Selling Life to Abortion-Seekers: A Content Analysis of Passive and Active Persuasion in Crisis Pregnancy Center Marketing

For supporters of the pro-life cause, crisis pregnancy centers (or CPC’s) have become the “darlings of the movement,” according to the New York Times (Belluck, 2013), offering women with unplanned pregnancies free advice, information, classes, childcare, and needed supplies. For abortion advocates, such establishments are intended to seduce vulnerable abortion-seekers into a situation where they will be counseled out of an abortion and possibly even proselytized. Yet for as much controversy as exists in the news media, medical community, and legal realm about CPC’s, there is an unsettling lack of understanding of how—and why—CPC’s market themselves the way they do. Their challenge is unique; they must “sell” non-abortive services to women who are oftentimes insecure, pressured, and abortion-minded. If one grants the right of such centers to exist, one must also grant their right to advertise. Do they market with active or passive persuasion, and does it accomplish the goal? To answer such questions, this study focuses on VirtueMedia, a notable pro-life marketing non-profit with connections to Care Net—the closest crisis pregnancy care equivalent of Planned Parenthood on the pro-life side. Using Petty and Cacioppo’s elaboration-likelihood model, or ELM, this study uses both proprietary and traditional means of content analysis to explore the themes and persuasive routes exhibited in two contrasting VirtueMedia television commercial campaigns. The study found that of the two campaigns analyzed, both relied heavily on peripheral cues and passive forms of persuasion, but not to the extent typically assumed. Overt central cues played a prominent role in one of the two campaigns. Also, women’s-issues framing of the description of CPC services—as a peripheral cue—differed vastly in both form and function, sometimes taking a form that abortion advocates could consider “deceptive,” and CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTER MARKETING 8 other times existing alongside explicitly pro-life messages. The study, in fact, found that as inferred audience elaboration levels increased, the women’s-issues message framing actually inverted pro-choice terms to draw attention to the tragedy of the post-abortive experience, showing a rhetorical strategy that is fluid depending upon the involvement of the audience— something again more consistent with brand positioning than deception. In sum, this ELM-based content analysis demonstrated that language typically indicative of pro-choice messages is employed by VirtueMedia as a brand positioning strategy rather than to intentionally obfuscate VirtueMedia’s political views. CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTER MARKETING 9 Chapter 1: Introduction With the 40 th anniversary of Roe v. Wade having recently passed, the abortion debate in the United States is increasingly leaving the political realm and sparking more organic movements on both sides. In the pro-life camp, focus is shifting from legislative efforts to pregnancy assistance. Crisis pregnancy centers (CPC’s), also known as pregnancy resource centers (PRC’s), have arisen as the poster children of the pro-life movement. CPC’s offer services such as peer counseling, pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, and spiritual support to pregnant women in what might be considered an understated effort to point women towards parenting or adoption rather than abortion. CPC’s educate women on their options, explaining the risks of abortion and encouraging women to make slow, reasoned decisions about their pregnancy. Some CPC’s offer medical services and are thus legally considered medical clinics; others do not (Committee on Government Reform—Minority Staff Special Investigations Division, 2006). Many are supported and run by evangelical groups or churches, using the counseling services as a means of evangelism. As a result, CPC’s generally rely on donation and volunteer support, with more limited staffing resources. Yet, reaching vulnerable populations in ways that no political activist could, it is estimated that these darlings of the movement have given help to over 2.3 million women (Shields, 2013). Targeting their communication strategy at abortion-minded women, these CPC’s have attracted wide attention in health communication, the news media, and rhetorical studies. Several writers and researchers have addressed CPC advertisement strategies. Yet these organizations have garnered heavy criticism from the news media in recent years for alleged deceptive advertising tactics in their attempts to draw in abortion-minded women. Health professionals have decried their information on abortion as inaccurate (Rosen, 2012), while CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTER MARKETING 10 others have actually called their advertisement messages deceptive (Mertus, 1990). Individual CPC’s have been targeted for study, and prochoice research has found them to disseminate “misinformation” to clients (Bryant & Levi, 2012). Legal scholars have questioned the legality of advertisement messages which do not disclose that these “fake abortion clinics” do not offer abortive services (Faria, 2012; Williams, 2010). Media reports have followed suit, bringing the controversial advertisement messages into the public eye (“Why won’t they say? ”). CPC advertisements have emerged as a highly subjective, controversial, criticized, yet littleunderstood phenomenon. Approaches to the issue of CPC advertising, which is in itself a relatively small field of study within the larger scholarly side of the abortion debate, fall into a few predictable categories. In the first (and by far the largest) group of literature, health communication professionals and legal writers, typically predisposed in favor of abortion rights, question the ethicality of delayed disclosure tactics. In a second, considerably smaller group, rhetorical analysts have studied the role of visual rhetoric, fetal imagery, and other peripheral cues in prolife advertising (Hopkins, Zeedyk, & Raitt, 2005; Lauritzen, 2008; Price, 2011), but not in CPC advertising in particular. In the third group, journalists (both editorial and investigative) have released scathing exposés on CPC advertisement strategies, contributing substantially to public opinion. Unifying these three groups of literature is a common lack of attention paid to the content of the advertisements themselves as legitimate persuasive devices, worthy of analysis from a theoretical basis, and one of the more unique features on the rhetorical landscape of the abortion debate. A second deficiency in the current literature is the absence of pro-life adherents in health communication. CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTER MARKETING 11 The absence of detailed analysis of CPC marketing messages is regrettable in light of the amount of criticism they have garnered from health communication professionals. The scholarly health community, characterized by a strong prochoice bias, will benefit from this study’s rhetorical analysis of several CPC ads. Pro-life marketers themselves will also benefit from the study, which will shed light upon the effectiveness of various central and peripheral cues in persuading abortion-minded women to engage a CPC organization. The purpose of this qualitative study will be to conduct a rhetorical analysis of several CPC advertisements using the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) framework, exploring the central and peripheral routes employed in the persuasion of abortion-minded women. Ultimately, this will help establish how CPC marketers craft their messages—whether communicating all their central points using direct factual statements, indicating a straightforward approach, or embedding them only in the peripheral route, indicating what could be seeds of deception. The study addresses three research questions: 1. First (RQ1), do VirtueMedia’s CPC ads reflect a more passive (i.e. peripheral) approach to persuasion, or active (i.e. central)? 2. Second (RQ2), how does VirtueMedia use women’s-issues message framing as a peripheral cue in relation to its advertising goals? 3. Finally (RQ3), is women’s issues related framing an effective cue, as inferred by studying the relevance of peripheral cues to central cues? The artifacts will be analyzed for what arguments are or are not presented in each route. It is the researcher’s hope that the outcome of the study will determine the rhetorical impact of full disclosure of services via the central route, explaining the effectiveness of each advertisement without this variable. CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTER MARKETING 12 Having established the goal of the research, the next chapter will discuss in greater detail the current literature relating to the study on a variety of levels: CPC-related, advertising rhetorical analyses, and ELM-based qualitative studies. This literature will inform the study as we seek to address an issue currently overlooked by communication scholarship. CRISIS PREGNANCY CENTER MARKETING 13 Chapter 2: Literature Review The growing prominence of CPC’s has not gone unnoticed in news media. As recently as January 2013, The New York Times reported on the impact of these “darlings of the pro-life movement” (Belluck, 2013). However, not all coverage of the trend has been positive; indeed, far from it. A 2011 Times editorial called for stricter legal treatment of the CPC movement which would force individual centers to disclose the fact that they do not offer abortion or contraceptive services, preventing them from being confused with abortion clinics (“Why won’t they say? ”)— a practice which this study will also note for its resemblance to brand positioning strategies adopted across a variety of industries. Yet as far back as the 1980s news media have CPC’s have been scrutinized as the dishonest, evangelical cousins of abortion clinics (Wong, 1987). Critical interest in CPC tactics also extends into fields beyond news media. Professionals in the field of reproductive health have accused CPC’s of disseminating inaccurate information about abortion pr