NARAL Pro-Choice America and NARAL Pro-Choice Texas continue to push forward in their years-long crusade to silence and shut down pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) – the clinics that offer women in crisis pregnancy situations Life-affirming assistance and empower them to choose Life. This network of aid (which encompasses material, medical, and emotional support) is abhorrent to abortion activists, who have disseminated conspiracy theories claiming that Pro-Life efforts to help pregnant women are a medium of the “war on women.” For a group that proudly self-identifies as “pro-choice,” their fear of any choice besides abortion in unplanned pregnancy situations is telling.
Women, they believe, are better off if their children are dead. And any view that does not align with theirs is, by extension, anti-woman. Why the crusade against PRCs specifically? Because they work. Groups like NARAL vilify the organizations for marketing themselves similarly to abortion mills in order to alert abortion-minded women that there are other options available. Although the anti-PRC movement claims to have the best interests of women in mind, hard evidence that women benefit from PRCs on a personal level is wholly dismissed. The testimonies of hundreds of thousands of women – if not more – who have emerged from PRCs relieved and happy that they found viable alternatives to abortion are brushed aside in favor of the notion that women considering abortion must really need and want abortion and nothing but abortion, even though that is demonstrably not the case.
The next agenda item on the anti-PRC crusade is to rescind the modest tax funding that some (not all) of these groups currently receive in Texas. That’s right: while Pro-Lifers are working diligently to defund Planned Parenthood for dismembering tiny humans and engaging in the sale of their body parts, abortion activists are preoccupied with the perceived injustice of abortion alternatives being offered to women. And guess who supports the defunding ploy? Abortionists – the people who suffer financially when a mother chooses Life for her child instead of trading her wallet for an empty uterus. Enter Bhavik Kumar, a Texas abortionist who says he sees women who went to a PRC before coming to him for an abortion. “In an ideal world,” Kumar says he would like to see PRCs “defunded.” “I don’t know if that’s going to happen anytime soon in Texas, but that’s what we really need,” he says.
Knowing that the fantasy of defunding Pro-Life resources in Texas is unlikely to become a reality, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas and the Lilith Fund have launched needabortion.org, a website aimed at getting women through the doors of abortion mills with as little intervention or information about alternatives as possible. Disregarding the possibility that some – even most – women experiencing unplanned pregnancy do not want to undergo abortions, the groups behind the site have purposely adopted the same language “typically favored” by PRCs in an effort to thwart PRCs’ attempts to reach women. (Ironically, these activists have spent years complaining that the PRCs copy the branding of abortion mills… so who is copying whom at this point? Hard to tell.)
The bloodlust of the abortion lobby can be shocking at times. Led by elected officials committed to protecting all Lives, however, Texas will continue to protect the right of women to holistic healthcare and pregnancy options that recognize their own value and the value of their preborn children.
