Ex-Planned Parenthood VP Launches New Effort to Slam Pro-Life Centers

By Jay Hobbs
National Right to Life

A new effort to undermine and oppose pro-life pregnancy centers offering women a chance to choose life over abortion is now underway, and this time, it’s a former Planned Parenthood vice president calling the shots.

Launched in the beginning of January, “Equity Forward” identifies itself on its online “About Us” page as, a project aiming, “to ensure transparency and accountability among anti-reproductive health groups and individuals who are actively working to deny women access to services.”

Later in its “About Us” page, the group says it “exists to create a window into what opponents of reproductive health care are doing, operationally and tactically, in order to expose malfeasance, fraud, unethical practices, and false information to hold them accountable.”

Led by Mary Alice Carter, a former interim VP for communications at Planned Parenthood, Equity Forward was approvingly profiled by The Hill Friday. The group has already kicked off its initial investigation meant to smear the nation’s 2,700 locally funded pregnancy centers that offer peer counseling, ultrasounds, material aid and post-abortive help offered at no cost.

“Rather than going on a wild goose chase against pro-life pregnancy help, abortion activists would do far better to investigate their own industry,” Jor-El Godsey, president of Heartbeat International—which serves over 2,400 pregnancy help organizations around the world—said. 

“Pregnancy centers are good for women and their children. It is abortion businesses—not pregnancy centers—that routinely physically harm their patients, profit off a woman’s desperation and break the law to maximize their bottom line."

“No woman has ever died or been harmed in a pregnancy center, and sadly, we can’t say the same about abortion businesses.”

Chasing the Wild Goose

Monday evening, a licensed private investigator named Jane Ebert called and left a message on the personal cell phone of a former pregnancy center employee who now works full-time with a national pro-life group. In her message, obtained by Pregnancy Help News, Ebert said she was working on an investigation on behalf of Equity Forward.

The message caught the former pregnancy center staffer off-guard, so she did a little digging into Equity Forward. She also reached out to her former colleagues at the pregnancy center and confirmed that Ebert hadn’t contacted any of them. As of Friday, Ebert had not returned a call or email from Pregnancy Help News.

While it’s likely the first time a pro-abortion group has enlisted the services of a private investigator, it’s nothing new for the abortion industry to probe into the pro-life nonprofits that serve well over a million women each year in the U.S. alone. In stark contrast to their pro-life counterparts who have exposed deep corruption in the abortion industry, pro-abortion “investigators”—some who pose as fake clients—have uniformly failed to back up their oft-repeated charges.

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