City centers

A decade ago young Michelle Heist walked onto the tall front porch of a white, pillared building in Cincinnati’s Clifton neighborhood, about three miles north of downtown. At Life Forward Pregnancy Care of Cincinnati she soon received confirmation she was pregnant. Heist, her heart set on college, told her mom she planned to have an abortion.

That’s when Heist said she learned her mom had had an abortion and didn’t want her to make the same choice. That conversation began to change Heist’s mind. She went to 12 weeks of parenting classes at the urban pregnancy center, and her client educator stayed in contact years after Heist gave birth to her daughter in 2005. Heist recalls, “She didn’t sell me this ‘It’s gonna be all OK’ story. … It would be a rough road. But she promised that she would be there, and she was.”

Heist did not have faith in Christ when she first walked through the center’s doors, but today she knows, “God does everything for a reason.” She went on to earn her bachelor’s degree and has been the director of the Clifton center for two years, sharing her own testimony with clients and recently helping the center move to a newer space around the corner. That Clifton center, one of two Life Forward has, is unusual: Most of the 2,500 or so centers across the United States are suburban, largely due to the availability of volunteers and dollars. Yet the rate of abortion is higher in cities than anywhere else.

That rate is particularly high in Washington, D.C., which is 50 percent African-American: The black abortion rate is about 3.5 times higher than the white rate. One attempt to lower the rate, the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center (CHPC), occupies a brick building eight blocks from the Capitol’s marble columns. The center, nearly 30 years old, served about 2,500 clients in 2013, about 2,300 of them African-Americans, mostly ages 14 to 20.

CHPC offers a free pregnancy test and counselors to answer clients’ questions about pregnancy, parenting, abortion, and adoption. Sometimes a client also seeks peer support and biblical help to heal from a past abortion. The center also offers childbirth and parenting classes: Since most clients do not have a father figure in their lives, it has started a mentoring program for the fathers of the babies.

Some women who come to the center face family rejection when they’re pregnant, and others battle intense pressure from their child’s father. CHPC executive director Janet Durig recalls how she had just come to work at the center when a young woman called to explain she had quit drugs and alcohol for the sake of her unborn baby, but her boyfriend wasn’t giving her anything to eat and was pressuring her to have an abortion. Durig invited her to the center, got her food, and bought her a bus ticket to Baltimore, where her father was waiting for her.

Houston also has a higher-than-average abortion rate. Sylvia Johnson, executive director of Houston Pregnancy Help Centers, recalls how about 11 years ago a pregnant 17-year-old called the suburban crisis pregnancy center where Johnson then worked. The girl already had an abortion scheduled and said it would take her three hours by bus to get to the center. She came anyway, since she wanted to talk with someone and didn’t really want to abort, but that experience prompted Johnson “to go into the community where this young lady lived.”

A year later she opened the Fifth Ward Pregnancy Help Center in a renovated building. A report by Houston’s Department of Health and Human Services gives a grim picture of that center’s neighborhood: Violent crime rate almost three times greater than Houston’s as a whole. Average birth rate for 15- to 17-year-old girls 80 percent higher than in the city generally. When thieves robbed the grocery store across the street, “some of the bullets even came through our doors,” Johnson said: The Fifth Ward “has a lot of pride, and it also has a lot of pain.”

Johnson said African-American churches in the ward were hesitant: “Are you going to be another organization that comes into our community and gathers your statistics and then closes down and you’re no longer here if I look for you tomorrow?” But despite graffiti and break-ins, the Fifth Ward center has stayed open for 10 years and served about 25,000 clients, offering compassion as well as free services like pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, parenting classes, and referrals. Johnson said she’s seen more cases of domestic violence, human trafficking, and fatherlessness in recent years: “We’re more needed today 10 years later, with our vision, than we were 10 years ago.”