Groups like NARAL say that all they want from pregnancy resource centers (PRCs) is “disclosure.” But let’s be honest. The real goal is just closure. And you have to hand it to abortion activists — they’ve gotten pretty creative in their strategies to beat back those who give women the choice of choosing life. With the help of local leaders across the country, the Left has managed to pass a handful of laws putting the squeeze on PRCs and their right to operate by their beliefs. First, liberals tried to force the centers to post signs about the services they don’t offer in hopes of deterring more women from visiting. When courts struck down those ordinances in places like Baltimore, the abortion movement took a more aggressive approach.

In California, they managed to persuade lawmakers to pass a bill — the Reproductive FACT Act — ordering PRCs to provide referrals to abortion centers where, they argue, moms will get the “full range of care.” Pro-lifers came out swinging against the idea — not only because it detracts from the positive alternatives to abortion, but because it violates these centers’ freedoms of speech and religion! “It’s bad enough if the government tells you what you can’t say,” said Alliance Defending Freedom’s Matt Bowman, who’s representing the pro-life centers in court, “but a law that tells you what you must say — under threat of severe punishment — is even more unjust and dangerous. In this case, political allies of abortionists are seeking to punish pro-life pregnancy centers, which offer real hope and help to women. Forcing these centers to promote abortion and recite the government’s preferred views is a clear violation of their constitutionally protected First Amendment freedoms. That’s why other courts around the country have halted these kinds of measures and why we will be discussing the possibility of appeal with our clients.”

Unfortunately, those courts don’t include the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where a three-judge panel upheld California’s stranglehold on PRCs’ freedom. It’s important to “[ensure] that its citizens have access to and adequate information about constitutionally-protected medical services like abortion,” wrote Judge Dorothy Nelson. If “adequate information” is important, then what about the truth of abortion? It’s ironic. If anyone’s in favor of full disclosure, it’s the pro-life movement! Unlike the Left, these centers tell moms what Planned Parenthood won’t: that there are ways of coping with unexpected pregnancies other than abortion. And unlike their competition, they don’t have a financial stake in the outcome. Groups like Planned Parenthood are inventing “wars on women” to extort more money from taxpayers; pregnancy resource centers are actually helping more than two million people every year. And unlike Planned Parenthood, they don’t do it with billions of government dollars but the charitable donations and support of tens of thousands of volunteers.

If legislators want to scrutinize anyone, shouldn’t it be the groups actually profiting from their agenda? Yet California refuses to apply the same rules to abortion clinics, which pride themselves on hiding the truth about unborn children, abortion, and its lifelong effects. While liberal lawmakers kowtow to the complaints abortionists are making about their compassionate competition, the real violence is going on right under their noses. As the undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress make painfully clear, Americans have much bigger things to worry about than PRCs. This is nothing but a witch hunt to take the attention off of America’s real problem: unregulated and unethical abortion businesses.

Originally published here.

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Pay for More Failure!

There’s a reason Congress just agreed to fund more abstinence education — the alternative isn’t working! It turns out that the president’s comprehensive approach to sex education has been comprehensive in at least one aspect: its failure. After five years of pumping money into a morally unrestrained approach, the American Journal of Public Health says the Left’s pregnancy prevention efforts have been a billion-dollar waste. “Most of the programs had small or insignificant impacts on adolescent behavior,” the researchers write. And that was putting it mildly, says Ascend President Valerie Huber.

“A closer look at the research findings reveals that this summary may be a generous assessment of the results, since some youth actually fared worse when they were enrolled in some of the funded projects. Compared with their peers who were in the program, teens in some TPP-funded (Teen Pregnancy Prevention) projects were more likely to begin having sex, more likely to engage in oral sex, and more likely to get pregnant. In fact, more than 80 percent of students in these programs fared either worse or no better than their peers who were not in the program.”

In other words, the Obama administration wasn’t just wasting money on an approach that doesn’t work but also makes the problems worse! That ought to sting, especially at a price tag of more than $375 million a year. Under the president’s approach, this generation of teenagers experienced “more pregnancies, more sex, and more sexual initiation” — hardly the recipe for combating disease and out-of-wedlock births.

Unfortunately, this is the result of liberal logic where adults operate from a position of lower expectations — as if teenagers were wild animals, incapable of exercising any self-control. It became assumed, not discouraged, that children would have sex. And as a result, we have an entire area of teen education (taxpayer-funded teen education, I might add) that doesn’t curb the risks but accelerates them. Think about the other behaviors that can devastate a young person’s life. We don’t tell kids to drink less. We tell them not to drink, period. The same with smoking. We don’t hand them filters assuming that they’ll light up anyway. We challenge them not to.

For whatever reason, we’ve become a society that’s afraid to challenge the idea that children have to have sex before marriage. Some adults simply refuse to believe that anyone has the self-respect to wait for their spouse — when in reality, there’s a whole generation of kids out there who are not having sex. As Valerie points out, “The healthiest message for youth is one that gives youth the skills and information to avoid the risks of teen sex, not merely reduce them. This is a message that is relevant in 2016, since the majority of teens have not had sex, far fewer, in fact, than 20 years ago.” It’s time to adapt our thinking, our strategies and our public policy to an approach that makes the most sense for our kids and their future. And based on the latest research, that isn’t Obama’s.

Originally published here.

Hillary Clinton: A Quid Pro Quo Pro

Money can’t buy love — but it can certainly buy influence. The Clinton Foundation scandal is proof of that. And after the latest WikiLeaks email dump, voters should take a long, hard look at how the person seeking the highest office in the country used her power the last time she had it. Not only did Hillary take money from governments that she knew were supporting ISIS, but the case is certainly building that Clinton Foundation donors got “favors on a global scale.”

“So Hillary thinks they are funding ISIS,” Donald Trump told crowds this weekend, “but still takes their money. And you know their views on gays. And you know their views on women.” Peter Schweizer, who wrote the blockbuster “Clinton Cash,” says it’s no wonder that the Democratic nominee for president has gone to such great lengths to destroy her correspondence and private servers. As Ginny Thomas points out, the “$2 billion the foundation has raised from "U.S. corporations, foreign governments and corporations, political donors, and various other groups was collected in exchange for special access to the State Department while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state.”

“They needed to have a means of communication on a global scale that allowed them to talk about favors that donors wanted, to talk about favors that could be done for donors, to talk about the flow of money in a way that could not be detected by anyone else,” Schweizer says in this video interview. And it seems this special treatment extended beyond her own agency to even the Justice Department and the media. Americans have already had a secretary of state who put her personal interests above national security. Can the country survive a president who does the same?

For more on the contents of those WikiLeaks emails, check out my interview on “America’s Election HQ” on Fox News from over the weekend.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.