Full text:
BOWIE, Md., Jan. 26 - Sixteen months ago, Andrea Brown, 24 years old and unmarried, was desperate for an abortion, fearing the disappointment of her parents and the humiliation she might face.
While frantically searching the telephone book one day, she came across the Bowie Crofton Pregnancy Center and Medical Clinic, a church-financed organization that provides counseling and education about sexual abstinence. The receptionist told Ms. Brown that the clinic did not perform abortions or make referrals but that she could come in for an ultrasound to make sure her six-and-a-half-week pregnancy was viable. When she did, everything changed.
"When I had the sonogram and heard the heartbeat - and for me a heartbeat symbolizes life - after that there was no way I could do it," Ms. Brown said recently as she revisited the clinic and watched her daughter, Elora, now 9 months old, play at her feet.
In the battle over abortion, opponents say they have discovered a powerful new tool: sonograms. And over the last 18 months, they have started major fund-raising campaigns to outfit Christian crisis pregnancy centers with ultrasound equipment.
The groups, including the Southern Baptist Convention and the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, have spent $20,000 to $30,000 apiece on ultrasound machines, and some of the clinics are vying for more expensive state-of-the art machines that show the fetus in three dimensions. Focus on the Family has budgeted $4.2 million in the current fiscal year for the machines and on training on how to use them.
The Bowie clinic, which bought its machine itself, has been a pioneer for such groups. The fund-raising is a sign of how the opponents of abortion are dividing their efforts - seeking to chip away at abortion through legislation but also waging a battle for women's hearts. And it comes at a time when leaders of both major political parties are talking about making abortion rare.
President Bush said in a recent interview that he considered it his duty to help people "understand there are alternatives to abortion, like adoption." And Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, recently affirmed her support of abortion rights but said that the opposing sides should find "common ground" to reduce abortion by preventing unwanted pregnancies though sexual education and abstinence counseling.
Places like the Bowie center are a front line in the struggle over abortion, and the clinic reported to the police that on the eve of the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision last month, its windows were smashed and it was spray painted with graffiti saying "Choice."
Such centers, many financed by churches and church groups, try to persuade women through counseling to carry their pregnancies to term, and often provide prenatal care and pregnancy tests and sometimes clothing and supplies.
Supporters of abortion rights say that a large number of the centers lure women by leaving the impression that they do, in fact, perform abortions and subsequently do not give young women a full picture of their choices.
"Generally, their treatment of women who come in is coercive," said Susanne Martinez, vice president of public policy at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "From the time they walk in to these centers, they are inundated with information that is propaganda and that has one goal in mind. And that is to have women continue with their pregnancies."
Most centers still do not have ultrasound machines. But at those that do, the results of performing sonograms have been startling, abortion opponents say. A survey by the Heidi Group, a Christian evangelical nonprofit organization that advises such centers on fund-raising and administration, found that those using counseling alone reported persuading 70 percent of women considering abortion to abandon the idea. In centers with ultrasound machines, that number jumped to 90 percent, said Carol Everett, the group's chief executive. Such statistics could not be independently verified.
Haha - like Planned Parenthood doesn't dabble in their own version of propaganda with "one goal in mind" - to sell the abortion.