OPINION | South Sound Reproductive Health Activists Debunk False Promises of Crisis Pregnancy Centers

by Megan Burbank

On a sunny Saturday a year after Roe v. Wade was overturned, representatives from service providers and community organizations — everyone from the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project to the Girl Scouts — stood behind tables lining a path at Tacoma's Wright Park, steps from an array of picnic-table birthday parties, a congested playground and adjacent splash pad, and a botanical conservatory and foliage drawing yellow butterflies. Anyone who happened to stroll along could stop by to sign up for cash or food assistance, learn about accessing medical care through Medicaid, or just grab a lollipop. You wouldn't know by the look of it that the event, the Grit City Community Resource Fair, was crafted as a response to crisis pregnancy centers, right-wing-operated groups that offer nominal resources, like free pregnancy testing, as part of a coordinated agenda to dissuade people from having abortions.

But that was the impetus, says Alexa Brenner, a regional field organizer with Planned Parenthood whose work focuses on the South Sound and Olympic Peninsula. "It's a part of dispelling the myth that crisis pregnancy centers have these resources, and also showing people what is here in Tacoma," she said. The idea emerged in collaboration with patient advocate Rachel Herbst, and the two sought to highlight organizations and state agencies that connect families and young people with practical assistance, health care, and legal and community support — a robust offering beyond a simple pregnancy test.

At the end of the path, staff from the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services had parked their mobile unit, a 40-foot truck housing a community services office that welcomes walk-ins who want to sign up for cash and food assistance, determine their Medicaid and Medicare eligibility, obtain an EBT card, or apply for child care assistance. Right beside them, a resource navigator with Sea Mar community health centers offered masks, hand sanitizer, and details on wellness and employment events through flyers with scannable QR codes. At another table, families could obtain legal aid for children. Another was staffed by the Girl Scouts.

"We're visible, and we want people who may need a resource to wander by and see that," said Brenner. "Oh, you know, 'I haven't been to a health clinic in three years, because I don't have health insurance.' Sea Mar's right here."

The broad array of organizations is intentional: Although the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision pulled focus onto abortion specifically, reproductive autonomy encompasses much more than the right to terminate a pregnancy, just as meaningful pregnancy care encompasses much more than the limited services crisis pregnancy centers provide — most notably pregnancy testing, which Brenner says is just one of a number of things a pregnant person may need, whether they choose to continue their pregnancy or not.

While it's hard to capture the influence crisis pregnancy centers have, offering free pregnancy testing is a predatory practice in a state like Washington, where establishing pregnancy is needed to access Medicaid coverage for pregnancy care or abortion. "A pregnancy test can get you one answer in 3 to 5 minutes," says Brenner. "But there very well could be a lot of questions after that one answer, and we want to answer as many of those questions as we can."

Those questions are much more likely to be answered at a medical clinic — or the DSHS mobile unit — than at a crisis pregnancy center. Brenner hopes the Grit City Community Resource Fair will set the stage for future events that use existing social services like these as a counterpoint to the idea crisis pregnancy centers propagate: that they're here to help. "This is really a pilot for us, and so we're figuring out how we can do things like this, to combat the need for [crisis pregnancy centers], and for people to realize that our community doesn't need people and organizations that are telling lies and running an agenda," she said.

Other routes to regulating crisis pregnancy centers have proven more challenging. Because the centers typically provide their services for free, they are more difficult to regulate than businesses that must abide by consumer protection laws, Sara Ainsworth of the reproductive law group If/When/How told the Emerald in December.

While legislative efforts to rein in the centers face these difficulties, approaches based on education and community outreach and mutual aid rather than the law do not. The Grit City Community Resource Fair is an example of what this kind of activism can look like: Rather than making the case against crisis pregnancy centers, they take an inverse approach by centering community resources that don't gatekeep services through a political agenda. "There are so many different solutions. Running bills is a way to combat crisis pregnancy centers," said Brenner. "But being in community and doing some community care, and offering people an opportunity to get a resource that they need without having to go to a crisis pregnancy center — [that's] also a way."

As more and more people get plugged into reproductive justice in the wake of Dobbs, many of them for the first time, it's also a way to identify resources and activism that already exist, to avoid doubling up on longstanding efforts — or impeding them. "A lot of people, since Dobbs happened, would say, 'I want to do something, I want to get involved, I want to create something that does something,'" said Brenner's collaborator Herbst. "And I would say there's already something that exists that can address most needs in the community, and I think the problem is getting the word out about them."

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Featured Image: People joining Washington leaders Tuesday, May 3, 2022, to protest a draft opinion showing the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. (Photo: Alex Garland)