Chris Lange, FISM News
[elfsight_social_share_buttons id=”1″]
Actress Patricia Heaton blasted Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for the Senator’s recent tweet demanding a “crackdown” on pregnancy help centers. The “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “The Middle” star said she has had to hire security guards for a crisis pregnancy center she supports amid increasing attacks targeting similar facilities across the country in the wake of a recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Heaton, along with many conservative lawmakers and pro-life supporters, has pointed to inflammatory rhetoric employed by high-profile public figures like Sen. Warren as incentivization for activists to target pro-life centers with vandalism.
Pregnancy help centers have been subjected to increased incidents of vandalism and harassment by pro-abortion activists egged on by a slew of progressive lawmakers and Hollywood glitterati. On more than one occasion, activists smashed windows and threw Molotov cocktails into pregnancy help clinics. Arson is being blamed for a recent fire at the Colorado Christian pregnancy center, resulting in heavy damage.
The center was also spraypainted with the slogan “If abortion ain’t safe you ain’t save” and “Fake Clinic.” The latter phrase is frequently employed by Democratic lawmakers as a means of discrediting pregnancy help centers.
“In Massachusetts, so-called crisis pregnancy centers outnumber legitimate abortion care providers 3 to 1. We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that,” Sen. Warren wrote in a Twitter post last week.
Heaton, a devout Catholic and staunch supporter of life, slammed Warren for the remarks.
“Our medical pregnancy clinic serves client families for five years, providing superior services for anyone who asks,” the popular TV mom tweeted. “We raised $250K for a mobile medical clinic for underserved areas, treating everyone. Because of people like @SenWarren we now have to hire armed security.”
Warren, along with Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), recently introduced legislation that would direct the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to prohibit crisis pregnancy centers from appearing on Internet searches for abortion services and empower the agency to punish violators. The lawmakers claim that pregnancy crisis center ads that appear in search results are misleading and designed to dissuade women from seeking abortions.
Democrats also cite privacy concerns as another reason the federal government should crackdown on pregnancy help centers. Information collected by the centers typically includes personal identification information like names and phone numbers, as well as pregnancy histories, test results, and ultrasound images – data lawmakers say can be exploited since most centers are operated by non-profit groups and therefore are not bound by federal health data privacy laws.
“We anticipate that we will see a dramatic increase in the criminalization of pregnant people for self-managed abortion and pregnancy outcomes,” Kim Clark, a lawyer at Legal Voice, a women’s-rights nonprofit in Seattle, recently told Time. “Pregnancy centers are just perfectly positioned to facilitate those investigations.”
Heartbeat International spokeswoman Andrea Trudden strongly disagrees with the leap to judgment, stating that pregnancy centers fiercely protect the privacy of all of their clients.
“That data is secure,” she said. “Any information that we publish and pull is just numbers, so we’re not looking at any of that [personal] information.”
Crisis pregnancy centers provide support for women seeking to give birth instead of abortion. Many centers employ trained medical professionals and offer medical services.