Pregnancy resource centers — pregnancy clinics, pregnancy help organizations, whatever moniker you prefer — exist for a singular purpose. That purpose is to save children who are at risk from abortion. No other organization in American life is focused on that work in the way these centers are. Everything else a center might do is legitimate only insofar as it serves that end.
That sounds obvious. It is not treated as obvious right now. The pregnancy center movement is being pulled in two directions at once, and both pulls come from inside the pro-life house. From one side comes the insistence that centers broaden their mission until it encompasses nearly every social good. From the other comes the insistence that centers enlist in a legislative campaign to prosecute women for murder, and the accusation that they are failing in their duty to serve God and save children if they decline. Neither pressure is a division within the movement. Both are distractions from it.
Some context on the vantage point. This is work I have been doing with pregnancy centers since the late 1980s — which is a way of admitting my age. It began with public speaking instruction, a program called the Pro-Life Speaker Seminar that is still running today, teaching center staff how to represent their organizations more effectively in public. The best way to move forward in ministry is to say yes when people ask you to do something, whether or not you were looking for it. Somebody asked whether I did banquets. I said sure. That was more than thirty years ago, and fundraising work has been part of the portfolio ever since. More recently the centers have become the tip of the spear for the Contend for Life seminars now running around the country, equipping pastors and lay leaders not only to speak more effectively from the pulpit on abortion but to make the scientific, moral, and biblical case for life. I speak at the conferences — Heartbeat, Care Net — and the questions that come up there are the questions this article is about.
The Pull From the Left: Pro-Abundant Life
The first pressure is the argument that centers must shift from being pro-life to being “pro-abundant life.” Under that banner, a center is told it must take on fatherhood initiatives, family formation, discipleship, integration into local churches, and a list of further obligations that grows every year. The concern is straightforward: these centers are being handed a job description that would overwhelm Superman.
The concern is not with the individual services. Many of them are defensible, and some are demonstrably useful. Consider STI testing. There are centers that offer it, and the rationale is sound. The testing brings people through the door, and the one thing the center knows for certain about those people is that they are sexually active. Testing is paired immediately with counseling. If a center can help someone toward a more biblical understanding of their body and of human sexuality, it may preempt that person from ever becoming a client in the first place. Everyone should be able to agree that it would be better for women not to face unintended pregnancies at all.
Fatherhood initiatives have a similar logic behind them. In many communities, the single greatest factor determining whether a woman has an abortion is what the father of that child says to her. When a man pushes hard for abortion, a woman often lacks the psychological or intestinal fortitude to refuse him. Centers that work to reach the man are working on the decision that actually decides the outcome.
Discipleship follows the same pattern, and it illustrates the right model. Most centers recognize that they do not have the resources to take a woman who has made a decision for Christ and disciple her all the way to maturity. So they work with a group like Amy Ford’s Embrace Grace, get the woman established in an area church, and function as a bridge. That is what a healthy center looks like: it coordinates with other agencies rather than absorbing their functions, and it gets the same benefit without diluting its own resources or attention. There are a great many ministries doing work that a center does not have to do itself.
So the standard is not whether a program falls outside the narrowest definition of abortion work. The standard is whether the center takes its eye off the ball. The end game has to remain the person at risk of being intentionally killed, which is the unborn child inside that woman’s body. Depending on locality and demographics, different centers will adopt different programs designed to feed into a life-affirming decision. As long as that is understood, the arrangement is fine.
What is not fine is the claim being made by some pro-life groups that the entire movement must adopt a whole-life or pro-abundant-life posture in order to honor God. No. You honor God when you save that child. If a program helps save that child and a center can demonstrate that it is effective at doing so, there is no argument here. But the demand that the movement take on every adjacent cause should raise a question: why are we beginning to sound like our secular critics, who insist that no one is legitimately pro-life unless they have adopted their entire agenda? There is only so much any organization can do.
There is a further danger on this side, and it deserves to be named plainly. Centers can drift into becoming nothing more than a diaper and wipe service. The pressure toward that drift is real and it is human. It is extraordinarily hard to be a pregnancy center counselor, or to be the person in the room during an ultrasound, because sometimes it does not go well. The ultrasound is performed, they see the baby, and then they realize that when that woman gets off the table they are the last people who will ever see that child alive. That is very difficult work, and it earns no applause. People will call it controversial — why saving the life of an unborn child is controversial has never made sense to me, but they say it. Handing out diapers and wipes, by contrast, earns a pat on the back all day long.
The drift is not as widespread as some critics believe. But in some places it has happened: organizations that have morphed into a helping-hands ministry and out of a life-saving one. Where that has occurred, the remedy is board changes and possibly director changes, because the main thing has to stay the main thing. There is a simple diagnostic. Look at the mission statement. If a line about saving children from the intentional death offered by the abortion industry does not appear in it, the center is doing it wrong.
Banquet work supplies a second diagnostic. The number to listen for is not total clients served. A center may report that it provided services to 181 clients, and that can mean diapers, wipes, and whatever else. The number that matters is the percentage of abortion-minded women reached and the concrete outcome among them. When someone says that 81 women who were scheduled for an abortion or were abortion-minded changed their minds, that commands attention. Call it the conversion rate. If eighty percent of the clients walking through the door are abortion-minded or abortion-vulnerable, and through prayer, counseling, and ultrasound ninety percent of them choose to give life to their child — and there are many centers posting exactly those numbers — those folks are doing it right. There are banquets where you leave thinking you have just helped raise money for a social relief agency, and there are banquets that send you back to the hotel too energized to sleep. The difference between them is measurable.
The Pull From the Right: Equal Protection
The second pressure comes from equal protection advocates, who argue that a center genuinely committed to abolishing abortion will join the push for bills that would abolish abortion and prosecute women for murder. One spokesperson recently put it directly: if we really care about deterring women from abortion, the only way to do it is to threaten to criminalize them.
Whenever the term equal protection comes up, the first question worth asking is: who are you protecting, and how effectively will what you propose actually protect that person? The primary goal of a pregnancy center is to protect the lives of unborn children from the threat of abortion. Equal protection laws do not accomplish that, for several reasons.
The first is that they cannot be passed. They have not been passed. They have not come close to being passed anywhere. What is intriguing is the explanation offered for this record: that pro-life people will not join the effort. If you cannot bring along the people who are already closely aligned with you, what possible basis is there for believing you will bring along people who are actively opposed to you? This is the point at which the argument loses me — a total inability to build coalitions with the very people who must be persuaded to win, followed by blame directed at those who decline. That is on the advocates, not on the people they failed to convince.
Notice, too, where the push is made. It is always made in states that are already largely pro-life. At that point the advocates are being incrementalists themselves. Try it in California. Try it in Illinois or New York and see how it goes. The foundation has to be built first.
Then there is enforceability. Even if such laws could be passed — and they cannot — they would be unenforceable. You cannot find the drugs. A chemical abortion presents exactly like an ordinary miscarriage, and nobody is going to go looking for it. Investigating all of it is logistically impossible, because miscarriage is unbelievably common.
And there is the political cost, which is already being incurred. The suggestion that these advocates will not be used rhetorically as a boogeyman is ludicrous; it has already begun. The New York Times assembled a substantial exposé identifying them as people who intend to come after women and jail them for abortion. In California, Illinois, and New York this makes little difference, because those states are going to say horrible things about pro-life people regardless. The damage lands in the states in the mushy middle. Those states now feel the threat, the threat will be pushed hard, and the people pushing it have the resources to do so. Voters there may well conclude that it is better to go with the pro-aborts they know than with people they do not know who look like lunatics to them.
Even successful legislation demonstrates the underlying problem. Where six-week abortion laws have passed, pregnancy center staff report that women in those states begin to panic and look for ways to obtain an abortion earlier. The worldview work has not been done, so the law changes the timing rather than the decision.
Abortion Pill Reversal and the Question That Was Dodged
One exchange captures what is at stake for centers specifically. In a recent interview, an equal protection advocate who also directs a pregnancy center argued that centers need not worry about frightening women away from their ministry, because a sufficiently tough law on the books would keep women from considering abortion in the first place. She was then asked a direct question: if a woman came to your center and said she had taken the first pill, and you administered abortion pill reversal, would you report her? She dodged it. Her answer was that very few centers have abortion pill reversal technology.
That is not true. Even centers that do not offer APR themselves have access to abundant referral networks that can get it done. At a center in Fallbrook where I spoke, they had three abortion pill reversals that week. Should there be more of it? Yes — the main obstacle is that it is not widely known, and there has been an aggressive pushback from abortion-minded states making all kinds of false claims about it. California and Colorado both attempted to tell people that offering APR violated professional standards. That is simply untrue. The research exists, and it is cited in Pivot. In sixty-five to sixty-eight percent of applications, the lives of those unborn children are saved.
It is worth being clear about what the treatment is, because the mystique around it is manufactured. Abortion pill reversal is progesterone. That is all. It is not some bizarre esoteric drug that has to be hunted down. Women who have trouble maintaining pregnancies use it all the time. It is safe, it is legal, and it should be done. Every center should be trying to find a medical director who will get on board with making it happen, and where that is not possible, referral networks can get progesterone to these women.
Why the Worldview Work Cannot Be Skipped
The response to all of this from immediatist and equal protection advocates is that those of us who insist on doing the worldview work first are cowards, waiting for universal agreement before we lift a finger to protect unborn humans. That is not a fair assessment, and the reason is structural.
This nation lives and dies legally on the consent of the governed. It is written into our founding documents: laws are passed with the consent of the governed. We do not have that consent on abortion right now. We barely have it in conservative churches.
Consider how little an unenforced statute accomplishes. There are laws on the books all over the country that nobody enforces — adultery laws, for instance. One state discussed in Pivot still imposes a fine for a conviction. The fine is ten dollars, and no one has been tried or convicted under it in a very long time. In the United Kingdom, there are anti-abortion laws on the books; over the last twenty years they produced four convictions, and nearly all of those were confessions. A statute is only the beginning. As Craig Ireland points out, you can pass a statute and have it be the law on the books, and it will be a statute that dies standing up. You need courts willing to enforce it, juries willing to convict, judges willing to hear cases, and appellate courts willing to affirm. That work requires the partnership of culture, and the advocates pressing hardest are tone-deaf to it.
So it is not cowardice. There is a difference between making excuses for inaction and recognizing political realities. What these advocates are really saying is that if we lived under a theonomy — if we could simply declare God’s will to be the law of the land — then we could win. God did not set it up that way. He chose to give people free will, and people exercise it, and people can be stiff-necked. That means we have to persuade. And these folks are conspicuously unpersuasive, because they do not want to do the persuasion work. It is hard. It is far easier to grandstand on legislation, or to steamroller a room full of people at the Southern Baptist Convention who had no idea what was coming, and then declare a moral victory, having accomplished nothing.
There is also a historical amnesia at work in the claim that we are the old guard and they are the new. People assume that when they arrive on the scene, nothing from the previous fifty years counts. They forget the Moral Majority. They forget that there was a serious push for a constitutional amendment, and that it failed. We have failed repeatedly, and because the hard work has gone undone we are watching states fall — Missouri, of all places, and Ohio. Missouri may get a chance to fight back in November, God willing. But no one should imagine there is a magic wand. And to those who call this impiety on the grounds that God can do anything: yes, God certainly can do anything. He has also chosen to work through persuaded people. If you do not lay the moral foundation, there is no reason your nation cannot turn into a death cult. We already have states where it is legal to kill adults through physician-assisted suicide. Look at Canada.
The work begins in the church, and the numbers explain why. Roughly forty percent of women having abortions are in church at the time of their abortion. How are we going to win states and secular culture when we cannot win in the church? If you wanted to shut down Planned Parenthood, the fastest route would be to keep churchgoing people out of their offices. Most organizations cannot survive a forty percent drop in clientele.
Doing that requires getting into churches and helping people build a biblical worldview. It means saying something strange out loud. It is a weird thing to look a room full of pastors in the face and tell them we have to teach our people not to intentionally kill their children. It is an odd sentence. But it has to be said, because it has gone unsaid, and that vacuum has been filled by the language of the abortion industry.
And education does work. There is a story I tell in Pivot about a man who approached protesters chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” and simply asked them which river and which sea. They had no idea it was the Jordan and the Mediterranean. He showed them a map and asked where, under their proposal, all the Jews would go, and all the Arab Israelis. Once it became clear to them, the vast majority moved off the position. People can be reached. That is the whole premise.
What to Tell the Immediatists
It is also worth keeping the scale of this dispute in perspective, because the echo chamber distorts it. Here is a test anyone can run. Walk into your church or your college and career fellowship cold, without announcing who you are or what you are about, and ask a simple question: who are the abolitionists? Virtually everyone will reference the Civil War. The reason this feels like an enormous conflict is the algorithm. You start clicking on these things on social media and it feeds you more of them. The vast majority of Christian people in the United States have no idea these folks exist.
So the message to pregnancy centers is not a call to battle. It is a call to focus. Tell the immediatists this: our job right now is to stand in the gap and protect the lives of unborn children who are at risk from abortion today. Your goal is to pass a law at some indeterminate point in the future. Go do you. We are going to stay focused on this. And if you are serious, your task is to assemble a coalition of people who agree with you and pass laws the consent of the governed can get behind.
That is not hostility. It is a division of labor that respects what pregnancy centers actually are. They are the tip of the spear, and the spear points at one thing. The long, hard, educational work in front of us — getting into churches, forming worldviews, persuading a post-Christian nation one room at a time — will eventually spill over into communities and then into states. Until that work is done up front, we are never going to win.
God bless our pregnancy centers.