Collegiate Times

Abortion is a topic debated across the board of politics, religion and academia. However, despite theoretical discussion, often the actual places where women go to seek help for an unplanned pregnancy are not mentioned.

Planned Parenthood is trying to shed light on crisis pregnancy centers, which offer reproductive services such as free pregnancy and HIV tests. According to the Planned Parenthood website, these centers often lure women with unplanned pregnancies in with deceptive advertising that seems to offer unbiased counseling. Once there, they are met with anti-choice propaganda and intimidation.

?Typically a requirement of those involved (with CPCs) is an opposition to abortion as an option. Some (counselors) are more vehement than others,? said David Nova, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Blue Ridge.

Caring Pregnancy Center is a non-profit crisis pregnancy center in Christiansburg that performs free services such as pregnancy tests and ultrasounds when a woman is six to 12 weeks pregnant. They also provide information about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and the importance of abstinence for single women.

?We are a life-affirming organization,? said Linda Robinson, executive director of Caring Pregnancy Center, a crisis pregnancy center in Christiansburg. ?Life is sacred. We present women with two options-to carry and have her baby or to carry and adopt. We don't refer or perform abortions.?

Planned Parenthood refers to crisis pregnancy centers as directive counseling, while Planned Parenthood offers nondirective counseling, said Nova.

?We don't push for one option over another. We help our patients to make the best informed decision without judgment or bias,? Nova said.

The caring pregnancy center provides information on abortion as well, Robinson said.

?We help women make a decision based on facts and truth, not their emotional state at the time,? Robinson said.

Volunteer counselors typically operate crisis pregnancy centers. Planned Parenthood's concern with these centers stems from the fact that many of the counselors are not certified and that the centers use deceptive advertising practices, Nova said.

?Crisis Pregnancy Centers do everything without charging a fee, so laws in Virginia pertaining to counseling regulation and advertising practices don't apply,? Nova said.

Despite the lack of regulation, crisis pregnancy centers maintain that they are looking out for women's best interests.

?We care about women and what happens to them,? Robinson said. ?We have compassion and respect for women. We're not here to make the decision for them.?

CPCs originated when Hawaii decriminalized abortion in 1970. Women would fly to Hawaii, live there for four weeks in order to establish residency, and then have abortions, Nova said.

A man named Robert Pearson started a home for pregnant women in order to attract women coming to Hawaii to have abortions. He then used those four weeks to convince those women to not have the procedures. After Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973, women stopped flying to Hawaii to have abortions, and Pearson established the same sort of tactics in the form of crisis pregnancy centers in the United States, Nova said.

?CPCs, by and large, work by offering free pregnancy tests. Often, these are home pregnancy tests, which are not necessarily as accurate. This is not true for all (CPCs), but certainly true for the ones I've seen,? Nova said.

One center though, said they offer higher quality testing.

?All our tests are lab quality,? said Amber Hodges, a volunteer counselor for the Blue Ridge Women's Health Center, a crisis pregnancy center in Roanoke. ?We do use urine tests, while some Doctors use blood, but our tests are 99 percent accurate. They're more accurate than what you would get at the store.?

Sometimes the tests will display a false negative because the patient is not far enough along, but very rarely do the tests display a false positive, Hodges said.

?The centers will say the pregnancy test results will take so much time, and they then have that window of opportunity, usually less than an hour, to do what Pearson did (and convince them not to have an abortion),? Nova said.

Crisis pregnancy centers mainly operate to talk women out of having an abortion, Nova said.

?The name crisis pregnancy center is designed to attract women who see pregnancy as a crisis. They're not trying to reach women who planned their pregnancies,? Nova said.

Hodge confirms that CPCs are seeking to help women who did not plan their pregnancies.

?Our purpose is to provide women with medical services as well as counseling,? Hodges said. ?Especially for women considering abortion because of lack of resources.?

The Caring Pregnancy Center has been in the New River Valley for 21 years and served 1,300 patients last year, Robinson said. The Blue Ridge Women's Health Center has been in Roanoke since 1984 and has served over 12,000 patients since that time.