{"id":2760,"date":"2022-04-12T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-04-12T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/?p=2760"},"modified":"2022-03-12T11:45:58","modified_gmt":"2022-03-12T17:45:58","slug":"from-the-gospel-to-pregnancy-tests-evangelism-in-pregnancy-centers-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/2022\/04\/12\/from-the-gospel-to-pregnancy-tests-evangelism-in-pregnancy-centers-2\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Gospel to Pregnancy Tests: Evangelism in Pregnancy Centers"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Reprinted from Gender & Society February 17, 2022<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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In 2021 the movement to oppose abortion rights experienced a banner year. By the midpoint of 2021, according to the Guttmacher Institute, state legislatures or municipalities enacted more abortion restrictions than in any other year since Roe v. Wade. <\/em>In September, the United States Supreme Court declined to block Texas Senate Bill 8, a law that effectively bans abortions in Texas after six weeks and institutes a bounty system that enables private citizens to sue anyone assisting a patient seek or obtain an abortion. Beginning in December 2021, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health Organization <\/em>to consider the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that bans abortion after fifteen weeks of pregnancy. Widely viewed as a referendum on Roe v. Wade<\/em>, the Court\u2019s decision may drastically alter women\u2019s rights to reproductive healthcare.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Amidst these legal rollbacks, a larger, quieter faction of the antiabortion movement works<\/a> \u201cto overturn Roe v Wade in hearts, not just the courts.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Pregnancy centers\u2014also termed crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) or pregnancy resource centers (PRCs)\u2014are non-profit, faith-based organizations that provide, in their words \u201calternatives to abortion.\u201d While centers desire, in the words of one network organization<\/a>, \u201cto make abortion unwanted today and unthinkable for future generations,\u201d they stay largely out of the legal fray. Instead, they position themselves as ministries <\/em>that, like in Texas, are ready to help women when clinics that provide abortions empty<\/a>. It is this concept of \u2018ministry,\u2019 that I write about in an article<\/a>* recently published in Gender & Society.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What are Pregnancy Centers?<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Pregnancy centers offer free resources like urine pregnancy tests, options counseling, limited obstetric ultrasounds<\/a>, and material services (e.g., diapers, infant clothing, and car seats). They can provide confirmation of pregnancy that helps clients enroll in Medicaid and many refer to a network of social service providers and offer parenting classes. Some offer STI testing, medically unfounded \u201cabortion-pill reversal\u201d services, and unsubstantiated \u201cpost-abortion counseling.\u201d Centers are increasingly professionalizing and medicalizing (estimates hold that approximately 70 percent now offer ultrasounds under the licensure of a physician). However, most are led, staffed, and supported by evangelical Christian women and only offer services that align with their religious worldview. Thus, they do not provide nor refer for contraceptive or abortion care, instead advocating for abstinence outside of marriage and \u2018natural family planning\u2019 within marriage. More troubling still is evidence provided by a variety of studies that pregnancy centers disseminate medical misinformation about abortion and contraception, and craft websites that obfuscate their services and mission. Though pregnancy centers are not full-spectrum healthcare providers, some receive state<\/a> and federal<\/a> funding.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

These centers comprise a distinct movement<\/a> within the broader antiabortion movement that is uniquely evangelical and gendered<\/a>. While the patriarchal ideology that infuses conservative evangelical Christianity tends to keep women out of positions of power in churches and other evangelical groups, pregnancy centers are led by women who use this gendered ideology to articulate and defend approaches to abortion opposition that focus on women\u2019s presumed needs. This approach is popular. Pregnancy centers, draw more volunteers<\/a> who put in more hours than any other part of the moment. Indeed, with somewhere between 2,500 and nearly 2,800 centers across the United States they outnumber, by a wide margin, facilities that offer abortion. Despite this vast reach, most women cannot distinguish<\/a> between a pregnancy center and an abortion provider and new research<\/a> conservatively estimates that approximately 13 percent of pregnant people visit a center during their pregnancy. My research sheds light on these centers, by focusing on the concept of ministry and how it shapes centers\u2019 tactics and performance of care.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Ministry Not Manipulation<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Pregnancy centers identify as \u201cfaith-based\u201d and, most centers, like the two that I studied over the course of three years, are seeped in evangelical Christianity. Centers\u2019 founders, leaders, and supporters\u2014most of whom are evangelical Christians\u2014describe their work as a \u2018ministry.\u2019 And, as is typical of centers in the U.S., they affiliate with large, evangelical network associations (like Care Net,<\/a> Heartbeat International<\/a>, or NIFLA<\/a>) that define the goals and strategies of affiliates. A key part of their ministry? Evangelism.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

For instance, Care Net holds that the primary mission of the pregnancy center is to share the gospel of salvation with clients, while Heartbeat International promotes centers as an \u201cunparalleled opportunity for relational evangelism\u201d giving\u00a0 \u201cyoung women in the throes of perhaps her most trying time\u2026a thoroughly gospel-saturated response, pairing a Christ-centered offer of hope with a real-world commitment to walk alongside another.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Given these endorsements, imagine my surprise when I did not see Bibles handed out, tracts dispersed, or staff sharing personal testimony with clients. \u201cMinistry not manipulation\u201d was an oft repeated phrase in centers and at trainings that staff unpacked in in-depth interviews. They painted a portrait of relational evangelism that is uniquely gendered, a process I refer to as feminizing evangelism<\/em>. In learning to practice feminized evangelism, staff\u2014who avowedly hate abortion\u2014come to empathize with women considering abortion on the basis of shared, gendered experiences. They articulate a unique ministry that they hope is more effective than other approaches to evangelism. However, staff consciously work to realign their deeply felt religious beliefs with practices that require them to put the Bibles away and to avoid conversion conversations.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Feminized evangelism gains more widespread support and client trust. In removing overt \u2018God talk\u2019 from appointments, centers produce a narrative of care that is grounded in social welfare and wrapped in the language of \u2018empowerment\u2019 and \u2018trauma-informed care.\u2019 While staff emphasize that they don\u2019t hide their faith, most clients in my study did not realize the pregnancy center they visited was \u201cfaith-based\u201d prior to their first appointment. Over the course of my fieldwork, both organizations gained secular and nonsecular supporters across the political spectrum, and solicited referrals from various secular organizations (including, unsuccessfully, a local Planned Parenthood). Pregnancy centers are not held<\/a> to the same regulatory and credentialing requirements as healthcare facilities, Further, their religious orientation restricts the range of services provided and shapes how they deliver them<\/a>, information that most women want to know<\/a>. When that worldview is not transparent, clients cannot give informed consent to services.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Supporting people with resources that enable them to build families if, when, how, and with whom they want should be a priority for our country. Excluding contraceptive and abortion care from reproductive support does the opposite. Pregnancy centers believe that providing limited economic resources and empathetic counsel enables meaningful choices but the ability to make unconstrained reproductive choices depends equally on access to a full range of healthcare services, including abortion and contraception.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The Supreme Court\u2019s decision on Dobbs<\/em>, not expected until 2022, may restructure the landscape of abortion care. Pregnancy centers are ready to fill the void and patients. If they do, patients with few resources\u2014those who are low income, underinsured, live in rural areas or conservative states, or women of color\u2014will bear the consequences of religiously-based healthcare restrictions.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

*This is freely available to read, download, and share through Open Access.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Kendra Hutchens<\/strong> is a research associate at Circle A Productions and a lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her academic research explores crisis pregnancy centers and Americans\u2019 abortion attitudes. In the public sector, her research focuses on deinstitutionalization for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted from Gender & Society February 17, 2022 In 2021 the movement to oppose abortion rights experienced a banner year. By the midpoint of 2021, according to the Guttmacher Institute, state legislatures or municipalities enacted more abortion restrictions than in any other year since Roe v. Wade. In September, the United States Supreme Court declined […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2760"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2792,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760\/revisions\/2792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/ccf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}