Exec dir of TX crisis pregnancy center proclaims "a lot of 13-year-olds do phenomenal as mothers"

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8. A Texas blueprint for converting the 'abortion-minded': Lattes and a view

POLITICS

A Texas blueprint for converting the ‘abortion-minded’: Lattes and a view

With abortion banned, a crisis pregnancy center plots a $10 million waterfront expansion for the post-Roe era

By Caroline Kitchener and Beth Reinhard
July 31, 2022 at 8:00 a.m. EDT



Jana Pinson, executive director of the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend, poses for a portrait with the center's staff at the future site of the center's new building, in Corpus Christi, Tex. (Marvi Lacar for The Washington Post)

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CORPUS CHRISTI, Tex. — Jana Pinson leaned over the table at the architect’s office, craning for a better look at the textures and patterns that would bring her post-Roe dreams to life. ... At a meeting in mid-July, three weeks after the Supreme Court retracted the constitutional right to abortion, Pinson was plotting a new-age makeover for her crisis pregnancy center, an organization designed to persuade people to carry their pregnancies to term. She ran her fingers across samples of porcelain tile and beechwood-stained cabinets. The walls of her new building would be varying shades of green and gray, splashed with abstract pictures of trees, each detail designed to evoke, as she’d requested, the feeling of a “coastal spa.”

The executive director of the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend had recently overseen the purchase of what she sees as the most “strategic” plot of land in Corpus Christi, a city of 300,000 people on the South Texas coast. Right next to the local Texas A&M campus, looking out over the Oso Bay, Pinson’s $10 million crisis pregnancy center will be built to attract female undergraduates, with a coffee shop and a thrift store visible from the road, and a patio where students can sip their caffè lattes. ... Chuck Anastos, the architect, gestured to the blueprint for the 20,000-square-foot facility. When it opens in February 2024, he said, the pregnancy center would be the “hip place for people to come.”

Over the past 50 years of legal abortion in America, crisis pregnancy centers have been one of the top tools of the antiabortion movement, and a target for intense criticism from abortion rights advocates. With more than 2,500 locations across the United States, these centers deploy what critics decry as overly aggressive — even deceptive — tactics to talk women out of abortions. Often religiously affiliated, they typically offer free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, sometimes initially presenting themselves as abortion clinics or objective sources of “abortion information.”

Now that abortion is banned across much of the South and Midwest, including Texas, many crisis pregnancy centers in these regions are preparing to assume a larger role, stepping into a void left by shuttered abortion clinics as the go-to place for ultrasound exams and pregnancy resources, despite the fact that they are not licensed medical facilities. The goal is to intercept women before they can access abortion some other way — through an online pharmacy or across state lines — and convince them that they’ll have support.

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By Caroline Kitchener
Caroline Kitchener is a national political reporter, covering abortion, at The Washington Post. She is the author of "Post Grad: Five Women and Their First Year Out of College." Twitter https://twitter.com/CAKitchener

By Beth Reinhard
Beth Reinhard has been a reporter on the investigations desk since 2017. She previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, National Journal, the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post. Twitter https://twitter.com/bethreinhard