While I think abortion is morally tolerable and should be legal, I recognize that there are competing moral views that can be held in good faith. Proponents and opponents of abortion have the right to argue for their views and influence others. So, I have no moral objection against the idea of a pregnancy crisis center that provides accurate information about alternatives to abortion and assistance to women who elect to not have an abortion. Unfortunately, pregnancy crisis centers often seem to engage in willful deceit.

Some years ago, John Oliver did a show on the deceptive practices of these centers. While Oliver is a comedian, his claims were backed up with evidence: these centers often trick women. One common technique is masquerading as an abortion clinic or health care provider by locating close to such places and using similar names. They also tend to use the trapping of professional medicine to create the illusion they are a clinic despite not being licensed to provide medical care. Another tactic is to make untrue claims about abortion, such as the claim that abortion increases the risk of cancer and infertility.

While centers are usually allowed to give ultrasounds, they seem to routinely mislead women about the results. While there is a shortage of funding for women’s health, many states provide public money to these centers. This should worry people who profess to favor small government and to oppose public money being used for ideological causes. After all, one of the arguments advanced against public funding of Planned Parenthood is that public money might be used for something some people find morally or religiously unacceptable. The same logic should apply to these centers.

On the face of it, deceit seems morally wrong and centers that engage in it are acting immorally. This is especially ironic given these centers tend to be affiliated with religious organizations and the bible is clear about lying. That said, one can argue in favor of the approach of these centers.

It can be argued that such deceit is justified on moral grounds because the end justifies the means. The obvious moral theory to use here is utilitarianism: the action that creates the most good and the least harmful is the right action. In the case of the centers, they could accept that deceit is generally not a good thing, but that the harm of deceiving the women and girls is exceeded by the good of misleading them so that they do not have an abortion. To use an analogy, lying to a murderer to keep them from murdering would be morally right on utilitarian grounds.

Even if one accepts the utilitarian approach, there is still the question of whether the centers are doing their moral calculation right: is the good they claim to do outweighing the harms to the women and girls they deceive? Obviously, pro-choice people would disagree. There is also my usual line: why lie if the truth will suffice? In the case at hand, if abortion is truly as evil as the center folk believe, then telling women the truth should suffice to convince them. If they must lie to people, then one would suspect that they must not have faith in their own reasons and arguments. They could, of course, reply by doubling down on the utilitarian approach and contend that people are not swayed by good reasons nor are they drawn to the right thing without being led there by deceit.

Accepting utilitarianism does create its own problem: if the ends justify the means in terms of deceiving to prevent abortion, then the same principle also applies to abortion. As such, abortion would be subject to the same utilitarian calculation and could turn out to be acceptable on these grounds. In any case, its wrongness would be conditional upon the harms and benefits.

The centers could reply that they are not utilitarians; they just hold that the end justifies the means when it comes to lying about abortion. They could hold that abortion is inherently worse than lying and it is acceptable to do lesser evils to prevent greater evils. While this is a consistent position it is morally problematic as there are non-deceitful ways to reduce abortions, such as providing cheap and effective birth control, funding quality sex-education, improving support services for women and girls who have babies, and so on. After all, it is hard to justify doing evil to stop evil when there are viable non-evil alternatives. If someone gladly embraces deceit to advance their cause when morally better alternatives exist, one must question their ethics.