January
2012
By
Joyce Arthur, Executive Director, Abortion Rights Coalition
of Canada, www.arcc-cdac.ca
If
you purchased a bottle of wine at your local government
liquor store in Kamloops BC during the holiday season last
year, you may have noticed a tin on the counter labelled "Help a Woman in Crisis." Perhaps you
even dropped a few coins in it. What you may not have
noticed is the name of the recipient on that tin—the
Pregnancy Care Centre of Kamloops. Unfortunately, this
agency is one that many people would be loathe to
support if they knew what it really represented.
On
its website and brochure, the Pregnancy Care Centre of
Kamloops claims to help women with unplanned pregnancies by
giving them practical support and “non-judgmental care” as
well as “education on all pregnancy options, and “referrals
for health, housing and community support,” among other
laudable-sounding services.
But
this carefully cultivated public persona deliberately hides the true nature and
purpose of the centre. Unsuspecting donors would
never guess that the centre is
actually an anti-abortion Christian ministry whose main
goal is to dissuade women from having
abortions—and then convert them if possible.
About
150 of these fake clinics—so-called “crisis pregnancy
centres”—exist across Canada. Many are affiliates of the Canadian
Association of Pregnancy Support Services
(CAPSS), an umbrella group that “encourages and
equips” these centres. One
of
the primary tools that CAPSS provides to its affiliates for
their work is an “Evangelism Manual.”
As
an affiliate of CAPSS, the Kamloops Pregnancy Care Centre must maintain
“faithful adherence” to several statements and codes, none
of which are available to the public (we obtained a copy of
them several years ago):
Fake clinics like the Kamloops centre try to
give the impression they are secular medical clinics run by
professionals, when most are staffed solely by volunteers
with no credentials or training in
counselling. Alarmingly, the vast majority of fake
clinics provide misinformation or withhold information from
women.
Although they claim to help with all options,
fake clinics will never refer a woman for an abortion—even in the most desperate circumstances, such
as a lethal defect in the foetus or in cases of rape.
Centres often use methods and language designed to horrify
and confuse women considering abortion, which can induce
guilt, anxiety, and emotional trauma. For example, they
generally subject women to
scare-mongering misinformation about abortion that
exaggerates its risks, such as warnings that abortion leads
to scarring, breast cancer, future miscarriage,
post-traumatic stress disorder, or infertility—all false
scientifically.
Fake clinics will
never refer a woman for contraception, either. They
generally counsel against using birth control and even
refuse to provide information on it, except for false
claims such as: condoms don’t protect against
sexually-transmitted infections, and hormonal methods
of birth control methods are "abortifacients."
Other
activities
that many of these fake clinics are known to engage in
include: delaying pregnancy test results and using the time
to expose women to anti-choice or religious propaganda,
presenting ambiguous or false pregnancy results to delay or
prevent abortion, lecturing women on abstinence, breaking
confidentiality by making unwanted phone calls to the woman
or alerting her parents, and conducting unprofessional
post-abortion counselling using a religiously-based model of
guilt, forgiveness, and redemption.
The
public,
and especially the women of Kamloops, deserve to know the
truth about this Pregnancy Care Centre. It is unconscionable
for this fake clinic to dupe people out of their money by
pretending to be secular and unbiased. The presence of their
fundraising tins in government liquor stores around Kamloops
indicates that the LDB itself has likely been deceived. Even
Canada Revenue appears to have been bamboozled—it gave
the
Pregnancy Care Centre of Kamloops charitable status as a
“Welfare Organization.” That is highly inappropriate for an
agency that might give out a few free diapers and baby toys
but primarily exists to stop women from having abortions.