Grudge of the Week: "Pregnant? Alone? Afraid?"—Part I
“Pregnant? Alone? Afraid?”
The blue and white signs interrogate passersby and drivers. It is impossible for me to ignore the scaled-down wooden billboards staked into the grounds of various Catholic churches throughout Maryland and Washington, D.C.
I am an abortion journalist. I do not like how the questions play, prey, and pray on a pregnant person’s fear.
When I became the pregnant person, I could taste the fear, even though everything else zinged of garbage. Garbage mouth, I called it. The formal term is dysgeusia, and it only subsided when I drank watered-down lemonade, the acidity cutting the mouthfeel of rot.
The signs include an 800 number and a website for the Gabriel Network. I assume it is another crisis pregnancy center, a fake clinic with a real ultrasound machine that anti-abortion workers, cosplaying trained medical providers, use to convince a person to continue their pregnancy. Abortion is presented as a danger, a murder, or a sin, if it is mentioned at all.
Upon further research, I learned the Gabriel Network runs maternity homes in the area.
Maternity homes have flourished in the four years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and with it, the constitutional right to abortion. The United States contains 498 maternity homes, representing a 17 percent increase from the 2022 ruling, according to a 2024 Impact Report from Heartbeat International, which partners with a variety of “pregnancy help organizations” in the U.S. and around the world.
Anti-abortion activity is an endless series of Matryoshka dolls, the colorful wooden figurines that hide each other. Heartbeat International affiliates collect and potentially exploit personal data from affiliated crisis pregnancy centers’ intake forms, according to the UK-based Privacy International’s 2019 report. One of Heartbeat International’s domestic affiliates is the Maternity Housing Coalition, an advisory group that provides training and an annual conference for maternity housing providers.
Before I fell further down the information hole, I read more about maternity homes. “They're free—but not without conditions,” often curfews and drug tests, NPR’s Katia Riddle reported in 2019. By then, Donald Trump had installed Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. One more justice to go and he’d have the votes to overturn Roe. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death the next year gave Trump the opening to nominate abortion opponent Amy Coney Barrett, as I’d predicted the night Ginsburg died in a piece for the defunct magazine GEN. In 2021, the Washington Post glowingly covered a “maternity ranch” a Texas woman opened following the passage of state anti-abortion laws that provided a post-Roe blueprint, I reported for SELF magazine.
There are more conditions on the ranch. “That her program involves mandatory Bible study, silver bracelets for moms that say ‘I am free,’ and insistence on heterosexuality and religious primacy of males over females is elided, or maybe just downplayed,” Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote in response to the article. “But good people who provide good service to good people who make certain choices only when their other choices are taken away is not ‘freedom,’ even if it comes engraved on a silver bracelet.”
The Gabriel Network sign that infuriates me the most appears outside the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament. It is a parish on the way to my mother-in-law’s house, off Chevy Chase Circle. Western Avenue cuts across, dividing the neighborhood into Maryland and Washington, D.C. turfs. You cannot get more Upper NW D.C.—or Upper Caucasia, as the locals call it—than Chevy Chase. The Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament sits on the District’s fringes and serves parishioners from both sides of the boundary.
Brett Kavanaugh comes from the Maryland side.
