Pregnancy Resource Centers (also known as Crisis Pregnancy Centers) are very controversial. When I say “very controversial”, I mean pro-choicers complain about them. Giving women only life-affirming options goes against everything Planned Parenthood stands for. Hence the reason the pro-choice movement is constantly attacking PRCs, claiming that they deceive women, because some women go inside a PRC thinking that they can get an abortion there, and apparently they also sometimes leave with a changed mind about an abortion because they are given factual information about their unborn baby—this is a bad thing to pro-choicers.

Where the “deception” comes in, I don’t know. I’ve yet to see a PRC blatantly advertise as an abortion clinic, so I don’t think that could be it. Perhaps by “deceive” pro-choicers think that somehow the women enter the clinic and are tricked into thinking that, sometime during the paper work and the video from the 80s that shows fetal development, they actually got an abortion only to find themselves horrifyingly giving birth a few months later.

But a few secular pro-lifers also do not like PRCs. In a particularly secular pro-life group, I’ve been discussing the issue with some of them. The first thing that’s wrong with PRCs is the fact that everyone who enters the center will be told a typical evangelical view of the “Good News” apparently found in the Bible. Many undercover NARAL interns also report being “guilted” into not having an abortion. Why, even some pro-lifers ask, are these centers making women feel guilty? Not that I don’t trust the undercover college-aged women who work for NARAL, but I’ve noticed that the general hard outer shell of the choice movement is broken at something as minuscule as a receptionist at the PRC offering them a mint. The run away screaming and crying, as if they were punched in the face. They must been guilt mints!