The Truth About Pregnancy Resource Centers

The case First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v. Platkin is currently before the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court Case

There are five pregnancy resource centers affiliated with First Choice Women’s Resource Centers in New Jersey. All of them provide counseling, support, and material help to pregnant people.

Here are the facts surrounding the case. New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin issued a subpoena against the centers in November 2023. He demanded over 10 years’ worth of records, including names and contact information of private donors.

However, he made no allegations of wrongdoing against the center, and Platkin’s counsel admitted there were no patient complaints.

Platkin’s demands are driven by pro-abortion ideology, not facts. It is simply harassment and a fishing expedition. Ironically, the same pro-abortion people who oppose requiring abortion facilities to report abortion statistics, claiming a violation of patient privacy, are demanding private records from First Choice.

Platkin threatened to deny the pregnancy centers the ability to operate if they didn’t comply with the demand. In response, First Choice sued to block the subpoena.

The current case is actually about which court has jurisdiction for the lawsuit, state or federal, and not the case itself. That has yet to be litigated. The answer will determine whether the centers can appeal the ruling if it goes against them.

Opposition to Pregnancy Resource Centers

Pro-Abortion attacks on pregnancy resource centers are usually based on misconceptions about what they do. Many Democratic politicians are dedicated to shutting them down, and in their public rhetoric, they misrepresent the services pregnancy centers offer.

New Jersey Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer said, “We need to do everything we can to shut down these brainwashing cult clinics, and they are brainwashing cult clinics.”

He said that the centers exist to “brainwash women with their own extreme agendas.”

The actual “extreme agenda” is to educate pregnant people about abortion, giving them the information about fetal development and medical risks that they will not get in abortion facilities.

Another part of the “agenda,” as we’ll see below, is to provide tangible support to women and poor families who are struggling financially and cannot provide for a new baby.

Another vocal opponent of pregnancy resource centers is Senator Elizabeth Warren. On August 4, 2022, in a speech before Congress, she claimed, “CPCs [crisis pregnancy centers] rarely employ licensed physicians or offer a full range of reproductive health services.”

Of course, to Warren, a “full range of reproductive health services” includes abortion, so the fact that the centers don’t provide abortions is enough to make her oppose them.

Warren makes all kinds of other allegations against the centers. She says that most pregnancy resource centers don’t have medical staff, which is statistically untrue. She also says:

[O]f the staff that did have some medical training, most work part-time or as volunteers.

As for the services they provide, the same study found that only one out of 607 crisis pregnancy centers provided contraceptive care, and 95% of CPCs offered no prenatal care, none, zero.

Why is the fact that medical staff are volunteers a problem? Certainly, that doesn’t affect the quality of care that they provide, does it? And yes, most pregnancy centers don’t provide contraception, but they don’t claim to – contraception is simply outside of their purview.

Finally, I wish I had a chance to ask Warren if she knows how many abortion facilities provide prenatal care. Only a very small fraction of Planned Parenthood centers do, and I never even heard of an independent abortion clinic that provides such care.

Pregnancy centers often help women access prenatal care, but they don’t usually have the resources to provide it in the center.

Why should the fact that pregnancy centers don’t provide these services be a reason to shut them down? And make no mistake, Warren wants to shut them down. She said as much in a speech here.

Warren also said, “Most have no doctors, no nurses, and offer no medical care. But they sure have a lot of medical opinions.”

In fact, in New Jersey, 29% of those working or volunteering at pregnancy resource centers are licensed medical professionals.

The Services Offered by Pregnancy Resource Centers

Let’s take a look at what pregnancy resource centers in New Jersey are offering men and women (primarily women, but they serve men as well). These are all the services that Matthew Platkin, Elizabeth Warren, Josh Gottheimer, and other pro-abortion politicians and officials want to deny to people.

According to a report from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, pregnancy resource centers provided the following services in 2019:

9,341 free pregnancy tests
5,614 free ultrasounds performed by registered nurses or medical sonographers
756 total STD/STI tests performed by registered nurses (90% female, 10% male)
6,555 free packs of baby wipes
6,985 free packs of diapers
42,656 baby clothing outfits
114 free new car seats
130 free strollers
1,681 clients received free parenting education
788 clients received free after-abortion support and recovery counseling

Abortion facilities charge an average of $162 for ultrasounds and $24 for pregnancy tests. They also charge for STD testing. At pregnancy resource centers, all of these services are free.

According to the same report, pro-life pregnancy centers in New Jersey served 35,138 women, men, youth, and families in 2019, and provided free services and free items valued at nearly $3 million.

These are the things Warren and others want to deny people.

It should be mentioned that abortion facilities provide nothing for free, and don’t provide parenting classes, baby items, or (generally) post-abortion support at all.

One Woman’s Testimony

What do the services provided by pregnancy resource centers actually look like? In a recent webcast, a woman named Aisha told her story.

Aisha had just quit her job to become a full-time entrepreneur when she discovered she was pregnant.

She was running a personal-finance blog aimed at teaching women how to manage their money. Quitting her job was a radical step, but she says that she “just felt a calling to pursue my passion, my dreams, and my goals of becoming a full-time entrepreneur.”

Her pregnancy threatened to derail those dreams and goals, which were so important to her. She says:

[I]mmediately, I felt so much fear. I did not know what this meant for my money. I didn’t know what it meant for my goals. I had no idea what it meant for my dreams, and at the time, I was just wondering if my dreams of full-time entrepreneurship were over.

To make things worse, she got no support from the baby’s father. Instead, he pressured her to have an abortion.

Aisha describes herself as being “devastated” by his response.

Aisha then found out she was having twins, and this worried her even more. How was she going to take care of two babies as a single mother with no help?

As time went on, the pressure from her boyfriend “just ramped up and ramped up and ramped up.” Her boyfriend told her that her twins would have no future and that she would never achieve her dreams if she had them. He refused to give her any help or support.

Abortion seemed like her only choice. But she says, “[A]t my core, I wanted to have my babies. I knew that they deserved life, and I wanted them…”

Aisha didn’t know whether she would have an abortion. But she decided to set up an appointment with an obstetrician, just in case she decided to parent. She wanted to make her prenatal appointments, because carrying to term was what she really wanted. She could, she reasoned, still have an abortion.

When she went to the prenatal appointment and had an ultrasound, she began to cry. The sonographer saw how upset she was. Although the sonographer was a stranger, she sat down with Aisha and gave her support and encouragement.

She told Aisha, who is a Christian, that God would use her trials for good and that things would work out. She also told Aisha about the local pregnancy resource center, where she could get free help and counseling – a resource Aisha had known nothing about.

The sonographer’s compassion and willingness to reach out had a huge effect on Aisha’s future and the lives of her babies. Aisha says:

I feel like it’s so important to be able to notice people who you’re in a space with. And she noticed me. She saw me, she saw the tears, she saw just the struggle that I had, and we just started up a conversation.

The sonographer told Aisha that the pregnancy center could provide free diapers, baby food, and counseling. The counseling sounded very good to Aisha. She was feeling very isolated. She had told very few people about her pregnancy, and even her parents didn’t know.

Having someone to talk to was something she really wanted. She called the center to make an appointment.

When she spoke to them, she was crying hard. All throughout the scheduling process, she sobbed. She describes the staff as being “just so patient,” saying, “I can’t even imagine trying to schedule somebody who was crying through the whole scheduling process, but they did…”

Aisha says:

They were super patient, and they made me feel comfortable. They helped me to feel loved and understood and cared for, even from the initial phone call.

Yet the pressure on Aisha continued to ramp up after her appointment. She says, “[T]he longer I was pregnant, the worse the pressure got.”

She called an abortion facility to make an appointment. But, she says, no one answered the phone at the abortion center, so she was unable to schedule an abortion.

A Common Problem

This is actually not unusual. During my research for the Problems with Planned Parenthood site, I discovered many, many reviews of Planned Parenthood centers saying that no one answered the phone when they called. This obviously works to the advantage of pro-lifers.

According to Rachel MacNair, who set up the website:

When we had an intern call Planned Parenthood centers to check on who their local mammogram referrals were, we found that about a quarter of the phone numbers never answered or left her on hold until she gave up.

To document this and to specify which centers have this problem, we’ve marked the centers where reviews indicate having phone trouble. That also comes to about a quarter of the centers.

We don’t include those where one person had trouble once, which can be a fluke, but only where people tried several times to reach them without success. In some cases, this included having specific medical problems due to the inability to reach them.

You can see a list of these facilities here. (Scroll past the lists of malpractice suits, failed health inspections, and patient deaths.)

But back to Aisha’s story.

Getting Help

Right after she attempted to call the abortion facility, Aisha went to a Bible study. No one at her church knew about her pregnancy, but the pastor said something that made her reconsider. He cautioned his parishioners never to make a permanent decision due to a temporary situation.

Aisha says, “I realized I could not undo an abortion, but what I was going through was temporary.”

But she and her children were not out of the woods yet. She adds, “[T]he fear could change, and that gave me hope, but the pressure got worse.”

She decided to call the pregnancy resource center again. It was after hours, and she knew that they were closed. But she desperately needed support and encouragement.

She remembers begging God that someone would answer the phone. And, unlike the abortion facility, someone did.

Aisha says the person who answered, “just talked to me and encouraged me and gave me hope, and that was the hope that I needed to make that pregnancy center appointment.”

She then described her appointment:

[W]hen I arrived, I was greeted with love, compassion, not judgment. They gave me an ultrasound, and the people were just so welcoming and just listened to me cry. I cried a lot at that time, and they were just so loving to me, and for me.

Aisha chose to keep and raise her twins.

She says that knowing there was material and financial assistance, such as baby food, formula, diapers, equipment, etc., available was very important in her decision. She was reassured that she would have everything she needed to take care of her babies.

But even more important, she says, was the emotional support she received:

But for me, the support, the encouragement, just the hope that they gave me during a time when somebody else in my life was telling me there was no hope was really the thing that stands out the most.

As a full-time entrepreneur, I wanted to know that if I ran into a difficult time, that there was a place that I can get diapers, that there was a place that I could get equipment.

But for me, having that support system was like, I can’t even put into words how important that was, what they gave me.

At the time of her pregnancy, Aisha had never even babysat and had no idea how to take care of babies. She went to the center’s parenting classes and found them very helpful:

[H]aving that parenting program helped me to feel more comfortable going into parenting and having confidence that I can even hold a baby, which is what I needed, but that just really stuck out to me, and so my life today, I’m just grateful.

Aisha’s twins are now ten, and she says she is very grateful to have them. She loves being a mom – it is her “favorite thing.”

But she’s also successfully running a business, being an entrepreneur, like she always dreamed of. She specializes in helping single moms, helping to equip them to financially support their children.

She is an author and a speaker and has published a book aimed at helping single mothers “walk through an unplanned pregnancy, to being able to set up their life, to just thrive, and to be able to give them hope.”

The pregnancy center not only enabled her to choose life for her twins, but it also helped her achieve her lifelong dreams, and now she is helping others.

Aisha describes her mission:

[W]hen I was pregnant, I was told that there was no hope for single moms. So, I want to be able to give hope to single moms and let them know that it is possible to be able to thrive as a single mom.

She sums everything up by saying:

[P]regnancy centers do important work. They provide diapers, wipes, baby food, [and] equipment. They provide love, encouragement, and support, and most of all, for me, they helped me make the decision that I wanted…

And so, they’re just a safe place for women to land in their pregnancies, and they just do so much important work.

If more pro-choice people knew the truth about pregnancy resource centers, I’m convinced there wouldn’t be so much opposition to them. The public is lied to about what the centers do, and that’s why they believe the centers should be shut down.

This article originally appeared on Sarah Terzo’s Substack. You can read more of her articles here.