Pro-Abortion Officials Must Stop Weaponizing their Power to Attack Pregnancy Resource Centers
By Marie Tasy, Executive Director, New Jersey Right to Life
A recent article in NJ.com, an on-line news source attacking Pregnancy Resource Centers, quoted Dr. Kristyn Brandi, an OB GYN and former board Chair of the Pro-abortion activist organization Physicians for Reproductive Health.
Brandi, a self-professed “pro-abortion doctor” and biased media favorite, is frequently known to provide misleading and untruthful information when it comes to all things having to do with abortion.
At one point, she says, “People will come with their ultrasound images from these places, which are often not done by trained sonographers, so I’ll look at those pictures and say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t what I am looking at.’”
Is it possible that an OB GYN does not know what she is looking at when she is handed an ultrasound image of a baby. Or is she working side by side with pro-abortion lawmakers and Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin as part of a larger, concerted effort to target, malign, and shut down New Jersey Pregnancy Centers? Whether one or both of these are true, the timing is indeed suspect.
On November 14, bill A4332 was scheduled for a New Jersey assembly committee hearing that would restrict the performance of ultrasounds for pregnancy resource centers but specifically excluded abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood from the same restriction. The bill had no legislative basis and the sponsor, when questioned, could not supply a reason for the bill’s introduction. The committee amended the bill, but it still contains language that marginalizes Pregnancy Resource Centers and sets a dangerous precedent for future legislation.
On November 22, the week after the November 14th hearing, the nj.com article appeared online. This was also the same day that First Choice Women’s Center filed an appeal before the Third Circuit in an on-going case against Platkin for an unlawful subpoena served on the Center. Platkin’s subpoena seeks information about the Center’s donors, advertisements, personnel, and allied relationships over the last 10 years.
As we have come to expect from nj.com, the reporter who wrote the story conveniently left out the fact that emails, obtained through a public records request, showed that the attorney general’s office colluded with Planned Parenthood by asking them to preview and edit a draft of the Consumer Alert warning about the pregnancy centers before it was issued.
The sequence of events calls into question whether Platkin served First Choice with the subpoena ‘to save face’ because his office could not provide any evidence of wrongdoing by the Centers except for the fact that he colluded with Planned Parenthood to write the Consumer Alert and then promoted Planned Parenthood on the same website.
These types of incidents against Pregnancy Centers are not just occurring in NJ; they are occurring nation-wide. In fact, sixteen Attorneys General issued an Open Letter Regarding CPC Misinformation and Harm which reads very much like the NJ Consumer Alert. In the letter, the attorneys general vow to “take numerous actions” against the Centers because they do not provide abortion. As expected, Platkin is one of the signatories.
A Reproductive Freedom Alliance, formed by twenty three Governors, which includes pro-abortion New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, boasts their extreme pro-abortion advocacy and the weaponizing of their power by their offices to launch strikes against Pregnancy Resource Centers. Their webpage specifically says that “members continue to work closely with reproductive rights leaders and organizations.” It makes it noticeably clear that they work with Abortion Businesses like Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion extremist groups to formulate pro-abortion laws, policies as well as coordinated efforts to shut down pregnancy resource centers. These leaders and organizations are known to be the major political supporters of these Governors, who, in turn, enriched them with hundreds of millions of our tax dollars.
At last year’s March for Life, pro-life New Jersey Congressman Chris Smith pointed out that 828 babies’ lives were saved over the last five years by the Pregnancy Resource centers. “There are more than 2,700 pregnancy resource centers throughout the United States – each and every one of them an oasis of love, compassion, empathy, respect and care for both mothers and their children,” he told the hundreds of thousands attending the March for Life.
Every time a mother chooses to give birth to her baby because of the help of these Centers, the Abortion Industry loses money and potential supporters. That is why they are using their political capital to shut down these Centers.
Pregnancy Resource Centers should be praised, not maligned for the invaluable help they provide for both mother and child. These all-out assaults against them must end. We look to the new Congress and the incoming administration to employ actions and adopt policies to halt these unjust and unwarranted attacks against these Centers’ life-saving work.
Published in National Right to Life News