WHERE CAN PREGNANT TEENS TURN?

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

A woman entering the Crisis Pregnancy Center, in a modern medical building in Poughkeepsie, New York, is greeted by a staff member seated behind a sliding glass window who hands her a clipboard with forms to fill out. In the bathroom, a chrome-and-glass cart holds a medicine jar full of cotton. But this is no doctor's office. The center--affiliated with the Christian Action Council's Care Net, a nonprofit organization based in Sterling, Virginia--has no staff members with medical training. Rather, any woman who drops by is offered a free over-the-counter pregnancy test and a good dose of antiabortion counseling using plastic fetuses, pamphlets and videos.

If she's financially distressed and not already on welfare--as half the C.P.C. clients are--she will be tutored in applying for AFDC and food stamps. ``We find that women don't even know what welfare assistance is available now,'' says Judy Brown, general counsel of Care Net. ``We act as a referral system.''

This, then, is where the goals of the antiabortion movement collide headon with the Gingrich agenda. The volunteers at roughly 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers nationwide (465 of them sponsored by Care Net) are promoting childbirth among the very women the Contract with America hopes to discourage from motherhood: unwed teens and welfare mothers having additional children. Could the centers make up the difference if, as Newt proposes, welfare benefits to such women were cut back? ``Absolutely not,'' says Linda Cochrane, executive director of the Poughkeepsie center. ``What clients get from the government far exceeds what we provide.''

What the center does provide is used baby and maternity clothes, toys, diapers and formula. ``They call you and say, `Do you need any stuff?' '' says Cindy Raabe, a pregnant 22-year-old single mother of two. ``I love this place.'' Last year counselors at the Poughkeepsie center saw about 850 women, most between the ages of 15 and 22.

The Care Net staff is almost entirely volunteer and operates on a shoestring; the Poughkeepsie center's annual budget is $59,000. Staff members must undergo 14 to 24 hours of in-house training before they can advise pregnant women. The pregnancy center does not dispense information about birth control, other than a brochure about ``natural family planning.''

But Planned Parenthood's Leslie Sebastian, who has monitored these unlicensed centers, warns that they have a history of deception. As the result of a 1991 congressional investigation, the Yellow Pages Publishers Association agreed to divide listings into ``abortion providers'' and ``abortion alternatives,'' but this does not always work. ``The way the ad read, I didn't know a Christian woman would be on the other end of the phone,'' says a 40-year-old woman who called Cobb Pregnancy Services in Marietta, Georgia (which is not a Care Net facility), looking for an abortion. ``I told her I didn't call to get a lecture.'' (This woman did visit Cobb and decided to keep her baby.) According to Sebastian, there have also been at least a dozen lawsuits against pregnancy centers, filed by women who claim they were coerced into giving up their babies for adoption.

If welfare benefits--and crucial Medicaid eligibility--are drastically curtailed, says Care Net's Judy Brown, ``we're going to have to be more creative in helping women pay their bills, and get job training and pre- and postnatal care. We'll have to be more assertive.''

--By Elizabeth Gleick. Reported by Sophfronia Scott Gregory/Marietta and Andrea Sachs/Poughkeepsie

With reporting by SOPHFRONIA SCOTT GREGORY/MARIETTA AND ANDREA SACHS/POUGHKEEPSIE