also at Talk to Action

Writer Heather Wokusch begins War on Terror, War on Women with a quote from the Commander-in-Chief.

"On September 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life... Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life."
— Bush in 2002, linking abortion rights with terrorism, as he declared the 29th anniversary of Roe v. Wade to be "National Sanctity of Human Life Day."

Wokusch notes, "Sabotaging programs for women has become something of a sport for this administration," and Bush acolytes in Texas government play hardball. To advance the state's goal of "promoting childbirth," our legislature diverted $5 million from historically successful family planning programs in order to fund a scheme funneling public support to crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs).

Their battle plan includes "educational materials" from Heritage House '76, a CPC supply house whose inflammatory publications have been used and promoted by the American Life League, the Quran-burning Operation Save America and the late Paul deParrie, a Hero of the Faith in the domestic terror organization known as the Army of God.

With testimonials such as those, is it any wonder that godly lawmakers see a crying need to inflict Heritage House materials upon unsuspecting pregnant women and teenaged girls, instead of frittering away our tax money on health care?

Public funding of CPCs is a major tactic in the religious right's anti-woman crusade. In Florida, CareNet's Option Line has become the de facto executive of the state's effort to direct traffic into CPCs via the Florida Pregnancy Care Network (FPCN).

The FPCN will launch an advertising campaign modeled after Option Line marketing efforts. English and Spanish commercials as well as Internet ads will promote a newly-created Florida 1-800 number that will ring directly into the Option Line call center in Columbus, Ohio. All Florida pregnancy centers currently receiving phone calls through the Option Line will be immediately eligible to receive phone calls made to the new 1-800 number.
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The Florida program will also involve the reimbursement of qualified pregnancy centers for counseling services that abide by Florida's faith-based initiative guidelines. The FPCN will allocate the state funds to those pregnancy centers that wish to participate and have been trained and approved by the FPCN.

That's right: Pregnant? Need Help? Call 1-800-PROPAGANDA. In Florida, as in Texas, the CPC business is booming.

In Florida, the crisis pregnancy centers are supported by millions of dollars in taxpayer money. ... Some crisis centers get state money for every hour a counselor spends face to face with a client — $50 an hour, up to $1,300 a month.

Anti-abortion hot lines — those numbers often called surreptitiously in the wee hours by women who think they're pregnant — get $4 per telephone contact, e-mail or instant-message stream.

And the public money does not stop at the state line.

"There's been an increase in the money and an increase in the focus because I think there is a perception that these clinics play an important role in preventing unwanted pregnancies," U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, said recently. "I don't think that's true.

''There's nothing wrong with having a religious mission," Wexler said. "A religious mission is wonderful. It just needs to be straightforward."

If the Christian right's mission to siphon public money into CPCs was straightforward, there wouldn't be any such mission in the first place.

The Austin Chronicle has mounted an intensive effort to pry a few straight answers from the Texas Pregnancy Care Network, the lucky winner of our state's multimillion-dollar Alternatives to Abortion contract.

[Sen. Tommy] Williams' rider set aside $5 million ... to administer a program explicitly intended to "promote childbirth" over abortion, primarily through a network of nonprofits, mostly "crisis pregnancy centers" – most run by vociferously anti-abortion groups that offer no medical services whatsoever. Lawmakers later told us they felt misled by Williams' assertion that the rider would not impact funding for traditional providers of preventative medical services for poor women – as in fact it has done.
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Texas ... awarded the $2.5-million-per-year contract to the TPCN, a brand-new nonprofit whose directors, according to their résumés, have no experience in nonprofit administration nor in women's health care. ... In January, we reported that under this system, during FY 06, TPCN had invoiced the state for more than $600,000. Although well more than $100,000 supposedly went to pay for "client services," it wasn't until August that the group reported spending any money on services; in that invoice, TPCN reported spending $50.98 on client services. In all, according to TPCN's numbers, in FY 06 the group served just 11 clients statewide – in essence, at that time, the program had cost $58,086 per client.

A memorandum on TPCN's letterhead responded [pdf link] at length, if not in depth, to Smith's detailed report on the program's lack of efficiency and effectiveness at anything except cashing the state's checks.

The memorandum is unsigned, but we've been told that it originated with the office of Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, who authored and carried the budget rider that created the Alternatives to Abortion program back in 2005. More precisely, the document appears to have been produced by the high-powered political consulting firm the Eppstein Group, led by Bryan Eppstein, which has done campaign work for many GOP lawmakers, including Williams. We tried to confirm this provenance from the horses' mouths, but at press time, neither Eppstein nor Williams' aide had returned numerous calls requesting comment.

TPCN Executive Director Vincent Friedewald was much less forthcoming when reporters asked to see the "educational materials" for the program — but maybe that was only because he didn't have an Eppstein Group lobbyist in the office when the press knocked on TPCN's door.

Shortly after our article was published, we were contacted by [the Health and Human Services Commission] and told that the agency had acquired the materials and would be able to make them available for inspection. We reviewed them earlier this month – under the watchful eye of an HHSC representative, who told us she was directed to sit with us during the entire visit.

The TPCN memorandum asserts that the group only buys educational materials that "meet high quality standards"; that cite "legitimate authorities, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or … articles published in peer-reviewed medical literature"; and that it buys no "materials that are political, judgmental, reflect activist sentiments or that contain spiritual or religious content." Our review of the TPCN materials contradicts those assertions. We found biased materials – many that appear to spin medical information toward a particular political point of view, such as that found in abstinence-only sex education – and materials that cite dubious sources other than medical and/or health authorities

Some materials shown to the Austin Chronicle were published by Heritage House '76. "Biased" is a mild word for either its catalogue of abortion-as-holocaust propaganda or for its owners, Mike and Dinah Monahan. Dinah Monahan is a veteran anti-choice activist who networks extensively with Focus on the Family, National Right to Life, Heartbeat International, CareNet and Lutherans for Life. She is also a principal participant at workshops and conferences with such major figures of the Christian right as Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life and the Diocese of Amarillo (pictured below with Monahan).

Photo: Priests for Life

The press wasn't allowed to see Heritage House pamphlets without official supervision, but CPCs in Texas and across the country pass them out by the handful to any pregnant woman or teenager who might be "abortion minded" — along with plenty of loving Christian advice, as reported by the Palm Beach Post.

In October, a woman said that she'd been to the Care Net Pregnancy Services in Port St. Lucie — part of a national chain of 1,000 crisis pregnancy centers.

"(They) told me I could die from an abortion, that I would never have kids, preached religion, told me I should have the baby and put it up for adoption, told me I had a formed baby and how it was a sin."
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In November, one pregnant woman wrote that she'd found the Boca {CPC] in the Yellow Pages and had gone there for a pregnancy test.

"They told me to keep it, not have an abortion," the woman wrote.

Eventually, the woman came to Presidential [Women's Center in West Palm Beach] and was assigned a counselor named Brooke, who said recently she remembers the woman because of her unsettling worries.

"She said, 'I need to know. Does this doctor, does he hate women?' At first, I was kind of stunned," Brooke said. "And I said, 'Not at all. Our doctors are very committed to women.' "

The woman wrote that a [CPC] counselor told her: "abortion centers use drills knife. cut u open. doctor hate women."

CPC representatives disparage reports like these as attacks on their Christian mission, but their denials don't even jibe with what they say to each other.

As a representative sampling of "educational materials" from the Heritage House catalogue, I present a small assortment from my own collection. Like the staff of Presidential Women's Center in West Palm Beach, our clinic here in Texas sees many patients who find their way to us only after running the CPC gauntlet, some of whom are still clutching Heritage House pamphlets in their hands when they come through the door.

Along with the fetal models sold by HH "in white, brown and black ... mixed and matched for quantity pricing," a perennial CPC favorite is "You Have a Right to Know," a title mimicking that of the "Woman's Right to Know" statutes mandating anti-abortion counseling and waiting periods in Texas and many other states.

Aspiration D&C is performed with the same kind of round-ended plastic tube that your dentist uses to extract saliva while you're having your teeth cleaned. That isn't likely to scare anyone, but this is.

And if that isn't enough, there's always the discredited specter of breast cancer.

That brochure's counterpart is "For Men Only," which urges a woman's male partner to take charge of his woman.

"The Black Woman's Voice" paints abortion as a genocidal plot by "upper middle class white" people who are "pruning the minority population."

And as is the case with these and so many other "educational materials," it's only available from Heritage House.

In Post-Abortion Syndrome: Are You at Risk?, Dr. David Reardon details the psyche-shattering consequences of Post-Abortion Syndrome, a malady as mythical as Reardon's nonexistent doctorate in bioethics. At least it's true that he's the "national expert" on PAS — because he invented it.

Perhaps the most blatant example of the Christian right's skewed version of the "pro-life gospel" is "What Can Happen to You" [pdf] — a glossy production packed with more twisted scare-tactic propaganda than one compact brochure should be able to hold. In addition to the usual dire alarms about the dangers of breast cancer, suicidal depression and immediate life-threatening complications, it echoes biblical warnings of punishment visited upon successive generations.

If you have an abortion:

(1) You will be more likely to bleed in the first three months of future pregnancies.

(2) You will be less likely to have a normal delivery in future pregnancies.

(3) You will need more manual removal of placenta more often and there will be more complications with expelling the baby and its placenta.

(4) Your next baby will be twice as likely to die in the first few months of life.

(5) Your next baby will be three to four times as likely to die in the last months of his first year of life.

How very un-Christian of them to evoke the Angel of Death.

The well-oiled campaign to fund CPCs is not about helping women, but about controlling women through fear and guilt, with the crudest and ugliest of tactics — and, of course, about empowering the Christian right's war on women with your money.

Just one more faith-based initiative headed to a statehouse near you.

Title Image: Domenichino, The Rebuke of Adam and Eve

Final Image: Evelyn De' Morgan, House of Azrael