Planned Parenthood: "Damn Those Worthless CPCs!!"

Planned Parenthood despises places that offer women in unplanned pregnancies real help. They can't stand the thought that women in crisis might seek help from someone else besides them. They loathe places that offer women free medical and financial assistance. The front page of their web site bears this out as it features the story of a young woman, named Laura P., who is pregnant and accidentally went to a pregnancy center thinking it was Planned Parenthood.

The essay attempts to shine a poor light on a crisis pregnancy center but fails miserably to any reader not wrapped up in a movement to disparage CPCs. The essay describes a CPC that gives a young woman a free pregnancy test, a free ultrasound, and offer to help her during and after her pregnancy. After? That's funny because I'm often told that prolife people only care about life before birth, not after.

As we walked back down the hallway, she told me about how the center provides assistance for mothers. She said that I could give birth there, and that they would pay all of my medical bills — as well as my baby's bills for the first year or two.

She also told me that the center would provide food and all of my prenatal care, including delivery.

Can you believe those CPCs? How dare they offer women in crisis help? The nerve!

After administering the ultrasound, the nurse turned the screen to show me the sonogram results. She said, "This is the fetus." Below the photo of the fetus, someone had typed in the words "Hi Mommy!" I couldn't believe it.

After being given a free pregnancy test and a free ultrasound and an offer to provide free financial and medical assistance, Laura P. is "shaken" after viewing the words "Hi Mommy!" on the ultrasound image of her child. She then goes on to describe the staff as "downright creepy" and was "worried that they might do something to me."

It's awful that they set up centers adjacent to Planned Parenthood health centers and try to manipulate women into believing we're sinners. We're not.

Wrong. We're all sinners. We've all fallen short. We've all made mistakes.

Laura P. never mentions that anyone in the center called her a sinner or said to her that having an abortion would be killing her child. Yet she feels she has been manipulated because these are the thoughts that she is having about herself. She knows she has done something wrong but instead of facing that reality, she accuses the center of manipulating her and creating those feelings. The picture of her child shakes her. Not because she's being manipulated but because the picture is true, because she knows the fetus was a living human being. A baby. She's seen a picture of her aborted unborn child while he or she was alive and that's not something that is easy to shake.

I wish I hadn't filled out that form. I wish I'd realized sooner that I was in the wrong place. But I hope that at least other women will learn from my experience. I want them to know what their options are, and to know that places like this aren't any help at all.

This is where I started to wonder if this was some kind of parody site. A crisis pregnancy center that gives women a free pregnancy test, a free ultrasound, and offers to pay her medical bills and the baby's bills for a year or two isn't "any help at all?" Who's buying that hogwash?

I think to a certain extent, this young lady knows that she turned down the help she could of used. She turned down the help of people who actually cared about her and her child.