Anti-abortion centers use sonograms to sway women
By Michael Alison Chandler
THE WASHINGTON POST
September 10, 2006
WASHINGTON – On June 6, Cheryl Smith took her last $600 and drove her teenage daughter from Baltimore to Severna Park, Md., to get an abortion. When they got there, a receptionist told them that the clinic had changed hands, she said, but the new clinic would offer a pregnancy test and sonogram for free. The Smiths stayed. After they saw a picture of the fetus at 21 weeks with arms and legs and a face, their thoughts of termination were gone. “As soon as I seen that, I was ready. It wasn't no joke. It was real,” Makiba Smith, 16, said. “It was like, he's not born to the world yet, but he is inside of me growing.”
With its ultrasound machine and its location, the Severna Park Pregnancy Clinic demonstrates two of the most important tactics in an intensifying campaign to woo women away from abortion clinics. Anti-abortion organizations in recent years have added medical services to hundreds of Christian-oriented pregnancy counseling centers nationwide, many in or near places where women go to end pregnancies.
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Abortion-rights advocates say the proliferation of anti-abortion pregnancy clinics is a dangerous trend, confusing vulnerable women by mixing a seemingly neutral clinical environment with a religious agenda. “They can set up a waiting room and an exam room, but that doesn't mean they employ actual medical practices,” said Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, a network of abortion providers.
The ultrasound exams have proven effective in persuading women to stay pregnant. A 2005 survey by Care Net, a Sterling, Va.-based network of about 1,000 anti-abortion pregnancy centers in the United States and Canada, found that 72 percent of women who were initially “strongly leaning” toward abortion decided to carry their pregnancies to term after seeing a sonogram. Fifty percent made the same choice after counseling alone. Such results have led anti-abortion forces to buy more ultrasound machines, which can cost as much as $50,000 each. In the past 2½ years, the evangelical organization Focus on the Family estimates that it has helped 200 pregnancy centers buy the machines.
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