Lessons from the Crisis Pregnancy Center: Anti-abortion Activism and the Architecture of Coercion
At the corners of Locust and South 12th streets in Philadelphia’s Washington Square neighborhood stand three institutions: the Mazzoni Center’s Washington West Project (figure 1), a satellite of the city’s oldest, ongoing LGBTQ-focused health center; Planned Parenthood’s Elizabeth Blackwell Center (figure 2), which provides abortion referrals among other reproductive health services; and the Community Women’s Center of Philadelphia (figure 3), a crisis pregnancy center. Each center occupies its respective, vernacular building, sheathed in Philadelphia’s familiar palette of brick and stucco. Yet the almost banal aesthetic cohesion of this urban intersection belies the forcefield of political opposition and protest that organizes the streetscape. While the Mazzoni Center and Planned Parenthood offer gender-affirming care and accurate information on abortion, the Community Women’s Center of Philadelphia attempts to convince abortion-seekers to carry their pregnancies to term with coercive emotional appeals, and often violent imagery and medical misinformation. Indeed, staffers of this crisis pregnancy center (and of others like it) do so on the basis of Evangelical, Catholic, or otherwise conservative religious ideology, which both positions the life of the unborn fetus as more valuable than that of a living, pregnant individual, and also denies the rights of children to sexuality– and gender-based confirming care.
Figure 1. The Mazzoni Center’s Washington West Project, which provides HIV and STI testing, Philadelphia. Photograph by M.C. Overholt, June 2022.
Figure 2. Planned Parenthood’s Elizabeth Blackwell Center, Philadelphia. Photograph by M.C. Overholt, June 2022.
The Community Women’s Center of Philadelphia is one of 2,546 crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in the United States, each broadly founded in the pro-life agenda of preventing abortions—at whatever cost. While many CPCs are strategically clustered around the nation’s remaining abortion clinics, or sited next to colleges and universities, they have also infiltrated rural towns all over the United States, assuming a prominent presence in electorally red and blue counties. According to a 2015 report published by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), most CPCs are affiliated with three of the pro-life movement’s most influential institutions: the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), which maintains at least 1,300 CPC affiliates, Heartbeat International with 1,800, and Care Net with over 1,100 affiliated CPCs. In total, CPCs today outnumber abortion clinics more than three to one, and that will likely swell to four to one in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade’s (1973) demise.[1] This ratio stands at odds with national sentiment on abortion. By most national polls’ standards, around two thirds of the country remains in support of Roe and the protection it offered of Americans’ rights to abortion care. On the basis of these seemingly conflicting set of statistics, understanding the political success of the anti-abortion movement—which ushered the conditions of possibility for the striking down of Roe in June 2022—is a confounding task. How could a movement with such marginal popular support have obtained so much political capital?
Figure 3. The Community Women’s Center of Philadelphia, a crisis pregnancy center. Photograph by M.C. Overholt, June 2022.
While many rightfully point to the growth of Evangelicalism within the United States' Christian population, and its parishioners’ waxing influence over the GOP platform, as the driving force behind the pro-life lobby, the understudied architectural and geographical tactics of the movement are also critically instructive. What began as a defensive response to the feminist abortion clinic, the crisis pregnancy center has become one of the anti-abortion movement’s most effective offensive strategies. In the absence of a majority of popular support, expanding its physical footprint over the course of the last half-century has allowed the American campaign to curtail abortion rights to claim the influence and stature necessary to transform American law permanently. This project was the result of decades of work on the part of pro-life’s “individual outreach stream”—what historian Ziad W. Munson observes as the most labor intensive and populated segment of the movement—which has positioned the construction, maintenance, and propagation of brick-and-mortar pro-life centers as central to the fight to overturn Roe.
The Community Women’s Center’s position vis-à-vis Philadelphia’s Planned Parenthood is not incidental, but born out of a national, decades-old anti-abortion playbook, which has long encouraged anti-abortion, largely non-medical “clinics” to co-locate in the same building as, or in direct proximity to, licensed clinics offering (or connecting patients to) pregnancy termination services. For central figures in the movement like Pro-life Action League founder Joseph (Joe) Scheidler, this geographical tactic served dual functions. The first, to intentionally deceive abortion seekers into entering CPC doors rather than those of the abortion clinic. The second, to reroute knowing individuals to the CPC by way of exposure to the rhetoric of coercive, anti-abortion “sidewalk counselors.” In his widely circulated 1985 manual Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion, Scheidler placed the latter, practical implication of this spatial tactic into stark relief:
Many pregnancy help offices are strategically set up in the same areas as abortion clinics and as close to the clinics as possible. Where there is an abortion clinic in an office building, pro-lifers can find space in the same building. That office gives you added advantages of access to the parking lot, the halls, and the lobby, so you can more easily talk to women heading for the abortion clinic. A workable plan is to get enough money to pay the rent for one month and make the escrow payment (usually an additional month’s rent), then challenge your supporters to help your pregnancy help office remain in the building.[2]
In Scheidler’s telling, proximity gives way to a cascading set of further spatial affordances: increasing access, on the part of the pro-life advocate or CPC staffer, to so-called “abortion-minded” women, as well as to the abortion clinics’ points of entry and avenues of passage for purposes of occupation. Beyond the functional role of the CPC itself, activists like Scheidler understood that the CPC’s physical presence and strategically considered siting could increase the influence and authority of the anti-abortion movement. It would be a generator of contact but also capital, a tangible reason for anti-abortion sympathizers to continue mailing in monthly checks to the movement.
“What began as a defensive response to the feminist abortion clinic, the crisis pregnancy center has become one of the anti-abortion movement’s most effective offensive strategies.”
Scheidler’s brief, two-page entry on CPCs in his more multi-faceted anti-abortion playbook—which espouses tactics as wide-ranging as billboard advertising, sit-ins, and harassing garbagemen picking up trash at the abortion clinic—was mimetic of another anti-abortion manual titled “How to Start and Operate Your Own Pro-life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center.” Published by Robert J. Pearson, a Catholic evangelist and founder of the first CPC (which is now named Pearson Place Pregnancy Resource Center of Honolulu, Hawai’i), the manual both articulated the “guiding principles” of the CPC (figure 4)—“to oppose abortion in all its forms, including the silent abortions of the pill and IUD . . . (and) to talk about God and the Mother’s relationship to Him”—as well as the architectural strategies needed to materialize them. As opposed to the more veiled rhetoric of CPCs today, which often cloak themselves in a more benign language of women’s holistic health, the guiding principles of the Pearson pamphlet are explicit in intent and allegiance to a particular anti-abortion, Catholic theology. Indeed, the goal to be “persuasive” and “firm”—here, euphemisms for coercive—was communicated as both central to the project of the pro-life clinic, and a foil to the pro-choice clinic’s central tenet of “choice.”
Figure 4. Statement of Principles in “How To Start And Operate Your Own Pro-life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center,” written by anti-abortion activist Robert J. Pearson, 1984. The pamphlet was included as an exhibit in the 1985 and 1986 U.S. Congressional oversight hearings on abortion clinic violence.
Like Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion, Pearson’s pamphlet also highlighted the importance of the CWC’s location in proximity to an abortion clinic. “The whole idea for this first location is if the girl who would be going to the abortion sees your office first,” Pearson elaborates, “she will probably come into your center.” Further deception is promoted through the pamphlet’s emphasis on the strategic articulation of a CWC’s name. A “neutral name” devoid of the term “pro-life” or any indicator of religious affiliation, Pearson suggests, should “be displayed on the office building and in advertising.” As in the urban fabric of American cities, in yellow pages CPCs deployed a strategy of adjacency aimed to confuse and mislead pregnant individuals seeking to terminate a pregnancy (figure 5).
Figure 5. “Accommodations Needed” subsection in “How To Start And Operate Your Own Pro-life Outreach Crisis Pregnancy Center,” in which Robert J. Pearson outlines the architectural agenda of his idealized crisis pregnancy center, 1984.
Beyond issues of geographical siting and rhetorical signaling, Pearson articulated a particular architectural agenda for his CPC, one based on isolating the pregnant individual, or “client,” from other pregnancy center visitors, and enforcing a continuous hierarchical relationship between staffer and client (figure 6). The CPC would include a cluster of distinct rooms—the reception room, the waiting room, two or more counseling rooms, a small general office, a room for running pregnancy tests, and a restroom—all separated by walls and secured doors, or in a pinch by a “portable screen.” Visitors entering the CPC would walk into the reception room, where they would be greeted by the receptionist alone. With other CPC visitors out of view in the waiting room, the reception room would be managed and controlled by the receptionist, who would bear the critical role of entrapping the guest, neither confirming nor denying her likely question as to whether this center indeed offered pregnancy termination services. In Pearson’s own advice to hopeful CPC initiators, this inaugural act of deception required a particular sensitivity to the circulation of sound and bodies, as well as the management of sightlines in the CPC:
When a client enters the office, she has often used the last of her courage just to turn the doorknob. For this reason, try to have the reception desk facing and in line with the entrance to the center, so that the client will see the receptionist first, and not other clients . . . Make sure all windows are curtained from any outside viewing into the waiting area. Be sure that the radio is on a pleasant station in the waiting room to muffle ensuing conversations.
Figure 6. Crisis Pregnancy Center advertising placed below a Planned Parenthood advertisement in the Pacific Bell Directory, c. 1985. Image included as an exhibit in the 1985 and 1986 U.S. Congressional oversight hearings on abortion clinic violence.
Upon entering the CPC, so-called clients were recast not as agents with recourse to their constitutionally guaranteed right of choice, but as docile bodies that could be ushered through an architectural and psychologically-charged labyrinth designed to fulfill an anti-abortion political agenda.
This fantasy of the submissive abortion seeker—rooted in the sexist ideological construction of women as inherently acquiescent—encountered friction both in the space of the CPC and in the nation’s capital. Over the course of several sessions in 1985 and 1986, the U.S. Congressional Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights convened to hear testimony on abortion clinic violence, focusing in large part on the testimony of abortion seekers and providers impacted by the violence of the anti-abortion movement. One woman from Fort Worth, Texas, Ann Gillespie, described her experience at a Texas Problem Pregnancy Center. After calling the center and receiving misleading information about the nature of the clinic—instead of relaying that the CPC did not administer abortions, the receptionist told Gillespie that abortions “ranged from $200 to $600” and that she would need to come in for further clarity—Gillespie arrived at the Problem Pregnancy Center and agreed to take a pregnancy test. Yet far from submitting to the will of the CPC staffers, Gillespie recalls resisting their coercion at every step—turning off the anti-abortion film she was compelled to watch, leaving her evaluation room, and walking around the CPC’s halls to find her girlfriend. In situations like that of Gillespie, when the limits of architectural control had been reached, CPC staff were forced to rely on other coercive tools in the Pearson toolkit: sending follow-up mail, sharing abortion-seekers’ private medical information with family, loved ones, and community members, as well as other shaming tactics.
With the cracks in Pearson’s triumphant story of the CPC as a coercive architectural machine thoroughly revealed through the Congressional hearings, the CPC movement received what anti-abortion activist Margaret Hartshorn called a “devastating” blow.[3] In Hartshorn’s first-hand account, the number of CPC clients decreased in many corners of the country, while law suits increased almost universally. Yet in the broader history of the anti-abortion movement, this moment in the late 1980s and early 1990s reinvigorated the CPC, rather than marking its demise. As Ronnee Schreiber has described in her 2008 book Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics, the CPC of the 1990s and 2000s did not fully abandon the Pearson agenda, but “modernized” by way of “incorporating women’s health frames into their repertoires.”[4] Formerly staffed by a mix of men and women, CWCs became predominantly women-led in this moment, and many of these women responded to pro-choice criticism of their bias and unprofessionalism by converting their CWCs into licensed medical clinics. Yet as sociologist Kimberly Kelly notes, while CWCs replaced Pearson-esque tactics such as “graphic visual aids . . . and misleading advertising with ultrasound services, standardized counselor training, and expanded practical services” in the 1990s, CWCs continue to deliver medical misinformation and remain guided by the pro-life movement’s mission: to prevent abortion, not to provide pregnant individuals with a full range of choices.[5] Under this so-called “woman-centered,” medical model, the number of CPCs in the United States has more than quadrupled since the early 1990s.
“it is critical for architects and architectural historians to return to the archives and observe how our spatial tactics . . . can be easily subverted”
Beyond serving as evidence of the pro-life movement’s political capital, the history of crisis pregnancy centers in the United States demonstrates the ideological flexibility of self-help architectural principles. In “Lessons from the Participatory Clinic,” I explored how feminist activists of the 1970s adopted the language of self-help as they designed and maintained Feminist Women’s Health Centers, the first consortium of explicitly feminist abortion clinics in the country. Feminist pamphlets, DIY manuals, and in situ architectural experimentation were deployed, in these spaces, in the service of making abortion more accessible, comfortable, and affordable. By contrast, the same self-help principles—those which encourage grassroots, direct action in the absence of state support, and feature an insistence that members of a political community know their needs and desires best, and therefore are best positioned to meet them—were applied in the CPC in the service of a political movement to coerce pregnant individuals out of terminating their pregnancy, even when an abortion is that individual’s expressed goal. Indeed, in the hands of anti-abortion activists, self-help appears more as a toolkit of oppression than of liberation.
The pro-life lobby’s geographical and architectural groundswell represents just one part of the movement’s many tactics that, in chorus, have resulted in the dismantling of Roe, yet it has played an essential role. As we face a national landscape in which abortion rights are significantly curtailed—an event that will disproportionately affect low-income women of color—it is critical for architects and architectural historians to return to the archives and observe how our spatial tactics, even those devised for progressive ends, can be easily subverted and appropriated. What remains, in this dire moment, is an urgent need for protest and refusal. Architects must render legible the pernicious spatial practices of the anti-abortion movement, but perhaps more importantly, they must deny their services to state actors who deprive abortion seekers of their right to choose, as well as the private corporations who vocally support or quietly affirm them.
CITATION
Overholt, M.C., “Lessons from the Crisis Pregnancy Center: Anti-abortion Activism and the Architecture of Coercion,” PLATFORM, June 24, 2022.
NOTES
[1] Estimates for current ratio are based on the Crisis Pregnancy Center Map, compiled and managed by Andrea Swartzendruber and Danielle Lambert, and the Abortion Facility Database, managed by the University of California San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) initiative.
[2] Joseph Scheidler, Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), 169.
[3] Margaret Hartshorn, “Pregnancy Help Centers, Abstinence, STDS, and Healing: Putting it All Together,” in Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-life Movement (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2003), 109.
[4] Ronnee Schreiber, Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 116.
[5] Kimberley Kelly, “In the Name of the Mother: Renegotiating Conservative Women’s Authority in the Crisis Pregnancy Center Movement,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 1 (2012), 212.
