THOUSAND OAKS : Advocates of Abortion Rights Allege ‘Scare Tactics’ by Counseling Center

About 30 abortion-rights advocates picketed in front of a pregnancy counseling clinic in Thousand Oaks on Thursday, accusing the clinic of deceiving pregnant women by not disclosing its anti-abortion mission.

The collection of placard-waving men, women and children denounced the Conejo Valley Crisis Pregnancy Center on East Thousand Oaks Boulevard, saying the center frightens young pregnant women with scare tactics such as showing videotapes with startling images of aborted fetuses.

“Their signs and their motives are very mundane and hard to decipher,” said Margaret Chamberlain, former president of the Conejo chapter of the National Organization for Women.

She said the clinic lures vulnerable young women into counseling with no mention in its advertisements of its affiliation with anti-abortion groups.

“What they really do is tell young women they could die from abortion,” she said.

Pregnant teen-agers, she said, “are very vulnerable to those tactics.”

Karen Johnson, director of the pregnancy center, disputed the protesters’ charges.

“It’s untrue,” Johnson said. “It’s absolutely untrue . . . . We’re very openly a pro-life organization.”

What the clinic does, she said, is disseminate factual information. And the center, whose activities are funded by private donations and 30 churches, is not hiding its views from anyone in the community, she said.

Defending the clinic’s tactics, she said, “We find the No. 1 thing (young women) say is ‘Nobody told me. Nobody told me it was a baby or that I would feel bad later.’ ”

Johnson said the clinic runs a 24-hour hot line, offers free pregnancy tests with “no questions asked,” and informs pregnant women of the emotional and physical risks involved in abortion.

The women who seek counseling at the center have the option of watching two videotapes.

One features interviews with four women who chose to keep their babies, and one shows a reporter playing devil’s advocate to people standing on both sides of the abortion issue.

Johnson acknowledged that the films are produced by anti-abortion organizations.

“We have a definite position here,” she said.

In a 1982 film entitled “A Matter of Choice,” the speakers stack up 2 to 1 on the anti-abortion side.

Abortion is described by one speaker as a “scheduled execution,” and the viewer is shown some graphic close-ups of fetuses killed by saline injection and the vacuum method.