Here’s an easy question: Guess which organization’s former interim VP of communications is running a new project designed to undermine and possibly destroy pro-life pregnancy centers, a project allegedly using a private investigator making phone calls to former pregnancy center employees?
Did you guess Planned Parenthood?
See, that was easy, wasn’t it?
Equity Forward, which claims it is attempting “to ensure transparency and accountability among anti-reproductive health groups and individuals who are actively working to deny women access to services,” is run by Mary Alice Carter, a former interim VP of communications at Planned Parenthood.
The group is taking aim at the 2,700 locally-funded pregnancy centers around the nation that offer peer counseling, ultrasounds, material aid and post-abortive help for free.
How would you know that Equity Forward intends to smear the pregnancy centers? Try this, from the group’s website; it claims it “exists to create a window into what opponents of reproductive health care are doing, operationally and tactically, in order to expose malfeasance, fraud, unethical practices, and false information to hold them accountable.”
Jor-El Godsey, president of Heartbeat International, which serves over 2,400 pregnancy help organizations around the world, had a blunt message for the pro-abortion organization:
Rather than going on a wild goose chase against pro-life pregnancy help, abortion activists would do far better to investigate their own industry. Pregnancy centers are good for women and their children. It is abortion businesses—not pregnancy centers—that routinely physically harm their patients, profit off a woman’s desperation and break the law to maximize their bottom line. No woman has ever died or been harmed in a pregnancy center, and sadly, we can’t say the same about abortion businesses.
As Jay Hobbs of pregnancyhelpnews.com reports, just this past Monday, a licensed private investigator named Jane Ebert allegedly left a message on the personal cell phone of a former pregnancy center employee who currently works with a national pro-life group. Ebert claimed she was conducting an investigation for Equity Forward. The employee asked her former colleagues at the pregnancy center if Ebert had contacted them; they asserted she had not.
In addition to the first employee, the same day as that phone call, Ebert allegedly contacted a former pregnancy center employee in another state.
Pro-abortion activists posing as fake clients is also not uncommon, as Suzanne Burns wrote in April 2015. She noted:
According to Cindi Boston, CEO of Pregnancy Care Center in Springfield, Mo., a fake client surge is standard protocol both in lead-up and immediate wake of any report from NARAL Pro-Choice America. As Boston pointed out, NARAL’s recent report, “Crisis Pregnancy Centers Lie: The Insidious Threat To Reproductive Freedom,” released March 9, has been accompanied by the usual increase. “We feel the implications of any kind of report soon after, or sometimes, right before, we see an increase in what we feel like are ‘plants’ or possible plants,” Boston said.
If you have been contacted by Equity Forward or Jane Ebert, please contact Pregnancy Help News here.