Animating and sustaining outrage: The place of crisis pregnancy centers in abortion justice

Abstract

In 2021, U.S. states enacted 106 different abortion restrictions, the highest number of any year since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. Inspiring the most public outcry is Texas's S.B. 8, which bans abortion after six weeks and allows private citizens to sue those performing abortions or aiding in this process. Abortion justice supporters should be enraged—but only in small part due to Texas’ ban, any of the other 105 enacted restrictions, or the likelihood that the Supreme Court soon will hand down a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. We should be enraged because the anti-abortion movement has chipped away at the accessibility of abortion to the degree that the legal right to abortion means far less than it should. Key to this chipping away has been crisis pregnancy centers—religiously motivated, anti-abortion non-profit organizations that critics describe as “fake women's health clinics.” Today, there are 2500 crisis pregnancy centers and just 738 abortion clinics in the U.S., numbers that were reversed 30 years ago. And yet, countering crisis pregnancy centers has been less central to the work of abortion justice advocates than advancing crisis pregnancy centers has been to the anti-abortion movement. In this article, I argue that focusing on crisis pregnancy centers can provide new opportunities for both understanding the contemporary abortion landscape and also for advancing abortion justice activism. To put a finer point on it, I argue that centering crisis pregnancy centers in our development of what Sydney Calkin terms “the political geography of abortion” is one way to animate outrage among those who have not been involved in abortion justice work previously and to sustain outrage among feminist activists who have been worn down by decades of anti-abortion advancement.