Jeb Bush visited a crisis pregnancy center. Here’s why that’s horrifying.
Early presidential campaign stops can often tell you a lot about a candidate’s true beliefs and agenda: What events are they attending? Who do they care about? Who do they support? What are their values? What matters to them?
Jeb Bush showed his true colors in his campaign stop yesterday when he visited Carolina Pregnancy Center, a crisis pregnancy center in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
What’s a Crisis Pregnancy Center?
Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are storefronts that pose as medical centers that offer free pregnancy tests or other services in the hope of luring women facing unplanned pregnancies into their office.
Once they have them inside, they have one and only one goal: to dissuade women from exercising the right to choose.
The staff at crisis pregnancy centers will say and do anything to convince a woman not to have an abortion. They’ll mislead, misinform, lie to, harass, and intimidate women — pushing false propaganda about the “consequences” of abortion, or using emotional manipulation to try to stop a woman from having an abortion.
Crisis pregnancy centers fail to provide accurate, comprehensive, or unbiased information about reproductive health. They claim to empower women, but it’s blatantly obvious that they do the opposite.
The Carolina Pregnancy Center in Spartansburg, SC is no different.
The Carolina Pregnancy Center is NOT a medical center, but a religious non-profit geared toward tricking women into not having abortions. They do this in a number of ways:
- The clinic will perform a pregnancy test, then tell patients about the pregnancy and fetal development. The staff poses as medical experts, but they appear to have no medical background.
- They claim to promise to provide “accurate information” about abortion procedures and risks, but then tell blatant lies. They say 80% of women who have had an abortion suffer from depression, and that 75% of relationships end in a break-up after an abortion. In reality, 95% of women who have an abortion feel it was the best decision for them.
- They tell men that they have options, but warn them that they “are a father from this day forward; abortion will simply make you the father of a dead child.”
Why is Jeb Bush visiting this crisis pregnancy center?
Jeb Bush has a lengthy history of supporting crisis pregnancy centers. As Governor of Florida, he signed a law that established “choose life” license plates and allocated state funds for crisis pregnancy centers. At a 2015 conference for an anti-choice group, he bragged that this law resulted in $2 million dollars per year of Florida state funds funneled into CPCs.
Jeb Bush also has a long history of anti-choice extremism: he appointed a lawyer to represent a fetus, saying “It is entirely appropriate that an advocate be appointed to represent the unborn child’s best interests in all decisions” and that “[Fetuses] need to have legal rights.” He even intervened in two cases to prevent a mentally disabled rape victim and a 13-year-old girl from having an abortion.
Bush also signed a law that would require young women who want an abortion to seek permission from their parents — even if they come from a violent, abusive, or neglectful home. He also signed laws that criminalize some abortion services and ones that subject abortion providers to burdensome regulations not applied to other medical professions.
Jeb Bush’s visit to the Carolina Pregnancy Center in South Carolina shows us who he really is: an extremist who will stop at nothing to outlaw abortion. The scary part? He’s considered by some to be the “moderate” Republican presidential candidate.
Learn more about where Jeb Bush and the other Republican candidates stand on abortion and make them own their records: https://ownit2016.com/
