low-cost nascence control is bachelor at the Gunnison County health department. Gunnison has no Planned Parenthood — the closest one is in Salida. But at that place are faith-based pregnancy centers in Montrose, Salida, Buena Vista and Gunnison.
"They definitely take us cornered out here," Godhardt said.
Source: https://coloradosun.com/2019/12/10/pregnancy-centers-in-colorado/
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