Editor’s Note: This investigation was produced by openDemocracy and is republished with permission.
When I call the Kharkiv Pregnancy Assistance Center, I hear a sympathetic woman’s voice in the receiver. I slowly explain my situation: I am a 20-year-old student and an internally-displaced person who was raped. I am now pregnant and thinking about accessing an abortion, which has been legal in Ukraine since the 1950s.
The woman’s tone changes. Abortion is not an option, in her view. Instead, she pushes me to turn to religion and tells me to go confess at church. “It is impossible to kill and be happy,” she says, suggesting that, even if I got pregnant from a rapist, I am still carrying a “child born of God and his blood.”
She said my “ability to love” would also be affected. “It is better to give him life than to get breast cancer or uterus cancer,” she added, incorrectly claiming that, after an abortion, these are “risks that await you at every corner.”
The story I told the woman was not my own. I’m 39 now, and I called her group’s hotline as part of an eighteen-country investigation by openDemocracy into how ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ (CPCs) are operating around the world.
Often styled to resemble medical clinics or neutral counseling services, staff at these centers have an agenda: to dissuade women from having abortions. Internationally, some even discourage women and teenagers from using contraception. Thanks to support from American religious groups linked U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, they have spread across the world.
The Kharkiv center is based in Ukraine’s second-largest city, which has also become the main destination for internally-displaced persons since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region in 2014.
Its website has a neutral landing page and the simple URL “helpcenter.com.ua”. On the site, it advertises services “regardless of whether you are considering an abortion, bringing up a child on your own or giving it for up for adoption.” It even offers an online “test” to tell you if you should have an abortion or not.
Though when you dig deeper, every blog post and article the Kharkiv center has published about abortion appears to emphasize only negative consequences and psychological and physical side effects. And when I called the center’s hotline, I was given only one choice: carry my unwanted pregnancy to term.
I couldn’t find any suggestion on the center’s website that it is a religious group, though the about section of its Russian Facebook page (which has only 600 followers) says it aims “to reduce the need for abortion to zero.” The English version with fewer followers says it reaches people with “the love of Christ.”
The center did not respond to an openDemocracy request for comment on its activities or the advice it provides to women.
On the phone, however, the center’s employee initially said: “If you have an abortion, I can’t judge you. This is your choice. You have a difficult choice.” But she quickly shifted the focus of our call from a discussion of healthcare options toward moral claims, and warned me that having an abortion would also threaten my soul. She spoke a lot about God, and told me “You will never be the same” after an abortion.
A woman in trouble and looking for help may not realize that the Kharkiv center has an agenda – or such powerful foreign friends. For years, however, this “crisis center” in eastern Ukraine has been connected to a Christian right group whose “new friends in Washington” include Trump’s Vice President Michael Pence.
This is Heartbeat International, which was founded in the 1970s and started opening “crisis pregnancy centers” in the U.S. decades ago. Today it says it has a presence on “every inhabited continent” and its online directory lists hundreds of “affiliates” internationally, including the Kharkiv center in Ukraine.
“She said having an abortion would threaten my soul, as well as my health”
As part of openDemocracy’s global investigation, many other undercover reporters visiting other such centers in Heartbeat’s network were told remarkably similar things. That includes incorrect information about cancer risks that was repeated by staff at some of these centers from Italy to Ecuador.
In Ukraine, the Ministry of Health guidelines say that “healthcare providers” should “be respectful of the patient and be able to help her maintain her dignity.” Counselors asked about abortion should only provide information on different procedures and never intimidate, condemn or force women into decisions.
But here’s the catch: the Kharkiv center I contacted for help appears to fall beyond the ministry’s reach, as it isn’t – and doesn’t have to be – on the list of officially accredited healthcare organizations. This means there’s no state monitoring or quality assessment of its services to pregnant women.
Hillary Margolis, a Human Rights Watch senior researcher on Europe and Central Asia and women’s rights, called our findings “disturbing.”
“These centers prey on women and girls who are often at their most vulnerable,” she said, calling on governments to make sure that their advertising is clear so that “people understand immediately what these centers really represent.”
Kateryna Levchenko, the government’s commissioner for gender policy, said she was not aware of the center in Kharkiv, but that “counseling is a service” that should not be prohibited, but regulated by “public organizations, and citizens themselves – if they see that a (government) approved standard is not being met, then they can apply to those institutions that issue a license to operate.”
From US to Ukraine
Unlike in the U.S., where there are thousands of these anti-abortion pregnancy centers, they are not at the forefront of public debate in Ukraine. Meanwhile, there have been several populist and nationalist political proposals in recent years to change the law and restrict Ukrainian women’s abortion rights.
OpenDemocracy’s investigation also comes amid increasing signs of intensifying U.S. Christian right-wing activity and connections in Ukraine – including links to the ultra-conservative World Congress of Families network that holds large annual summits and lists Heartbeat as a previous partner on its website.
Since 1955, women in Ukraine have had the legal right to abortions on request, paid for by the state, through the 12th week of pregnancy (and after this period in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformities and threats to the woman’s health).
A 2017 bill would have limited legal abortions to cases of rape, fetal impairment or to preserve the woman’s health. A previous 2013 bill tried to introduce criminal liability for abortion and fines for abortion ‘propaganda.” Each of these proposals was met with resistance and was ultimately rejected by parliament.
However, in January, a new inter-party group of nearly 300 Ukrainian lawmakers was unveiled under the banner: “Values. Dignity. Family.” One of this group’s leaders, Oleg Voloshyn from the party of Putin’s ally Viktor Medvedchuk Medvedchuk, said he hopes the ultra-conservative World Congress of Families network will hold their next global gathering in Kyiv.
The World Congress of Families is led by the U.S. activist Brian Brown, who visited Ukraine last year to participate in an ultra-conservative ‘family forum’ in Kyiv. This March, he met Voloshyn and Sviatoslav Yurash, the young co-leader of the “Values. Dignity. Family” group in Ukraine’s parliament.
“We agreed to coordinate efforts in everything, adopt international experience in legislation… and also do everything to prove that to be part of the modern world there is no need to bury our eternal values under the cover of a rainbow flag,” Voloshin wrote on Facebook alongside a picture of himself and Brown.
Olena Suslova, a researcher and human rights activist who founded the Women’s Information Consultative Center, says such ties between Russian and U.S. ultra-conservatives are a major driver of anti-abortion initiatives in Ukraine.
These initiatives intensified, she said, after 2010 when President Viktor Yanukovych entered office and a wide range of church-related NGOs were established.
Success and shame
Founded in 2003, the Kharkiv center reaches hundreds of mainly “unbelieving” women a year, “who are seeking abortion as a way out of the crisis of an unplanned pregnancy,” its director Elena Batina claimed in 2015.
The Kharkiv center has no known links to the World Congress of Families, but Heartbeat has given it small grants in recent years. In 2016, Heartbeat’s president Jor-El Godsey also praised Batina at a 2016 anti-abortion summit in Atlanta, saying that she “has been instrumental in fanning to flame the work of pregnancy help organizations across Eastern Europe.”
A “success story” celebrated on Heartbeat’s website is about a child it claims was born after Kharkiv center staff prayed and persuaded her mother to give birth.
Others, however, have questioned the effectiveness of these centers. Halyna Maistruk at Ukraine’s Women’s Health and Family Planning foundation argues that the number of abortions women have will only decrease if more people have access to sex education and contraception, both of which are currently limited.
“We still have Soviet-educated teachers who don’t want to talk to children about such topics and we still have parents who don’t speak to children about them,” said Maistruk. Meanwhile, the Kharkiv center does have programs for teenagers – teaching abstinence and “true love waits.”
In such contexts, where comprehensive sex education is not widely taught at schools, Jaime Todd-Gher, former Legal Advisor at Amnesty International, warned that the activities of ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ can compound “stigma around abortion and women’s sexuality in general, and lead people to feel ashamed and embarrassed to seek accurate information.”
This can cause “unnecessary emotional distress” and, for young people without access to other sources of information, the consequences can include “increased rates of adolescent pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal mortality.”
Silence from Kharkiv?
While the Kharkiv center declined to comment, Heartbeat told openDemocracy “we stand firmly by our Commitment of Care” – which commits affiliates to providing accurate information and advertising.
In further emailed comments, it stated that its affiliates “must adhere to basic principles that affirm alternatives to abortion and ensure non-discrimination, but all other matters of policy and management remain under the direction of the centers’ local leadership allowing for autonomy.”
“Our clients have the right to choose an abortion and they also have the right to know more fully what may be at stake in their decision,” it added, saying “a recent survey of pregnancy help center clients revealed a 99% satisfaction score.”
The World Congress of Families declined to comment.
In response to openDemocracy’s investigation, Fred Matic, the European Parliament’s Special Rapporteur on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, said he believes: “Misinformation and deliberate inaccurate information provided in these centers are undoubtedly a violation of human rights.”
In Ukraine, Jaime Nadal Roig, the United Nation Population Fund’s country representative, said he was not aware of the Kharkiv center but that “the provision of inaccurate information and counseling not in line with official health legislation and protocols should be brought to the attention of the appropriate authorities.”
Such inaccurate information “could lead women to make ill-informed decisions, exposing them to unnecessary health risks,” he warned.
