A pregnancy resource center opened its doors next door to a Planned Parenthood in Indiana last week to offer support to women and their babies.
But local abortion activists are not too happy about this new neighbor, the Women’s Care Center.
The Indiana Daily Student reports the pregnancy center opened Feb. 1 just one building away from Planned Parenthood in Bloomington, Indiana. It will offer life-affirming resources and support to women and babies in the community, and it hopes to reach students at the nearby Indiana University, according to the report.
“We exist to ensure that women feel like life is an option that’s available to them. Our experience is that women frequently don’t feel that way,” said Jenny Hunsberger, vice president of the national Women’s Care Center. “We exist to support women. To really give women the opportunity to choose life, and we do that in a way that is without judgment, period.”
The new facility will offer women everything from pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, to diapers and baby clothes, to help signing up for government assistance and finding affordable housing.
In an interview with the student newspaper, local Planned Parenthood spokesperson Ali Slocum implied that pregnancy centers give women biased, inaccurate advice, and women should come to Planned Parenthood instead.
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“We stand up for all people, and when you have policies and access to health care, it has the power to change lives,” Slocum said.
Yet, Planned Parenthood is known for giving biased advice and inaccurate information to persuade women to have abortions. And the Bloomington Planned Parenthood specifically has a poor record for patient care.
In 2008, undercover investigators caught an employee at the Bloomington facility failing to report a suspected statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. The employee also told the undercover investigator how to go out of state to get an abortion to avoid the state parental consent laws.
Then in 2015, surveys from the Indianapolis State Department of Health (ISDH) uncovered poor medical practices at the Bloomington facility that potentially put women’s lives at risk.
Yet, local abortion advocates heavily criticized the new pro-life center in local news reports this month.
The Herald Times reports more:
“Our goal is for everyone to get the care they need to make the reproductive decisions that they want to make,” said Shelly Dodson, center director of the All-Options Pregnancy Resource Center. “That is the ongoing challenge and pushback against crisis pregnancy centers. They’re not being open and transparent about their goals and the services they’re providing. Their goal is that they’re wanting people not to have abortions.”
All-Options, a secular nonprofit that offers free pregnancy testing, peer-to-peer counseling, material resources and referrals to services including abortion, also maintains the Hoosier Abortion Fund, which more than 100 people utilized last year to receive legal abortions.
Ironically, this statement is a deflection of abortion clinics’ own goals in promoting abortion. Planned Parenthood calls itself as a “reproductive health care” provider, and its very name implies that it offers prenatal care, infertility treatments and other services related to parenting and pregnancy.
However, increasing evidence indicates Planned Parenthood’s primary goal is abortions and the money they bring in. Former employees said Planned Parenthood sets abortion quotas and rewards its employees with pizza parties and paid time off when they meet them. In 2014, Planned Parenthood admitted to giving an award to a Colorado clinic for “exceeding abortion visits.”
Further, investigations by the group Live Action found that some of the non-abortion services Planned Parenthood claims to offer are almost non-existent. The abortion group does not provide mammograms, and very few facilities provide prenatal care.
Of the 97 facilities it contacted, Live Action discovered only five offered prenatal care – something Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards once claimed “folks depend on Planned Parenthood for.” After the investigation, dozens of the abortion group’s center websites removed “prenatal” services from their list of services.
