The state is spending taxpayer dollars to run a pro-abortion political campaign.
The state is spending taxpayer dollars to run a pro-abortion political campaign.
R ecently, I was watching a YouTube video when an ad butted in. “Whether you need pregnancy care or abortion care, avoid anti-abortion centers,” warned a grave but sympathetic 30-ish female voice. “They may look like medical clinics, but try to limit your options if you’re pregnant. Learn more and find care you can trust.”
As a lifelong New Englander, I (alas) found nothing unusual about the substance of the ad or its moralistic tone. What was unusual was its attribution. As the ad finished, it was not the logo of Planned Parenthood or another abortion-rights organization that came on the screen, but the seal of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The ad was one of two launched a week ago by Governor Maura Healey as part of a $1 million new campaign against crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs).
CPCs, of which there are several thousand across the country, counsel women to choose motherhood or adoption instead of abortion. They frequently offer pregnancy testing and ultrasounds and distribute donated baby clothes, food, or other items to assist underprivileged mothers through the early stages of motherhood. Some offer counseling to women who have already received abortions and are dealing with lingering physical- or mental-health effects. Many CPCs are licensed medical clinics staffed by medical professionals. Other non-medical CPCs are staffed by counselors, social workers, and volunteers. Many, but not all, of these employees oppose abortion on religious or moral grounds. Unsurprisingly, abortion-rights organizations such as Planned Parenthood don’t much like CPCs and have campaigned against them for decades, painting them as full of sinister bible-thumpers determined to guilt women into having children they can’t afford or don’t want.
But, disturbingly, those private organizations’ political-activist tone seems to have seeped into Massachusetts state-government communications as well. On the official website of the anti-CPC campaign, Massachusetts accuses these “anti-abortion centers” of posing as medical facilities while refusing to apprise women of all their options, as though the testing or ultrasound services CPCs provide aren’t real, or as though the women who go to them are unaware that they can have an abortion elsewhere. In his speech announcing the initiative in Brookline, Massachusetts’ Public Health commissioner Dr. Robbie Goldstein accused CPCs of having “bribed” women using the distribution of baby clothes and diapers into not choosing an abortion. U.S. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, who was present at the campaign’s unveiling, referred to CPCs as “fake clinics” operated by “extremists.”
A persistent theme in Massachusetts’s campaign is that CPCs are disseminating “misinformation” or “disinformation” to vulnerable women to persuade them not to have abortions. It’s an echo of the rhetoric used to silence dissent against the public-health establishment during the Covid-19 pandemic. But just as those latter charges were levelled during the pandemic to enforce policies of six-foot distancing and mask-wearing despite little or no scientific evidence to support them, the Healey administration is thin on details as to exactly how CPCs are misinforming women.
One of the few specific examples it does provide is blatantly false. In his speech, Goldstein claimed that CPCs warn women of mental-health consequences of abortion, yet fail to present any evidence of a link between abortion and mental disorder. But the most significant 30-year longitudinal study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2018, found that abortion was associated with a 30 percent increase in mental-health disorders, and that “there were no consistent associations between other pregnancy outcomes and mental health.”
But even if spurious, the accusation of “misinformation” allows those who wield it to remove the issue of abortion from the arena of democratic debate. Rather than a complex matter on which Americans are conflicted, both between each other and often within ourselves, it becomes a cartoonish one with clear heroes and villains. When the government can paint opponents of abortion as liars misrepresenting matters of scientific fact, their opinions become easier not only to dismiss but to suppress.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, American public opinion on abortion has been difficult to pin down. Polls (and local elections) suggest that most Americans believe abortion should not be banned completely but that it should be limited. Many feel uncomfortable choosing an abortion for themselves or suggesting it to a loved one but would not stand in the way of a woman choosing one. The issue remains politically wide open — a perfect fit for the democratic process that helps our country work through difficult problems. Americans believe that advocates on both sides of the debate — both the Planned Parenthoods and the CPCs — have valid points to make.
It is a consummate disservice to democracy for any government entity — federal, state, or local — to use public tax dollars and the imprimatur of public-health authority to shut down such a debate. In a state like Massachusetts, which has decided to make abortion freely available, the executive branch’s only role is to ensure that it stays freely available. The presence of CPCs does nothing to prevent access to abortion, any more than the presence of an ad for one political candidate prevents the public from voting for his opponent.
Instead of concerning themselves with threats to abortion access, the supposed proponents of a “woman’s right to choose” who populate the Massachusetts government are using their authority to prevent women from choosing not to have an abortion. Far from “safe, legal, and rare,” the abortion-rights slogan of the 1990s, Massachusetts’s 2024 abortion slogan might be “easy, healthy, and as common as possible”!