Shockingly, the New York Times prints an essay by a women’s studies major claiming that crisis pregnancy centers — organizations that offer abortion alternatives, including adoption, to women with unplanned pregnancies — harm women. The piece is trite agitprop that depends entirely on the false view that all CPCs are the same — that they all try to deceive women.

It’s not true. Some years back, my wife volunteered at a CPC. She didn’t realize until some months in that it was the policy of this CPC to lie to women to get them into the door. She found out when a woman and her boyfriend showed up for what she thought was going to be her abortion, and found out otherwise. The man was furious, in part because he had taken the day off of work to be there. My wife was scared and embarrassed; she had not known that the owner of the CPC had taken the initial call from this couple, and had deliberately misled them. His theory was that anything is permissible to save the lives of unborn children.

My wife was unwilling to participate in these lies so that good might be done. Aside from that, we both feared that she herself would be in danger from angry people who had been lied to. She resigned. Later I found out that other CPCs in our city kept this particular provider at arm’s length. They knew that it was committed to deceit, as they were not, but that its owner’s rogue morality threatened to taint the work of all of them. This essay in the Times is a good example of how deceptive practices of some confirm the stereotypes liberal newspaper editors have of all CPCs — though it should be pointed out that the author does not say that the CPC she went to deliberately misled her, only that it failed to meet her expectations. That’s a significant difference.

In any case, CPCs that lie to get women in the door are immoral, and deserve opprobrium. They do exist — but they do not represent the mainstream CPC movement! I wonder if the Times would ever publish an essay by Abby Johnson, the disillusioned former Planned Parenthood clinic worker who quit her job in 2009 after seeing on an ultrasound machine the result of an abortion procedure, and after coming to the conclusion that her organization pushed women to have abortions because they were financially lucrative.

Actually, I don’t wonder that at all. I know the answer.