Navigating New York Crisis Pregnancy Centers A 'Battlefield,' Opinion Piece Says
Main Category: Pregnancy / ObstetricsArticle Date: 02 Nov 2010 - 4:00 PDT
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opinions'Navigating New York Crisis Pregnancy Centers A 'Battlefield,' Opinion Piece Says'
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In a New York Times opinion piece, Ariel Kaminer chronicles her experience at the Brooklyn-based crisis pregnancy center Expectant Mother Care, where she was "administered a therapeutic technique that might be called the Love Bomb." Kaminer writes that during her sonogram, Linda Marzulla, the center's director, said that "[i]t's my body, my choice ... invoking the old abortion-rights rallying cry with a new, antiabortion twist, 'but someone else is involved, too.'"
Although EMC and other centers "have provided emotional and practical support to more than 100,000 women over the past 25 years," a NARAL Pro-Choice America report "contends that [EMC] and similar centers do so in a deceptive way -- by using erroneous medical advice to steer clients away from abortion, contraception and the morning-after pill," Kaminer writes. Legislation currently under consideration by the City Council would require that CPCs "make more clear what services they do and do not provide," she continues, noting that the legislation is "intended to prevent deceptive practices -- to keep counselors from pretending to be neutral while pursuing a political agenda."
Many CPCs "are often located right near abortion providers -- in this case, in the same building," she continues, adding, "It's easy to imagine someone spotting the generic-sounding Expectant Mother Care in the lobby directory and assuming it was a general source for reproductive information, perhaps even a medical office." However, once inside Kaminer writes that she was given a pamphlet about the risk of abortion, which "mentioned breast cancer, a link the National Cancer Institute has refuted, and something called post-abortion syndrome, for which the American Psychological Association, among others, says there is no evidence."
While at another pregnancy counseling center -- Pregnancy Resource Services on Staten Island -- Kaminer writes that the center's director "walked me through a dry dispassionate recitation of the risks abortion posed." His speech "was so dispassionate in fact that it might pass for objectivity," she writes, adding, "But it was so affectless I could not imagine it convincing anyone of anything."
Kaminer writes that Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger Center was "the only one of the three pregnancy counseling centers I visited with a financial stake in the clients' decisions." However, "it was also the only place where I felt that I was not being pushed one way or the other," she continues, adding, "In fact, it was the only place where anyone even mentioned the possibility of adoption, an option to which its critics often say it is blind."
While "trying to navigate the various options and deducing their individual perspectives," Kaminer writes that she felt "as if I was tiptoeing around a battlefield." She continues, "Now imagine what that experience would be like for someone who was truly in a crisis -- with an unplanned pregnancy and more questions than answers -- all while the stopwatch in her belly was ticking away the weeks." Kaminer concludes, "Watch your step. There are bombs hidden everywhere, and not all of them are loving" (Kaminer, New York Times, 10/31).
Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.nationalpartnership.org. You can view the entire Daily Women's Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery here. The Daily Women's Health Policy Report is a free service of the National Partnership for Women & Families.
© 2010 National Partnership for Women & Families. All rights reserved.
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MLA
25 May. 2012. <http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/206386.php>
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http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/206386.php.
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Visitor Opinions (latest shown first)
This woman is a liar
posted by AliceL. on 17 Nov 2010 at 9:25 amwith an anti-life agenda! I guess she did not like the "love bombs" - she prefers to be treated like a slab of meat which is what Planned Parenthood does to its "patients". This woman is a phony who cries when a woman chooses life for her baby. CPCs do much good especially for poor women - the kind of women whom Kaminer with her law degree, disdains.
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