As Roe dies, a fake clinic with an ugly record gets its windows broken and locals take to the streets

The front of Mountain Area Pregnancy Service, a far-right ‘crisis pregnancy center,’ on June 7. Photo by Veronica Coit

[This piece contains mentions of sexual abuse, religious bigotry and miscarriages]

Blade reporters Matilda Bliss and Veronica Coit contributed to this piece

A few years ago a local, we’ll call them G, walked through the doors of the Mountain Area Pregnancy Center to confirm a home pregnancy test. They were 19.

“It was the only resource I could find with free ultrasounds I was in no way planning to give birth,” they tell the Blade, under condition we use an alias they chose to protect their identity. “When they confirmed the test, they asked me what I wanted to do. I told them I was going to have an abortion. Period.”

But the staff didn’t respect their wishes.

“They intentionally showed me my Ultrasound and pointed out ‘my baby.’ I sat there for what felt like hours, being chastised for my decision, given tons of ‘resources’ on why i should carry a child to term and put it up for adoption, continuous gaslighting, god, and eventual disrespect when I held my ground in my decision to have an abortion.”

Then there was the racism.

“The all-white staff spoke to me specifically about Black abortion and birth stats in the area. So not only was I chastised for wanting to have an abortion but also for being Black and having an abortion.”

“By the time I left I felt battered and ashamed, emotions I had entered with and came out with three times fold.”

MAPS is a “crisis pregnancy center” or, to use a blunter term, a fake clinic. It’s one of hundreds throughout the country that masquerade as reproductive health centers but are actually run by far-right zealots who use deception and even outright coercion to try to prevent abortion. G was, sadly, far from the only one to encounter this. Two other detailed accounts in this article back up the kind of coercive behaviors they faced.

“They will lie about just about anything to push people not to have abortions,” Kristin Rawls, a journalist who hosts Christian Rightcast and has extensively investigated the theocratic far-right and the anti-abortion movement, tells the Blade.

“It’s considered the ‘gentler’ face of this movement, but they engage in really coercive and unethical tactics.”

On the night of June 6 (or the early morning hours of June 7) with the death of Roe already foretold, someone busted out the center’s windows and drew graffiti all over the building. “If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either” and “no forced birth” in red paint now decked its walkway and walls.

The words used in the graffiti matched that previously claimed in actions in multiple parts of the country by the anonymous Jane’s Revenge collective, which had recently issued a public call for autonomous action.

“Whoever you are and wherever you are we are asking you do what you can to make your anger known,” part of the call read, also cautioning allies. “Do not police us. Do not tell us what is and isn’t appropriate. But do aid us when we are in need.”

The Asheville Police Department quickly issued a press release promising to hunt down whoever did the vandalism. Photos obtained by the Blade, backed by the testimony of multiple witnesses, shows that they started providing round-the-clock security for the far-right center. By contrast, about a year earlier they’d stayed silent when the former GOP chair’s son opened fire on a pride party.

The far-right, locally and nationally, was apoplectic. Long accustomed to terrorizing abortion clinics, they were livid that someone had finally struck back.

But this is a left-leaning city. The Blade’s initial social media reporting on the graffiti went viral, and Ashevillians’ overwhelming response was enthusiastic approval.

“Hahaha I saw this when I visiting a couple of weeks ago! Brilliant! Good for whoever did this,” one typical remark ran.

Others were even more openly jubilant: “love to see it! haven’t been this proud of my hometown in god knows when! END FORCED PREGNANCY!!”

“Thinking that the ‘wrongs’ of vandalism matter at all in the context of what forced birth does to people is not something a person with their rational faculties can seriously believe,” another local wrote.

While the city’s political and non-profit elites are generally of the “do nothing, ever” variety, to the point of generally being indulgent of the far-right, there’s a lot of rage here on the ground. A few weeks later, about 700 people took to the streets of downtown after the U.S. Supreme Court made their killing of Roe official.

In that context the broken windows at MAPS seem less like a one-off incident and more like the prelude to a much larger fight to come. The people’s patience is not endless.

Aviva’s story

In early 2020, I had an abortion at a Planned Parenthood 230 miles from home. While there is a Planned Parenthood clinic in my hometown of Asheville, NC, it does not offer IV sedation. Like hundreds of millions of others, I am a survivor of sexual assault and was incapable of handling the procedure without light sedation; even regular pap smears are excruciatingly painful and anxiety-provoking due to vaginismus, which I developed from sexual abuse that I endured as a child.

If you live in North Carolina, getting an abortion can be a costly race against time (and sometimes hundreds of miles away). Patients are lawfully required to receive “state-directed counseling that includes information designed to discourage the patient from having an abortion, and then wait 72 hours before the procedure is provided.” However, waiting times can be much longer (in my case, two weeks) since there are only a handful of abortion clinics in the state, and that number has steadily declined in the past decade. In 2021, only fifteen clinics offered abortion services in North Carolina, compared to thirty-seven in 2014.

To receive an abortion at the only facility in the entire state of North Carolina that offered IV sedation during the procedure, I traveled nearly four hours with a friend (as I would not be legally able to drive after receiving the sedative), and incurred an upcharge for the medication of several hundred additional dollars, on top of the procedure itself, which was $500.

Even as a white cis woman, my abortion was only narrowly accessible; I scraped together resources to overcome the unnecessary barriers to safe abortion. The procedure is commonly inaccessible for people with fewer privileges and resources, especially Black and poorer individuals. How many survivors of sexual assault have endured painful, traumatic, unsafe abortions? How many survivors could not bear the thought of being unmedicated during the procedure, so they had no abortion?

But financial and geographical barriers are not where abortion inequity begins. Rewind several weeks prior in my own abortion journey: I found myself sitting in the quiet waiting room of Mountain Area Pregnancy Services (MAPS) in West Asheville. I was there to receive a doctor-confirmed positive pregnancy test –Planned Parenthood would not book an abortion consultation without one. At the time, I was uninsured. I called dozens of gynecologists and family physicians in Asheville, but only MAPS, which considers itself a “crisis pregnancy center,” offered this service to uninsured uterus owners.

When I arrived at MAPS, the staff was saccharine-sweet, taking time to ask about my age, occupation, and interests. After peeing in a cup, the clinic confirmed what I knew: I was pregnant. Once the nurse handed the official medical documents to me, I stood up to go but was not allowed to leave the exam room. Instead, two additional staff members, including the center’s medical director, joined the nurse and feigned concern as they interrogated me. Did I have religious beliefs? Did I know all the options that didn’t include violence toward the innocent life inside me? Why wouldn’t I be willing to take on a second child as a single mom and receive welfare benefits to raise two?

It would have been a traumatic event if I had not been in my 30s, already a mom, and very clear in my choices and morality. It’s very possible that I would have been guilted and bullied out of my decision to have an abortion. All over the U.S., predatory “crisis pregnancy centers” like MAPS try to lure uninsured, poor, and vulnerable people seeking the required documents for these fundamentally simple procedures from seeking access to abortion healthcare.

There are millions of reasons people choose abortions, each of them valid. Yet, shame-based discourse and restrictive legislation perpetuate harmful stigmas and codify racist, classist, and discriminatory barriers to reproductive healthcare. It doesn’t have to be this way, but today, uterus owners are denied rights that prior generations possessed. I offer my story in solidarity with those who have struggled for their bodily autonomy against others’ bigoted compulsions to dispossess them of their worth and rights.

Jesus on the wall

MAPS isn’t a new feature in Asheville. It first opened its doors in 1981, part of a wave of “crisis pregnancy centers” that spread rapidly during the ’80s. Their sudden growth was pushed by a false moral panic about a supposed epidemic of teen pregnancy (“there were just more baby boomers,” Rawls observes). While their roots predate Roe — the first such fake clinic opened in Toronto in 1968 — they ramped up afterwards.

The first centers were explicitly catholic, as Rawls notes that “the anti-abortion movement started out primarily as a catholic thing, and it was really after Roe v. Wade that protestants started to come on board and really form alliances with right-wing catholics. Today the evangelicals outnumber the catholics; they’ve kind of taken over as the muscle of the movement.”

Indeed MAPS is thoroughly tied to evangelicalism. Pictures of Jesus bedeck the walls and the staff are overwhelmingly white.

“By 2009 there were over 3,000 in the United States, staffed by about 40,000 volunteers along with paid staff, seeing about a million pregnant women a year” Rawls notes.

But while they may have changed some over the decades, she observes that they were always deeply coercive institutions. The experiences local Ashevillians describe are sadly not unique.

“There have been homes for pregnant girls and women associated with some of these crisis pregnancy centers, and people have been coerced into giving up their children for adoption, they’ve had babies taken away,” Rawls said.

“There’s a tendency to infantilize them, to insist that men did them wrong and they’re these helpless victims that need Jesus,” she continues. “They lie, using junk science to say abortion causes mental health problems and physical problems like cancer and sterility. That’s a form of coercion.”

This includes falsely telling people who come to the clinic that their pregnancy is farther along than it is, making them think it’s past the point where they can legally abort. In other cases they string people along to “wait out the period where they’re legally allowed to have an abortion.” Some centers even give themselves similar names to actual abortion clinics and use the language of choice “to make people think they’re something they’re not.”

Because they’re fake clinics, they’re not bound by the patient privacy laws actual medical centers are. They will use personal information about a pregnant person to call up their family and encourage them to coerce the person to halt their abortion.

“It’s very dangerous, they’ll basically go to any lengths.”

Crisis pregnancy centers have historically received less attention than more visible actions like the harassment of abortion clinics or the murder of doctors, but they are very much part of the same far-right push to crush bodily autonomy and enforce a particularly brutal version of christianity on everyone else.

“They are something women in evangelicalism are really encouraged to do,” she adds “Women have been involved in every aspect of the anti-abortion movement, including violence, but this is something young girls and teenagers are encouraged to do if they want to get a job outside their home.”

“There’s also the sense they’ll be more capable of manipulation, to convince someone not to have an abortion.”

“They got a cultural foothold in the ’70s when there was this teen pregnancy moral panic,” Rawls notes. “They offered abstinence-only education, telling people this was the only way they could stem the supposed problem.”

“They are the only part of the anti-abortion movement that provides any services at all,” though “they exaggerate the extent to which they do that”

The centers have continued to largely gain power and funding under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The “welfare reform” passed by the Clinton administration gave the centers a windfall, as did the “faith-based initiatives” programs under George W. Bush. The Obama administration dialed this back, but some funds still made their way through. Conservative state governments have funneled in millions more. Indeed state support of these openly religious institutions remains considerable. in 2018 far-right state senator Ralph Hise ensured MAPS received $250,000 in state funds. The center’s annual budget is around $400,000.

To some degree, the failures of liberal non-profits and reproductive health centers also left many working class and marginalized people desperate; something the far-right’s fake clinics are happy to exploit.

“It’s also very important to note that it was one of the only places I was able to have a free ultrasound,” G tells the Blade. “Matter of fact, when you search ‘free ultrasound in Asheville NC’ it still comes up as the first service in my algorithm.

“At the time I could not afford, financially, to go to a place that supported my autonomy in my decision. I personally wanted my abortion to happen as soon as possible, as the hormones I experienced with pregnancy, as well as the overall fact of experiencing pregnancy, affected my mental health and triggered suicidal thoughts, my physical health, and my overall well being.”

Plenty of liberal media even give the centers sympathetic coverage, glossing over their coercive practices and far-right beliefs. NPR’s This American Life gave one such center a sympathetic segment mere days after Roe was overturned, taking their promises to take care of children and mothers at face value.

“They’re staffed by women, they lean on these services, and they’re not the people screaming,” Rawls emphasizes.

Emily’s story

In 2019 I started to experience symptoms of pregnancy- my first time. I was 18. After struggling to get an appointment to confirm my pregnancy for quite some time I was able to see a doctor and get my results, simple pee test. It came back positive. I was shocked and tried asking my doctor if they had any resources for me. Basically said congratulations and sent me out the door. I then again asked if they had any info for me at the desk, nothing and a snide “we don’t do abortions” from the nurse when I didn’t even directly ask such a thing.

I tried to set an ultrasound up with that office and they told me they were extremely busy and I couldn’t schedule an ultrasound for about three months- this ended up being the case with almost everywhere I called in the Asheville area. Desperate, I saw the mountain area pregnancy services on my drive to work one day and decided to give them a call. They told me they would confirm my pregnancy and how far along I was- they had the resources to do so.

I show up for my appointment with my partner. They promptly congratulated me on my pregnancy and then continued me down the hall to the ultrasound.

It was a very small room. There was about three women in there with my partner and I. I was not asked if I would like to see// it was projected upon the wall in front of me and the women immediately started taking guesses at the gender before I could even process what I was looking at. “oh look at that it must be a sassy little girl”

“No look at that energy! It’s a boy!”

My partner could tell I was visibly upset, and panicked. He had me look at him until the ladies brought us out of the room.

I was confirmed 8 weeks pregnant.

They then took me to a room where an older lady sat us both down and the door was closed behind us by the nurse- who proceeded to stand by the door. Pretty intimidating.

The older woman handed me brochures, care instructions etc. pregnancy information. In these for example-they stated abortion pills are not safe as advertised etc.

The woman started her preaching with “Do you know who Jesus Christ is? And do you know he died for us and our sins” etc.

My partner immediately was very upset. I, squeezing his hand just wished to get through and out after knowing my results and having gone through what I just did. I grew up with extremists my whole life so it was simple to tune them out and let them speak to get it over with. Him, protecting me. argued with them and they got pretty off-standish. Told him he was wrong, Jesus Christ is lord, blah blah. They took my silence as weakness and almost made it out to seem he was forcing something upon me I didn’t want.

We quickly rushed out with excuses of work to be to though it was very hard of them to let us go knowing we hadn’t “converted.”

After leaving I felt very manipulated and taken advantage of. The claim they seemed to have over my child to their religion was disgusting in itself. The guilt was very strong and ultimately did influence my decision.

The only reason I was able to follow through with my pregnancy was due to my partner being supportive/protecting me from people like that— a person of support many do not have. I was lucky.
People having the right to choose in safe, non-predatory environments is very important to us. We are proud parents but we are also parents who in recent years made the decision to terminate two pregnancies.

About two years after having my daughter I suffered multiple miscarriages- it was very stressful on my family and me. The grief affected my partner and I and reflected in my day to day life and my health.
After experiencing the losses earlier in the year I was confirmed pregnant. I was very weary of where I went to get my results from. I was honestly terrified- with my already looming worries of a healthy pregnancy we were also in the peak of COVID, rising prices, scraping by to afford rent/unable to afford daycare for my living child.

I found safety and understanding in Asheville’s Planned Parenthood and I am so thankful for the assistance I received. My family is better off for the opportunity of abortion. The pill was extremely safe and the follow ups/care I had from the PP clinic were better than my OBGYN when I had my first child. Everyone deserves the right to decide for themselves, because nobody knows your full situation, struggles and future.

‘Bans off our bodies’

Given everything above, and their nature as a far-right center in a left-leaning city, MAPS’ busted windows probably shouldn’t come as much surprise. Nonetheless the days after saw the Blade‘s social media coverage go intensely viral. They included no amount of support, not just from long-time leftists but plenty of others disgusted by both far-right violence and liberal timidity.

They also included no shortage of whining from anti-abortion zealots, who would veer from threatening to murder everyone supporting this to crying at how oppressed they were.

Such an action was relatively new. Before the recent rounds of attacks by Jane’s Revenge, Rawls notes that “there wasn’t very much pushback” against this part of anti-abortion networks. Pro-choice groups had mostly responded to these fake clinics with an occasional lawsuit, and “the courts have generally sided with the crisis pregnancy centers.”

By some estimates, she observes, the anti-abortion movement spent far less than their pro-choice counterparts over the past decades, as the latter remained focused on “lobbying, liberal advocacy that’s focused on the law and not direct action.”

But in mid-May Jane’s Revenge and a growing tide of grassroots pro-abortion rage were forging a very different path.

“This is not a mere ‘difference of opinion’ as some have framed it,” the first communique from the collective read. “We are literally fighting for our lives. We will not sit still while we are killed and forced into servitude. We have run thin on patience and mercy for those who seek to strip us of what little autonomy we have left.”

“As you continue to bomb clinics and murder doctors with impunity, so too shall we adopt increasingly extreme tactics to maintain freedom over our own bodies.”

“The vandalism and the tagging and the firebombing that Jane’s Revenge has done are a new front,” Rawls emphasizes. “It seems like they have decided to take up some more militant tactics, finally.”
“It’s definitely a shift in pro-choice movement and tactics.”

That was definitely reflected in Asheville. Despite this being a fairly left-leaning city, local officials have often been fairly soft on their support for abortion rights.

That was evident on June 24, the day Roe was overturned. A slew of official non-profits and advocacy groups held an event at a private business far removed from either the public square or the far-right organizations behind Roe’s death. The event included speeches from county commissioner (and congressional candidate) Jasmine Beach-Ferrara and mayor Esther Manheimer. Those attending were mostly told to vote.

The two figures are interesting, as both have their role in the much larger liberal complicity that’s allowed a declining parcel of theocrats to overturn a widely popular legal ruling. Beach-Ferrara, a minister, is ostensibly pro-choice. But in a 2017 Ozy magazine interview, she asserted that she believed abortion was always tragic and expressed sympathy with the anti-abortion movement, saying pro-abortion people needed to be nicer to them, “acknowledging that’s what people believe, wonder and wrestle with.” Against all evidence, she claimed their zealous campaign to crush abortion rights “doesn’t make them an enemy to women.”

[Editor’s note: indeed, they’re also the enemies of transmasculine and non-binary people who need abortions too, but of course that’s not what Beach-Ferrara meant — D.F.]

Manheimer would, a few days after her remarks, vote to give the same police department providing MAPS round-the-clock security a massive budget increase. She (and every other council member except Kim Roney) had the temerity to do this during the same meeting they passed a toothless proclamation “for reproductive freedom.” They all wore pearls “in honor of the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” No, I am not making this up.

While Manheimer was speaking to the pro-choice event, up to 700 locals gathered in downtown, shouting “Bans off our bodies” and marching through the streets. The march wasn’t permitted, and took a far more defiant stance, even proceeding to block the interstate. The police, sharply reduced in numbers, were powerless to do much more than stay back and try to block off certain routes with their vehicles. Often they failed to keep pace with the marchers. No arrests were made.

But it’s been more than marches and direct actions. Pro-abortion forces are also putting more focus into mutual aid and health support, something G thinks is desperately needed to keep people away from predatory organizations like MAPS.

“We need to share resources for abortion services and support amongst community, especially those who can’t afford to go to what may be a more ‘supportive’ environment due to lack of funds,” they say. “I am hard-headed as hell, so I wasn’t planning on being talked out of an abortion, but the constant gaslighting and guilt did take a toll on my mental health. I believe it is very easy for people who are experiencing pregnancy to be manipulated in this environment, and that is very much their intention at this place.”

They encouraged people to support organizations like the Mountain Area Abortion Doula Collective (MAADC0) and Carolina Abortion Fund that provide direct help with abortion access.
And some of the struggle won’t be in the streets or in busted windows and graffiti, but person to person.

“TALK TO YOUR NEIGHBORS ABOUT ABORTIONS,” they wrote in an all-caps message to the Blade. “Let them know their options, remind them of their autonomy in their bodies and ability to make decisions for themselves. No one should be guilted into bringing a child into this world. Period.”

—

Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 15 years. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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