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Inside a Crisis Pregnancy Center

Lessons learned about bad fathers, young mothers, despair, and hope.

Feb 10, 2003, Vol. 8, No. 21 • By EVE TUSHNET
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THE CAPITOL HILL PREGNANCY CENTER in Washington, D.C., where I've been working as a volunteer for over a year, is a pro-life Christian ministry to pregnant women and poor families. Like most pro-life pregnancy centers, it offers free pregnancy tests, confidential counseling, referrals to outside services like child care, job banks, and housing, and basic material aid like diapers, formula, cribs, and clothes for mother and child. It also provides a childbirth class and a parenting class, and runs abstinence programs in nearby schools. CHPC is one of about 3,000 pro-life pregnancy centers in the United States, and one of some 600 in North America affiliated with the umbrella group CareNet.

Our little center is nestled in a half-gentrified residential neighborhood of Northeast Washington, 15 minutes' walk from the Capitol. We see about 1,000 clients a year, most of them under 25, virtually all of them unmarried, so our accumulated counseling experience gives us a certain perspective on the matter of why women get pregnant out of wedlock--as a record number of American women now do. (In 2001, 33.5 percent of U.S. births were to unmarried women.) We conduct extended interviews with most of our clients and usually cover a number of standard questions. In women's responses, I've noticed four main themes: fatherlessness, fatalism, an attenuated concept of marriage, and the intermittent use of contraception.

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