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 A Legal Offensive
New York’s top law-enforcement official has opened an investigation which seems clearly designed to undermine the work of crisis-pregnancy centers—and thus eliminate competition for the abortion industry.

On January 4, New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer served subpoenas on two crisis-pregnancy centers on Staten Island and in Manhattan. The identical documents said that Spitzer was investigating the centers because of his “good faith belief that the entities named . . . may have violated one or more . . . statutes by misrepresenting the services they provide, diagnosing pregnancy and advising persons on medical options without being licensed to do so, and/or providing deceptive and inaccurate medical information.”

Chris Slattery immediately warned his pro-life colleagues that the subpoenas represented the first volley in “a major legal offensive against New York-area pro-life crisis centers.” The attorney general, he predicted, was offering “a New Year’s present” to his pro-abortion supporters, and would soon serve similar subpoenas on other crisis-pregnancy centers. The ultimate goal of the legal inquiry, he charged, was “to destroy the crisis-pregnancy center movement in New York.”

Slattery is the founder and president of Expectant Mother Care, an organization that operates five crisis-pregnancy centers (CPCs) in New York City. A former advertising executive who now works full-time for the pro-life cause, he is determined not only to overcome this legal offensive against his organization, but in the process to let Americans know about the important work being done by CPCs.
 
How widespread is the Attorney General’s investigation? How many crisis-pregnancy centers received subpoenas?

Chris Slattery: So far, only three. But then in the original Operation Rescue case [a lawsuit in which Slattery was one of many pro-life defendants], it took months to serve everyone.

I don’t know if they’re making an aggressive effort to serve these subpoenas. I don’t think they are. They served the first center on a Friday, and they didn’t serve the next center until the following Wednesday. And they may be taking on just a handful of centers, because they don’t want the work of going after all of them.

Expectant Mother Care has not been served with a subpoena yet. But we’re doing all the same things as the three centers which have been cited. (In fact, in the case of one of the centers that was named, I was operating that center for a year and a half; so I’ll probably be part of the case, just for that reason.) So they haven’t come after us yet, but they will. If they’re going to go after three centers, why not go after all of them?

Also, bear in mind that 16 different centers, operated by 10 different organizations, were sponsoring the same advertisements. So an attack on the centers for deceptive advertisements applies to all of us. If they go after the centers for using lay counselors, that applies to all of us, too.

Ever since the first subpoenas were served, you have been doing everything in your power to call public attention to this investigation. Why do you think this is such an important case?

Slattery: This is a great opportunity to awaken Catholics to the work CPCs do. CPCs are the heart and soul of the pro-life movement; this is our compassionate wing.

President Bush specifically endorsed the good work of CPCs in his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention last year. We’d love to see him come forward and defend us now.

What’s at stake is the heart and soul and salvation of our entire CPC movement. The New York Attorney General can affect law throughout the country. He has attacked the very nature of lay crisis counseling.

That is the essential point of the Attorney General’s investigation, isn’t it—the fact that your CPCs use lay counselors?

Slattery: Our movement has been predominantly organized by, and has carried out its counseling with, lay trained staff and volunteers. This is not uncommon in the world of crisis counseling.

For instance, what better counselors do you find in the field of alcohol rehabilitation but former alcoholics? These are ordinary lay people who counsel and give advice to people in the throes of alcoholism. The same is true with drug rehabilitation services, which are often headed by former addicts. And how many hotlines are staffed by lay people? How many homeless shelters?

Look, I’m not against professionalism. We bring professionals into our centers: technicians who operate our ultrasound machines and the like. But what the Attorney General is saying is because CPC counselors are counseling women on medical options, to do so unlicensed is illegal—practicing medicine without a license.

We say that’s nonsense, because this is a traditional field of lay counseling. Individuals—mostly women of various adult ages—have volunteered to serve their sisters amidst unexpected pregnancies. Often they are acting out of spiritual concern. These are corporal and spiritual works of mercy: counseling the doubtful, instructing the ignorant, sheltering the homeless.

To deny that this work can be done by lay people is to deny our freedom of religion, our freedom of assembly, our freedom of speech.
This attack is a fundamental attack on our First Amendment rights and on church ministries. How many ministries are reaching out to homeless people, AIDS victims, or street kids? All these efforts involve, to some degree, discussion of the medical options these people must choose. If the Attorney General says we are advising people of their “medical options,” and uses that pretext as a mean of quashing our free speech, then he is an enemy of the Constitution, and no friend of the First Amendment. We have called on the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], and all those who defend free-speech rights, to support us in this fight.

Is this really a question of medical counseling? Is that really the focus of the CPCs?

Slattery: Abortion is the greatest moral and social dilemma of our age. It is the leading cause of elective death in the US. It is not just a medical issue. To assign this question to a medical category, so that CPCs can be licensed out of existence, is clearly the act of a band of militant pro-abortion zealots.

The Attorney General has hired two long-term militant feminists and abortion advocates to supervise this attack on the CPCs: Jennifer Brown, the former head of NOW [the National Organization for Women] in New York and director of the ACLU’s abortion-rights project; and Hillary Riceman, who was the lead attorney in the State of New York’s attack on the so-called “gag rule” in the Rust v. Sullivan case. It’s ironic, isn’t it, that the woman who was the leading advocate for open speech in abortion clinics is now acting to gag free speech at CPCs?

It’s also ironic that the same people who wanted to make it possible for nurses to perform abortions now want to ratchet up the standards and force us to have only licensed personnel. We’ve known for years that the abortion clinics don’t have exclusively licensed people doing the counseling. In fact, their notion of “counseling” at abortion clinics is often a matter of, “Will you be paying by cash or travelers’ check?”

Actually, I contend that the Attorney General has conspired to violate the FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinics) law! We are pregnancy centers, which are explicitly protected by the FACE law. They are trying to put a legal block on our doors—to take away our freedom to advertise, with positive advertising. Instead of saying what we do, they want us to tell what we don’t do.

By trying to knock out lay counselors, they discourage clients from coming in. They try to bankrupt us by limiting us to hiring licensed professionals. Then they control the licensing, which means they will enforce what these counselors can say.

They would say Priests for Life brochures are misleading and inaccurate. They would claim that all our abortion brochures are illegal, because they don’t treat abortion as a positive good.

They want CPCs to drop dead. And if they do drop dead, so will hundreds of thousands of babies a year, because their mothers won’t be reached by the compassionate, caring, loving women and men across the country who are there not only to provide a listening ear but to offer compassionate, helpful advice on alternatives to abortion—helping to arrange marriage, if it’s appropriate; helping them to adopt a lifestyle of independence and self-sufficiency, if necessary; or even arranging adoption, if that’s possible. These centers arrange free long- or short-term maternity housing. They give out clothing, furniture, baby supplies, and gifts. They offer help in finding employment. They offer general assistance in legal matters that may be forcing a mother to consider abortion—such as an employer who may try to fire an expectant mother, or a landlord trying to force an expectant woman out of her apartment. They help young women who are being forced by their parents to abort (there are many instances of this), or threatened by the prospect that the baby’s father might be jailed. They provide for women to obtain Medicaid and insurance for their children. The help that’s given by the pro-life movement to women in crisis pregnancies is profound.

Most agencies can offer free prenatal care. A significant trend is the addition of medical services in CPCs. We are the first center in the state to pioneer on-site medical services. We started this in 1999, when we began with the first part-time medical service, in addition to on-site ultrasound. We’ve added three-dimensional ultrasound, which gives an incredible window to the womb. We now give 60 sonograms a week. (We’re also the largest CPC in the state, serving 4,200 women a year.) Ultrasound scares abortionists, because it clearly shows the baby, and drives home the point that abortion would kill this baby.

So they’re trying to get the centers however they can —trying to figure out a way to stop us, because they view us as competition.

Can you really expect to compete with the abortion industry?

Slattery: The abortion facilities in New York City outnumber CPCs in New York City by a margin of 8 to 1! That’s a shame.

As a lifetime New Yorker, I say with shame that it wasn’t until 1984 that the first CPC opened here. In the early 1970s there were 175,000 abortions performed annually in New York City, even before Roe v. Wade. We still have close to 100,000 abortions annually in New York. One out of every ten abortions performed in the US is done in this metropolitan area. We are woefully under-serving this community as things stand, because we are not reaching nearly as large a number of women as the abortionists are.

Take Brooklyn, 2.5 million population. That’s the size of many large cities. Only two CPCs there; and ours only opened in 1999. While people keep telling me my base of support is NYC, I can’t find many pro-life folks here in NYC. I’m looking elsewhere because people outside NYC are more compassionate. Anytime unsolicited contributions come in, they’re almost always from out of state.

But we are accomplishing something! We have over 100 CPCs of various types in the State of New York now. We’re helping women, and we’re counseling abstinence and marriage. And I would argue that the front-line defenders of marriage in this country today are the CPC workers.

In the South Bronx, our center is in the same building as Planned Parenthood and a late-term abortion clinic. We’ve been skillful in attracting some of the women who would have gone to those other clinics.

We have one center that was close to the World Trade Center, and one of my associates there saw the tower burning, saw the second plane hit, and saw the collapse of the towers. She was terribly upset, and she couldn’t do counseling for two weeks. The first day that she couldn’t come in, I took seven or eight calls from women who wanted to come in and have abortions. The Attorney General would like us to channel all those calls to abortion clinics.

Our success rate is about 60 percent—that’s the rate of “turning around” women who are pregnant and inclined toward abortion when they come into our centers. Of the 4,200 women we see each year, about 55-60 percent are pregnant. So we literally save over 1,000 babies a year! That is done primarily through the counseling of a few lay people. And now the Attorney General is trying to take them off the job.

This should scare CPCs all over the country. That’s why, although I don’t think the pro-life movement in the nation as a whole should emulate the pro-life movement here in New York, because we are woefully short, we do all need to rally to the defense of these CPCs in New York. Because if the effort to shut down the CPCs is successful here, you can be sure that abortion advocates will move to shut down CPCs across the country.

How will you respond to the Attorney General?

Slattery: We’re not afraid to fight them. We’re not going to back down.

It’s high time that Catholics stand up for their rights. I’m tired of being trampled on by pro-aborts and liberals and people who think that I should do things the pro-abortion way. No; that won’t stand! I defend compassionate conservatism. I defend compassionate liberalism. I won’t stand this attack.

’m going to be traveling up to Albany, to do some lobbying in the state legislature. I’ve also assembled a team of fifteen attorneys to rally behind the three centers that have already been served and any others that will eventually be served.

We’ve struggled to do what we’re doing. We’ve bounced checks on our employees; we’ve been late with our rent payments. Defending against the Attorney General is not our only problem—and he probably knows that. He probably figures, even if he can’t shut us down legally, he can shut us down financially. The legal cost of this case could be staggering.

The Catholic community needs to come out publicly and formally to defend the CPCs.

What sort of response have you received in your effort to rally support?

Slattery: We have been the lead story on the Focus on the Family and Family Research Council web sites. American Family Association lawyers have called us. I have done quite a few interviews.

We’ve seen a surge in traffic on our own web site (www.expectantmothercare.org). And without any promotion or advertising, we have been receiving a lot of online donations through that site. Interestingly enough, 97 percent of the donations have come from outside New York.

In fact, the vast majority of my support always comes from outside New York. (We have a lot of jaded New Yorkers.) I have a small list of about 1,000 donors, and I’ve been writing to them for 17 years. There are some major donors that have kept Expectant Mother Care afloat; without them we would never have made it. I’m hoping that this crisis will help us to find people that have never heard of us before.

Back to Catholic World Report February 2002 Table of Contents