4/8/2023 0 Comments Spacenet cpc![]() Munson observes as the most labor intensive and populated segment of the movement-which has positioned the construction, maintenance, and propagation of brick-and-mortar pro-life centers as central to the fight to overturn Roe. This project was the result of decades of work on the part of pro-life’s “individual outreach stream”-what historian Ziad W. In the absence of a majority of popular support, expanding its physical footprint over the course of the last half-century has allowed the American campaign to curtail abortion rights to claim the influence and stature necessary to transform American law permanently. What began as a defensive response to the feminist abortion clinic, the crisis pregnancy center has become one of the anti-abortion movement’s most effective offensive strategies. While many rightfully point to the growth of Evangelicalism within the United States' Christian population, and its parishioners’ waxing influence over the GOP platform, as the driving force behind the pro-life lobby, the understudied architectural and geographical tactics of the movement are also critically instructive. How could a movement with such marginal popular support have obtained so much political capital? On the basis of these seemingly conflicting set of statistics, understanding the political success of the anti-abortion movement-which ushered the conditions of possibility for the striking down of Roe in June 2022-is a confounding task. By most national polls’ standards, around two thirds of the country remains in support of Roe and the protection it offered of Americans’ rights to abortion care. This ratio stands at odds with national sentiment on abortion. In total, CPCs today outnumber abortion clinics more than three to one, and that will likely swell to four to one in the aftermath of Roe v. According to a 2015 report published by the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), most CPCs are affiliated with three of the pro-life movement’s most influential institutions: the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), which maintains at least 1,300 CPC affiliates, Heartbeat International with 1,800, and Care Net with over 1,100 affiliated CPCs. While many CPCs are strategically clustered around the nation’s remaining abortion clinics, or sited next to colleges and universities, they have also infiltrated rural towns all over the United States, assuming a prominent presence in electorally red and blue counties. The Community Women’s Center of Philadelphia is one of 2,546 crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in the United States, each broadly founded in the pro-life agenda of preventing abortions-at whatever cost. Indeed, staffers of this crisis pregnancy center (and of others like it) do so on the basis of Evangelical, Catholic, or otherwise conservative religious ideology, which both positions the life of the unborn fetus as more valuable than that of a living, pregnant individual, and also denies the rights of children to sexuality– and gender-based confirming care. ![]() While the Mazzoni Center and Planned Parenthood offer gender-affirming care and accurate information on abortion, the Community Women’s Center of Philadelphia attempts to convince abortion-seekers to carry their pregnancies to term with coercive emotional appeals, and often violent imagery and medical misinformation. ![]() Yet the almost banal aesthetic cohesion of this urban intersection belies the forcefield of political opposition and protest that organizes the streetscape. Each center occupies its respective, vernacular building, sheathed in Philadelphia’s familiar palette of brick and stucco. ![]() ![]() At the corners of Locust and South 12th streets in Philadelphia’s Washington Square neighborhood stand three institutions: the Mazzoni Center’s Washington West Project (figure 1), a satellite of the city’s oldest, ongoing LGBTQ-focused health center Planned Parenthood’s Elizabeth Blackwell Center (figure 2), which provides abortion referrals among other reproductive health services and the Community Women’s Center of Philadelphia (figure 3), a crisis pregnancy center. ![]()
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