Justin's Political Corner

The latest filings from Karl Rove’s American Crossroads show a last minute contribution of $1 million received just days before the election (10/29/12) from Gary Heavin — the co-founder of Curves International Inc., which calls itself “the world’s leader in women’s fitness.”

Curves, a chain of women-only fitness center franchises, claims nearly 10,000 locations in more than 85 countries. Heavin and his fellow co-founder, his wife Diane, sold Curves International to an private equity firm in October, but they remain prominently featured on the company’s website. The Heavins say they “share a passion for and commitment to women’s health and fitness.” But his massive donation to the right-wing super PAC is only the latest in a long pattern of their efforts
in support of policies that undermine women’s equality in the workplace and restrict women’s access to health care services.

American Crossroads spent $91 million to elect Mitt Romney over President Obama. Romney refused to endorse key pro-women legislation including the bipartisan Violence Against Women Act, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act, but backed reinstating the “global gag rule” on even discussing abortion as a family planning option and supported the infamous Blunt Amendment to allow employers to deny health benefits that go against their personal views. Crossroads also worked to help far-right extremists like Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, and George Allen. Much of the American Crossroads attack strategy focused on criticizing Obamacare and those who backed the effort to expand health insurance access to all Americans.

And this past election isn’t the only time that Curves and the Heavins have worked against women’s reproductive rights. Gary Heavin pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars for controversial “pregnancy crisis centers” that try to talk women out of abortions and have been accused to providing false information. They also made large donations to abstinence-only education programs — programs which often misinform and make teens more likely to engage in risky behavior and become pregnant. Curves also pulled its funding for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation over its objection to the charity’s funding for Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening services. In a 2004 editorial, Mr. Heavin attacked Planned Parenthood’s sex education literature, writing “I have a 10-year-old daughter. I would absolutely not allow her to be exposed to this material. I don’t want her being taught masturbation and told that homosexuality is normal.”

That anti-choice and anti-LGBT stance was further demonstrated when Curves partnered with the American Family Association — a group that has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “hate group.” 

Gary Heavin has also been an outspoken enthusiast for televangelist Pat Robertson, who has blamed natural disasters on same-sex marriage equality and blamed 9/11 on abortion, the separation of church and state, and civil liberties groups.

H/T: Josh Israel at Think Progress Health

As ThinkProgress has reported, so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” that claim to help women in need are actually established by anti-abortion activists with the sole objective of shaming women out of having abortions. Despite receiving federal and state funding, they have a history of preying on and misleading pregnant women who are seeking abortions and giving them false medical information to dissuade them from making their own decisions.

After a year-long investigation, a new report to be released today by the pro-choice group NARAL reveals that those problems plague the vast majority of North Carolina’s crisis pregnancy centers. In addition to providing false medical information, many of the centers actively proselytize and tell women of non-Christian faiths to convert or face damnation:

In recent years, NARAL Pro-Choice state chapters have conducted investigations into the pregnancy clinics in New York, California, Maryland, Texas and Virginia, reaching the same general conclusions. Over the past year, the North Carolina office of the organization embarked on an identical investigation, studying the centers’ websites and other material, and sending staff and volunteers posing as pregnant women or couples into the clinics. […]

NARAL says it found the majority of the centers it investigated in North Carolina had no medical professionals on staff, and only a quarter of them disclosed they were not medical facilities. More than two-thirds provided distorted or false information about abortion risks and consequences.

The report says one Jewish investigator who posed as a pregnant woman was told at five centers she wouldn’t go to heaven unless she converted to Christianity, and that one volunteer challenged her to become a “born-again virgin.”

The number of centers in North Carolina has nearly doubled since 2006, and there are eight times as many of them as there are abortion clinics. Carey Pope, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina, said the group’s investigators found numerous instances where crisis pregnancy centers were misinforming and misleading women. “Staff and volunteers often use propaganda to dissuade women from abortions,” she said.

North Carolina’s GOP lawmakers have flooded these anti-abortion centers with taxpayer money while defunding Planned Parenthood and taking money away from legitimate family planning centers that provide medical services. Two new state laws will drive even more funding and patients their way. Money from sales of the new “Choose Life” license plates will go to the centers, and starting this Wednesday, a state-run website will launch and list the places that provide free ultrasounds.

There are between 2,500 and 4,000 crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) operating in the US, all devoted to preventing the women who walk through their doors from getting abortions (meanwhile fewer than 2,000 clinics offer abortion). Some of these anti-abortion centers are part of massive evangelical Christian ministries, some are standalones, and others are attached to individual Catholic churches, whose priests sometimes bless the centers’ ultrasound machines to power them with extra holiness for their main task: convincing a woman who may want to have an abortion to have a baby instead. Thanks to George W. Bush’s breezy hand-outs of public money to Christian abstinence programs, many of these religious, anti-choice centers got millions in federal funding in the 2000s.

Many centers don’t look too different from regular women’s health clinics, and that’s the whole point. If a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy walks into a CPC assuming it’s a women’s health clinic and not a front in the abortion wars, she’s more likely to believe what they tell her there: like when a staffer says that abortion causes breast cancer (not according to actual studies), or that she might bleed to death on the table (so unlikely it’s close to impossible), or that she can’t have an abortion if she lacks legal residency (blatantly false), or any number of misleading and manipulative tactics documented in investigations of CPCs over the years. (In one case, a volunteer handed an undercover investigator a model of a 12-week-old fetus to “show her boyfriend.”) (See the 2004 Waxman report [PDF] and the results of an undercover investigation by NARAL Pro-choice Maryland Fund [PDF].)

Not all CPCs misinform women about their intentions or wave plastic fetuses in their faces. Some are clear about their anti-abortion stance and a lot offer services helpful to children after they’ve exited the womb, like child care and parental education, which is not something that can be said for most of the players in the anti-choice movement.

Still, multiple investigations have revealed that CPCs use a wide variety of tactics to lure pregnant women in order to scare, guilt and manipulate them into carrying their pregnancies to term. Some advertise in the same part of the Yellow Pages as abortion providers. Many are situated right next to Planned Parenthood clinics. A representative of the National Abortion Federation told AlterNet a member clinic reported that volunteers from a neighboring CPC have intercepted women headed into the clinic and steered them into the CPC instead.

There’s another strategy that’s gotten less attention: an under-the-radar campaign by large anti-choice organizations, like the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates and Focus on the Family, to fund and guide the conversion of CPCs into licensed, limited-service medical clinics, ramping up their services to include pregnancy tests and ultrasound. Although they offer only limited women’s health services — none offer mammograms, for instance — medical clinic status has led many to start offering early prenatal care, prenatal vitamins, STI testing and even eye exams. A few have started advertising pap smears.

But in a bad economy, and with GOP governors across the country having spent the last legislative session coming up with endlessly creative ways to choke off funding to Planned Parenthood clinics (which many low-income women depend on for their health care), women’s health choices are dwindling.

On its website, NIFLA, the main group behind the push to convert CPCs into medical clinics, boasts that conversion leads to “major increases in the numbers of clients they are seeing on a monthly basis, as well as a dramatic increase in the number of clients choosing life.”

Unsurprsingly, there’s a lot of right-wing muscle behind the push to make CPCs more attractive to women who may be considering abortion. (“If you are pregnant, or might be pregnant, you might be feeling overwhelmed” an ad suggests over a picture of a wide-eyed young woman on the CareNet website. “You are not alone” consoles the tagline.)

In 1998, NIFLA established the Life Choice Project (TLC), which equips CPCs with legal tools and information to convert to medical clinics. They have a team of law consultants to help shepperd CPCs through the complex legal process, and an advisory board of medical professionals to oversee member clinics and make sure they comply with standard medical practices.

Focus on the Family is also involved. In 2004 the anti-gay, anti-choice religious-right group starting handing out “TLC grants” that fully fund the conversion of CPCs that make it through their application process, which FoF uses to determine two things: if a CPC has its act together (with a functioning board, CEOs and directors) to handle the legal hurdles of the transition, and perhaps more importantly, whether the center is worth investing in.

The latter consideration rides on which CPCs are the most likely to influence the most women to have babies. According to the assessment form, a center is more likely to get a grant if it operates in a large metro area, in a state with public funding for abortion beyond rape, incest or if the life of the mother is at risk. It also helps if the state gets an A or B grade for abortion access from NARAL. Another question asks if four or more public abortion providers serve its city.

Also advantageous is the presence of a large number of young women likely to find themselves pregnant, single and confused about it: “City has a four-year university with a student body of 15,000 or more (age 18- 26, excluding online students), that’s a target audience your organization will serve,” according to the self-assessment form.

In September, a NIFLA-affiliated CPC called Pregnancy Resource Center in Minnesota (where Planned Parenthood had to close six clinics in the state after Congressional budget cuts to Title X) hawked the enticing combo of HIV testing, Pap smear and a Little Caesar’s pizza in an ad placed in the back of the St. Cloud university student guide book.

The website of Choices Inc. in Kansas (10 CPC “clinics” to three Planned Parenthood clinics; a judge just blocked a law defunding Planned Parenthood that would have forced them to shut down one of them) advertises physician care and features a photo of a doctor feeling a newborn baby’s heartbeat. On the site, Scott Stringfield, the clinic’s medical director, promises to “Treat you with kindness, love you enough to tell the truth, give you the best medical care we can provide and remain by your side through this difficult time.”

Whether they try to draw women in with crappy pizza or the promise of free access to a doctor, the big picture stays the same. The NIFLA FAQ page assures interested parties that all the bells and whistles of medical clinic status will not thwart the clinics’ endgame. ”If our center becomes a medical clinic, will we cease to provide crisis intervention counseling? No! A Pregnancy Resource Medical Clinic continues to provide crisis intervention counseling for women who are in crisis pregnancies.”

Despite their religious overtones, CPCs continue to draw public money, mostly from various shadowy corners of state budgets.

But that’s not the only boost they’re getting from states. Recently South Dakota legislators passed a bill that would have forced women not only to wait 72 hours before getting an abortion, but to pay a visit to an anti-abortion CPC as well.

So as one arm of the anti-choice movement tries to eviscerate the nationwide women’s health services delivered by Planned Parenthood for decades, another is helping boost a version that offers severely limited services stacked with an anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-sex, aggressively Christian worldview.

The anti-choice agenda is going ahead full-steam.

H/T: AlterNet