I did my own undercover trip to a crisis pregnancy center in Western MA in the mid-90s, when I was in college. It wasn't part of any concerted campaign, it was just something that I wanted to do. (I later wrote about it for a civil liberties and public policy class.) The short story is: this sort of manipulation and dangerously misleading - sometimes downright harmful - "advice" has been doles out for a *very* long time by these programs. It is high time that people understand that the "counseling" offered here is extremely dangerous, not only to women's emotional/mental health, but to women's physical safety, too.

For example: I will never forget that the mother-daughter tag-team of "counselors" at the "crisis pregnancy" center encouraged me to tell the father of my child (I wasn't pregnant, I gave them the true story of a young woman I knew who was) that I was pregnant and give him the chance to be a good father. I told them that I couldn't do that because I was no longer with the father of the child -- that I had broken up with him after he turned controlling and physically abusive. (This is what happened to the young woman whose situation I was relaying.) They told me, and I will never forget this: "Abusive men often change once a baby comes into their lives." They then went on try to convince me that I should get back together with my batterer, that he wouldn't hit me once he knew I was pregnant, because kids bring out men's "softer sides." This is, of course, in direct opposition to everything we know to be statistically true about the cycle of dating violence and domestic violence.

I also told them I couldn't afford to keep the child, that if I had a kid I'd have to drop out of college, and that I had no financial way of supporting myself if I did that (as a low income student, with a paycheck-to-paycheck single mom, that would absolutely have been true if I had been pregnant). They said their church would help, and that was the end of the story. When I asked them how long the church would be able to help me support a child, they had no answer for me other than "it will all work out, you'll see."

Had I been pregnant and followed their advice, I would have been a college dropout with no financial options, fully dependant on a physically abusive boyfriend.