Fraser Health Must End Anti-Abortion Partnership

An alliance of groups that support reproductive rights is raising the alarm over a recent partnership between Fraser Health and an anti-abortion organization called Hope for Women. Over the summer, Fraser Health supported four community groups to lead Breastfeeding and Chestfeeding Cafés for new parents, with Hope for Women delivering the cafés in Abbotsford during August.

Hope for Women is an unregulated pregnancy centre that should not be given any public funding or support because they promote an anti-abortion agenda while misrepresenting themselves as neutral providers of pregnancy options counselling, says the alliance – which includes the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC), the BC Humanist Association (BCHA), and the AccessBC Campaign. 

Extensive research conducted by ARCC, the BCHA, and other groups (see for example this 2023 report) has documented how unregulated pregnancy centres (UPCs) (sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centres”) such as Hope for Women rely on deception, misinformation, and manipulative counselling practices in order to dissuade people from choosing abortion.

For example, Hope for Women presents abortion as negative and traumatizing, despite peer-reviewed studies confirming that 95% of people who have abortions are satisfied with their decision five years later.

“By spreading falsehoods and sowing fear, Hope for Women may be causing harm to vulnerable people, exploiting their uncertainty to push a particular outcome,” said Joyce Arthur, Executive Director of ARCC.

“While we strongly support the goal of providing supportive spaces for new parents, this partnership with Hope for Women is deeply troubling as it compromises the principles of equality, human rights, and public trust,” said Ian Bushfield, Executive Director of BCHA. 

Fraser Health specifies that Hope for Women’s Café is “a women only space.” Bushfield said the deliberate exclusion of parents who are non-binary or trans men means the program violates the BC Human Rights Code. “Fraser Health is a publicly-funded agency with a duty to serve all members of the public. It must uphold human rights and Charter rights.”

“The partnership undermines public trust in Fraser Health by associating a public healthcare initiative with an organization that provides medical misinformation, counsels people against abortion, and has discriminatory policies,” said Teale Phelps Bondaroff, Chair and co-founder of the AccessBC Campaign. “Worst of all, it places people in vulnerable situations – new parents, those considering their reproductive options, and members of the 2S/LGBTQI+ community – at risk of harm.”

“We’ve written Fraser Health to ask them to immediately disassociate from Hope for Women, terminate any existing contracts, and commit to not working with the agency in the future,” said Joyce Arthur of ARCC. “But we have yet to hear back from them.”

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Media Contacts: 

Joyce Arthur (she/her)
Executive Director
Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC)
www.arcc-cdac.ca/
joyce@arcc-cdac.ca
604-351-0867

Ian Bushfield (he/him)
Executive Director
BC Humanist Association
www.bchumanist.ca/
exdir@bchumanist.ca
778-680-5729

Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff (he/him)*
Chair and Co-Founder
AccessBC Campaign for free prescription contraception in BC
www.accessbc.org
tealepb@gmail.com
778-678-8325

*Disponible pour des entretiens en français

Further background on Hope for Women

Hope for Women uses deceptive grounds to gain access to public schools for its sex-ed program.  The Hope for Women centres in Abbotsford and Langley have been teaching their sexual education “SHIFT” program in public and private schools in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley since at least 2017. However, Hope for Women was forced to delete their SHIFT website around 2022 due to the similarity of the website and program name to that of the legitimate Shift Education program run by Jessy Wollen, who sent them a cease-and-desist letter. 

Despite the disappearance of its SHIFT website, Hope for Women is continuing to gain access to classrooms, apparently by allowing schools and teachers to assume their SHIFT program is the legitimate Shift Education program. Hope for Women has recently been teaching sex-ed at Lord Byng Secondary School, Maple Ridge Secondary, and likely others.

Hope for Women provides “recreational ultrasounds” that medical bodies warn against. The agency is one of a handful of UPCs in Canada that offer problematic non-medical ultrasounds to their pregnant clients. UPCs use ultrasound as a tool to manipulate people into continuing with their pregnancies, believing that if confronted with an image of their fetus, fewer people will choose abortion. But Health Canada recommends that ultrasound be used prudently and only by qualified health professionals for medical purposes. 

Numerous medical bodies have created policies or issued statements against the non-medical use of ultrasound, including the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC), the Canadian Association of Radiologists (CAR), Sonography Canada, and others. The joint policy statement issued by SOGC and CAR voiced strong opposition to the non-medical use of fetal ultrasound, in part because of the potential harm to fetuses of targeted energy exposure: 

“With the non-medical use of fetal ultrasound, the maintenance of technical safeguards, operator training, qualifications, expertise, standards for infection control, and governing competency are no longer ensured. As a result, fetal energy exposure may not be appropriately monitored, and operators of the equipment may not be adequately trained to recognize fetal and placental abnormalities that may adversely affect fetal and maternal outcomes.