The Resource Center (TRC), a pro-life pregnancy resource center located in Greeley, Colorado, is thriving despite being the target of a well-coordinated and well-funded pro-abortion attack.
“It’s just part of the whole fake clinic movement,” Gail Holmes said, the Executive Director of TRC, in an interview with The Daily Citizen.
Pro-life pregnancy resource centers (PRC) have been under almost constant attack by pro-abortion groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and others. These efforts are well-funded and usually include things like buying Google Ads to ensure pro-life centers don’t show up in Ad searches, mounting internet campaigns, and, most recently, picketing outside PRCs in certain states. But the situation in Greeley took it to another level.
A pro-abortion group called COBALT, which has connections to NARAL and attempts to recruit students from the University of Northern Colorado (UNC) campus, has created a website called truth4greeley.com, which closely mimics TRC (tests4greeley.com) and was created simply to disparage the great work that ministry is doing within the community. It’s just one part of a larger attack strategy, which includes passing out anti-PRC flyers on campus and writing fake reviews online.
“I was sort of shocked that they’d pick on a smaller town pregnancy center,” Holmes said. “We’re not tiny but we’re not Los Angeles or Denver. I just thought, why would they pick on Greeley other than the fact that we have a college campus here and it was maybe easy to recruit college kids to help.”
TRC has been operating out of Greeley for almost 40 years, serving one of the biggest counties in Colorado through ultrasounds, STD testing and treatment, the abortion pill reversal protocol and parenting classes at no cost to prospective parents and other clients.
Though there had always been a strong pro-abortion movement on the college campus, the creation of a website was new.
“We contacted Alliance Defending Freedom about it, and they told us that it was the most serious fake clinic attack that they had seen,” Holmes said. “It wasn’t just the fact that the name was really close to ours, but they also took our branding, which is a tree with multiple colored leaves. They also used our exact colors and put the tabs and buttons in similar places to ours. They were mimicking our website.”
Unfortunately, there are few options when it comes to this type of attack.
“What we wanted to do is get the page off the internet, so we contacted NIFLA and we had advice from all different directions and our board.” Holmes said. “After talking about the situation with a lawyer, it felt like the only thing we could do to get the website taken down is to file what’s called a UDRP or Uniform Domain Dispute Resolution, where you ask this arbitration board to look at the facts and then decide whether they have encroached upon us. The main thing we have to do is prove that they created this website to cause us harm.”
Despite all the evidence, the arbitrator, a single judge, ruled in favor of the pro-abortion group. The arbitrator ruled that the website was only being used for political speech and not in bad faith.
“It was really disappointing because we thought that it was a slam dunk,” Holmes said. “We could sue them but that could cost up to $30,000.”
In the minds of many at TRC, that money could be better spent towards ministering to women in the local community, rather than fighting a court case with an uncertain outcome and large legal bills. Thankfully, the existence of the website has done little to impact the traffic to TRC, which remains mostly operational despite the coronavirus pandemic. Nonessential staff are now working from home and those who interact with clients still see women every day.
“We recently had a prayer text that went out sharing how one girl came in wanting an abortion and ended up accepting Christ during her meeting with the advocate,” Holmes said. “That’s a bit unusual because we don’t always have an opening to share the Gospel. She decided that she wanted to go ahead and have the baby, so we did the ultrasound and discovered that she was pregnant with twins. It was so remarkable and such a blessing. If she was the only client we saw the whole month, it would’ve been worth it just to save those two little babies.”
It’s incredibly unfortunate that TRC lost the case because it may mean that more abortion groups are going to attempt similar smear campaigns. The aggressive attacks against “fake clinics” within the pro-abortion community is real and could impact the reach that pro-life pregnancy resource centers have.
This case is a warning to PRCs across the country about what the future may hold.
Please pray for The Resource Center as it continues to deal with relentless attacks from this pro-abortion group associated with NARAL and the Social Democrats. TRC is also asking for prayers regarding one of their biggest fundraisers of the year, which has already been impacted by the outbreak.