"Gummy Bears" and "Teddy Grahams": Ultrasounds as religious biopower in Crisis Pregnancy Centers

Crisis management: pathways to crisis pregnancy centers

Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) provide social support, material aid, and counseling against abortion. We evaluated the perspectives of CPC clients to understand how they found the CPC that they attended for services. In 2019, we conducted in-depth interviews with 21 clients of 10 CPCs in Ohio, who were recruited from the CPC (n = 9) or an abortion clinic (n = 12), to understand their experiences attending the center. This analysis focused on the ways in which pregnant people end up as clients at a CPC seeking assistance instead of attending another setting, such as a medical center. We identified two pathways through which clients find CPCs. First, in the internet pathway, clients needing abortion services found CPCs via internet search for pregnancy symptoms, abortion care, or ultrasound services. Second, in the social safety network pathway, clients needing material aid found CPCs through recommendations from trusted others and due to the proximity of CPCs to their homes. Structural conditions influence the pathways clients pursue, such as the need for healthcare services and material aid. Future research should further explore the demographics of those who attend CPCs and motivations for attendance.

"It Wasn't Very Public-Clinicy": Client Experiences at Faith-Based Pregnancy Centers

Faith-based pregnancy centers strive to offer "alternatives to abortion" that supporters claim aid women and critics assert manipulate pregnant people, stigmatize abortion, and potentially delay clients from obtaining medical care. However, scholars know little about the exchanges within appointments and how clients make sense of these experiences. Drawing on ethnographic observations of client appointments in two pregnancy centers in the West and 29 in-depth interviews with clients, this article uses an intersectional framework to analyze client experiences. Clients favorably compared centers to clinical health care providers, emphasizing the unexpectedly attentive emotional care they received. These evaluations stem from clients' reproductive histories, which are shaped by gender, racism, and economic inequalities that configure their access to and interactions within the health system. Emotional care serves to create and maintain pregnancy centers' impression of legitimacy among clients.

Intimate Compromise: Reproduction, Piety, and Medicine Among American Orthodox Christians

Drawing on ethnographic findings from an American Orthodox Christian community, I examine how forms of intimate reproductive compromise facilitate the assertive refusal to negotiate on abortion. The American Orthodox harness the values and practices of biomedicine to validate their refusal of abortion, but their inflexible views emerge from prior compromises. By not giving up modern contraception, women self-fashion forms of piety that allow them to navigate composite identities while remaining dedicated to a pro-life stance. That steadfast refusal of abortion may be the consequence of previous concessions opens up new ways of theorizing refusal as inextricably bound to - rather than exclusive of - prior compromises.

Free, but at what cost? How US crisis pregnancy centres provide services

In the USA, the most popular form of anti-abortion activism, crisis pregnancy centres (CPCs), provide a variety of services to prevent abortions. Moving beyond debate about misinformation and the ethics of CPCs, this study considers the services they provide and given their popularity among state legislatures, their connection to the state. Using interviews with ten CPC staff in Ohio (a state providing support to CPCs) and supplemental data from both state and CPC organisations, we find three relevant themes. First, CPC services reflect ideas about personal responsibility and Christianity held by the CPC staff. Second, we show that CPCs have assumed a variety of state duties (e.g. pregnancy testing and parenting classes), appealing to lawmakers in conservative states eager to transfer responsibility for disadvantaged residents to other entities. Finally, we consider the future direction of CPCs, highlighting tension between organisational goals (focusing on abortion prevention) and the on-the-ground experience of CPC staff (where non-pregnant clients need material aid). Drawing theoretical connections between CPC staff and social service workers sheds light on whose responsibility it is to address poverty in a post-welfare era.