When Looking into Crisis Pregnancy Centers
By Avery Edwards
Photo credit: Hannah Levitan of The Tulane Hullabaloo
This summer, I worked as a research assistant for Dr. Clare Daniel on an upcoming research project involving crisis pregnancy centers across the United States. Dr. Clare Daniel is an administrative associate professor of Women’s Leadership and the Assistant Director of Community Engagement for Newcomb Institute of Tulane University. In addition to her work with the university, she is on the advisory board of the New Orleans Maternal and Child Health Coalition, which focuses on centering black birthing people in the discussion of maternal/child health to address racial disparities in birth outcomes. In short, Dr. Daniel’s work revolves around the study of reproductive politics and the changing political climate of reproductive justice in the U.S.
Crisis pregnancy centers are organizations that claim to provide counseling for those who are pregnant and need resources but ultimately withhold valuable information about access to abortions and birth control options. Crisis pregnancy centers are typically funded by tax dollars and religious organizations, which creates a belief conflict with the option for abortion. The main threat with seeking care from a CPC is that there are typically no medical professionals within the establishment, and they use fear tactics and misinformation to shame and intimidate an individual out of a safe and legal abortion.
As a research assistant, I took on the role of identifying contact information (emails and contact pages) of every crisis pregnancy center across the United States. The crisis pregnancy centers were stratified in alphabetical order by state and then further by town/city. The original list of crisis pregnancy centers was populated through a database that collected locations, which led to discrepancies in addresses, names of organizations, and accessibility to said pregnancy centers. The majority of my time was spent investigating the name of a listed pregnancy center to determine if it was even an open facility. The paradox of my research was that I was trying to establish contact with the crisis pregnancy center despite the nature of the research being to uncover the misleading tendencies of CPCs when a pregnant person comes to them with questions. RRRH and my position as Dr. Daniel’s research assistant taught me about the vast prevalence of crisis pregnancy centers and the importance of access to reproductive care while also honing my time management and professional relationship development skills.