Antiabortion Centers Offer Sonograms to Further Cause

From an article of the same title by Michael Alison Chandler in The Washington Post:

On June 6, Cheryl Smith took her last $600 and drove her teenage daughter from Baltimore to Severna Park to get an abortion. When they got there, a receptionist told them the clinic had changed hands. The abortion provider had moved a few miles away, she said, but the new clinic would offer a pregnancy test and sonogram for free. The Smiths stayed. After they saw a picture of the fetus at 21 weeks with arms and legs and a face, their thoughts of termination were gone. "As soon as I seen that, I was ready. It wasn't no joke. It was real," Makiba Smith, 16, said. "It was like, he's not born to the world yet, but he is inside of me growing." With its ultrasound machine and its location, the Severna Park Pregnancy Clinic demonstrates two of the most important tactics in an intensifying campaign to woo women away from abortion clinics. Antiabortion organizations in recent years have added medical services to hundreds of Christian-oriented pregnancy counseling centers nationwide. Many of these antiabortion clinics have opened in or near places where women go to end pregnancies... By many accounts, the ultrasound exams have proven effective in convincing women to stay pregnant. A 2005 survey by Care Net, a Sterling-based network of about 1,000 antiabortion pregnancy centers in the United States and Canada, found that 72 percent of women who were initially "strongly leaning" toward abortion decided to carry their pregnancies to term after seeing a sonogram. Fifty percent made the same choice after counseling alone. Such results have led antiabortion forces to buy more ultrasound machines, which can cost as much as $50,000 each. In the past 2 1/2 years, the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, estimates it has helped 200 pregnancy centers buy the machines... Defending the decision to locate antiabortion pregnancy centers near abortion clinics, Hartshorn said abortion foes are not seeking "to be deceptive or to trick people, but to be right where they are when they are making decisions." Some Feel Deceived But many women say they have felt duped. The National Abortion Federation has received hundreds of calls and e-mails from women who say they went into pregnancy centers with vague or confusing names, many of them found under "abortion services" headings in the phone book. Rather than receiving unbiased counseling on all of their legal options, these women said, they found themselves listening to frightening, sometimes false, information... For Cheryl and Makiba Smith, ending up at the wrong clinic was a mistake they say they are deeply glad to have made. "God sent me to that clinic," Cheryl Smith said.