We’ve been keeping you informed about our state government’s ongoing efforts to defame pro-life pregnancy resource centers (PRCs). Although these charitable organizations do heroic work to help women facing unplanned pregnancies, pro-abortion radicals have made it their mission to smear them for the “crime” of not supporting abortion.
In addition to filing a lawsuit to protect the First Amendment rights of these centers, we have been filing public records requests to uncover more about how and why our state government is spending over a million dollars in taxpayer money to go after PRCs. We recently filed a request with the Attorney General’s Office to review whether the Commonwealth has received any legitimate complaints against PRCs over the past two years that could justify this smear campaign. What we found was shocking.
As it turns out, only a handful of complaints have ever been filed against the centers with the AG, and only four were filed in the past two years since Roe v. Wade fell and attacks on PRCs increased. Of these four complaints, two dealt with issues completely unrelated to the State’s allegations against PRCs, such as employment grievances. This means that only two complaints over the past two years have alleged any kind of “deceptive practices” by PRCs. Yet, Massachusetts public officials consider PRCs to pose such a threat to women’s health that they spent a million dollars of your taxpayer money to smear them.
Even more scandalously, however, we were able to verify that these two remaining complaints were filed by biased pro-abortion activists – one of whom was impersonating a confused client.
Yes, you read that correctly. Radical pro-abortion activists are filing false complaints against PRCs, pretending to be women in need, to try to shut down these charitable centers. While we can’t share all the information we have because we want to protect the PRCs targeted by these complaints, we can share some of the most egregious details.
In one of the complaints, the alleged victim claimed that she called her local PRC and spoke with someone in the office, suggesting that she was seeking care. Supposedly, after asking a few questions, she realized the center was really a “sketchy place” full of “religious conservatives who might not even be real healthcare providers at all.” She said the center was “very misleading and scary” and ended her complaint by stating, “I don’t think places like this should exist.”
This complaint immediately struck us as suspicious. The PRC it targeted clearly lists all of its services on its website, which don’t include abortion. It seemed highly unlikely that this alleged victim was actually confused about the center’s services. The complaint read more like it was written by an undercover abortion activist than by a confused woman with an unplanned pregnancy.
Sure enough, it was. When we Googled the email address attached to the complaint, we were able to confirm that the person who filed it worked in a senior position at a prestigious Massachusetts hospital and had a long history of advocating for abortion rights and railing against PRCs. She had targeted specific centers in Massachusetts, calling for them to be shut down. She had even given a presentation to her work colleagues called “Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Why We Hate Them & If You Don’t Hate Them, You Should.” Most damningly, however, we found that the year before filing her complaint with the AG, she had protested the very same PRC that she named in her complaint, calling it a “fake clinic.” For obvious reasons, this didn’t fit with her claim that she had no idea what the center was or what services it offered when she filed her complaint.
In other words, this pro-abortion activist lied on an official complaint to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office. She painted herself as an unwitting client to a pro-life center who was “confused,” “upset,” and “scared” when she learned that the center was a PRC, rather than an abortion clinic. But in reality, she knew exactly what the center was. Knowing full well that her complaint misrepresented the truth, she nevertheless signed a certification that stated, “the information I have provided is true and correct to the best of my knowledge.” And she did all of this to attempt to close down this local PRC because she saw it as a threat to abortion in Massachusetts.
While these complaints have thankfully been rare, they are representative of the tactics that radical pro-abortion activists have employed and the lengths to which they are willing to go to try to shut down pro-life pregnancy resource centers. Nothing is off the table: not vandalism, not censorship, not threatening physician licenses, not defaming centers, and as we can now confirm, not even falsifying official complaints against them.
It should not be lost on anyone that the activists crying the loudest about the “deceptive tactics” of pro-life centers are the ones who are actually doing the deceiving. In fact, the entire crusade against PRCs, pushed by organizations like Planned Parenthood, Reproductive Equity Now, and our own state government, is premised on falsehoods. But when abortion rights are sacred, the end justifies the means.
MFI is doing everything we can to expose the lies of pro-abortion activists and protect the life-saving work of pregnancy resource centers. We need your support to continue shining light in the darkness. Would you join us?
