Alternet on anti-choice crisis centers

Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte has a great piece up on Alternet today about anti-choice “pregnancy crisis centers� that pose as abortion clinics, Exposing Anti-Choice Abortion Clinics.
Here’s a telling snippet:

Anti-choice activists openly regard family planning clinics like Planned Parenthood as primarily feminist organizations that just so happen to provide health care. Sarah Wheat of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, who spent a considerable amount of time researching crisis pregnancy centers and has compiled a full report on them, explained that the first crisis pregnancy center was opened in 1967 by Robert Pearson as “the service arm of the anti-choice movement.” Crisis pregnancy centers have a long history of providing the absolute minimum of services required to maintain the illusion that they provide care while they further their actual goal of trying to persuade women out of abortion — sometimes using deceptive methods.
Peggy Romberg recollected that when she worked for Planned Parenthood in the ’80s, crisis pregnancy centers would actually provide shelter to pregnant women right up until the eligible date for legal abortion had passed. They would then turn the women out, and it was Romberg’s agency that was tasked with explaining to these desperate women that it was too late.

Yikes. Amanda goes onto note that many of these “clinics� have no medical staff whatsoever; the only “medical� treatment they offer is a pharmacy-bought pregnancy test. Make sure to read the whole article—it just gets worse.