Where NOT to seek help: avoid Cornerstone Pregnancy Advice Centre
As part of our Resources page, you can find recommendations on local and national organisations delivering advice, information, and services related to sexual and reproductive health. Having access to full, factual, and unbiased information is a vital part of making a full choice over your body.
In previous instances, some students facing unplanned pregnancy have sought support anonymously via Camfess. Fellow students have recommended Cornerstone Pregnancy Advice Centre. But these concerned individuals are usually committee members of Cambridge Pro-Life Society, who give out Cornerstone leaflets at their Freshers’ Fair stall. Cornerstone Pregnancy Advice Centre is a religious, anti-abortion organisation; we would not recommend contacting this organsiation for advice unless you would specifically like an anti-abortion religious perspective.
This article gives more details on Cornerstone, revealing the goals of the management behind Cornerstone, and how crisis pregnancy centres serve as advocacy arms for religious anti-abortion movements.
Contents (click to view):
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What is a Crisis Pregnancy Centre?
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Crisis pregnancy centres disguise themselves as clinics offering support, and rarely own up to what they are: Christian outreach initiatives ultimately aiming to discourage abortion. A recent BBC Panorama investigation highlighted the level of manipulation and misinformation peddled by these clinics. In the most upsetting examples, women seeking advice on abortion were incorrectly told that it would cause infertility, breast cancer, and death; that they would ‘suffer the consequences’; or were asked to imagine the sensation of holding a baby.
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Like these other centres, all Cornerstone promises on its website is to offer ‘unbiased information’ and support – but anybody presenting this as a secular clinic promoting medical knowledge is being completely disingenuous. Members of our community should be aware that Cornerstone is part of an advocacy arm of conservative Christian groups who condemn abortion, and their care is likely to be inappropriate to your needs.
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What does Cornerstone say about abortion?
At first glance, Cornerstone doesn’t look like a pro-life charity. Unlike protesters who stand chanting outside abortion clinics, there are no medically-misleading and graphic images, sermons to the unborn, or mentions of religion. Indeed, it seems they’ve actively sought to conceal their message of Christianity. Only on the ‘Work For Us’ page do they tell potential applicants: ‘we are a Christian charity’.
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To be clear, Cornerstone cannot refer you for an abortion. Their website claims that this is a bonus, as it means they only offer ‘impartial advice’ (the implication of this, of course, being that NHS-contracted organisations are evil bodies manipulating people into having abortions). However, the advice they offer is not impartial and not medically accurate. Abortion is one-dimensionally characterised as an ‘extremely painful emotional experience’, after which ‘many women’ struggle with depression, recurrent dreams of the ‘unborn child’, guilt, relationship difficulties, eating disorders, substance abuse, and low self-worth. The website presents no medical study to support these conclusions (meanwhile, medical studies repeatedly show that abortion is safe and the most commonly associated emotion is relief). Cornerstone also provides no concrete information on how abortion practically works - all they say is ‘there are various methods of termination’. That’s it.
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What Cornerstone says about keeping your pregnancy is very different. While abortion is presented as overwhelmingly negative, becoming a parent is described as being ‘rewarding and filling’. There is very little information online about what Cornerstone can offer to those considering an abortion; but if you want to become a parent, they offer to talk male partners out of their doubts about becoming a father, and provide free baby supplies. In other words: if you want your pregnancy, Cornerstone are very open about what they can do for you. If you want an abortion, you’re immediately told it’s a health risk, and encouraged to come in for a chat.
Who’s behind Cornerstone?
The careful language on the Cornerstone website avoids referring to the unborn, to religion, or to abortion as a ‘sin’. However, these are all stressed by members of Cornerstone’s management.
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Cornerstone’s Board of Trustees is packed with conservative Christian figures. Its Chair, Reverend Michael Kendall, is pastor of the local St Neots Evangelical Church, and on the board of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC). FIEC proudly states [X] [X] that ‘despite pressures from society’, it upholds ‘traditional biblical sexual ethics’: sex outside of marriage is a sin; gay marriage is unholy; husbands and fathers lead the family, and women submit. Kendall himself describes abortion as a ‘naked evil’.
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Cornerstone’s Manager, Helen Turley, is a Trustee of the Pregnancy Centres Network (PCN). PCN is a nationwide group established in 2015 to coordinate pregnancy centres ‘operating with a Christian ethos’ and ‘providing care and compassion based on Christian principles’. The link between Cambridge Cornerstone and PCN seems pretty strong; Turley leads both organisations, Cornerstone’s public reports confirm that it uses PCN training courses for its staff, and their websites even use the same web design platform (Hubb Digital and Hubb Church, ‘designed specifically for churches and ministries'). PCN’s website specifically declines to make a public statement on abortion - a completely unsustainable stance for any organisation claiming to offer real choice over unplanned pregnancies. Elsewhere, PCN’s Director has made it clear: they promote ‘a culture that affirms preborn life’.
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What actually happens at a clinic run by the Pregnancy Centres Network? Again, PCN are secretive. Their training courses can’t be accessed unless you’re part of the network; and annual reports or other documentation don’t reveal their content. Luckily, public statements by members of PCN management reveal the religious, anti-choice nature of their advice.
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In 2023, Celia Wyatt (PCN Deputy Chair of Trustees) gave a lecture on ‘The Unborn Child’ at Keswick Ministries, a controversial conservative evangelical Christian conference. Wyatt claimed that ‘the most dangerous place for a child in the UK is in its mother’s womb’, and quotes bogus studies on the supposed harmful medical consequences of abortion. Most revealingly, she tells the story of a client called ‘Annette’, who visited a PCN clinic after having an abortion. In Wyatt’s own words, the clinic prompted Annette to express ‘anger’ at herself and at ‘those who failed her’ by providing an abortion. The counsellors told Annette that she had ‘broken God’s law’, but that Jesus loved her despite this grave sin. Wyatt describes the PCN counselling approach as balancing between ‘God’s truth and God’s compassion’: that abortion is never a solution, but that Christian grace demands sinners be pitied and forgiven.
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Elsewhere, local church leader and PCN Developmental Lead Caitlin Heslop has revealed what counsellors do when a client asks for an abortion. Heslop told the My Faith At Work podcast that PCN uses a ‘compassionate’ approach, telling these clients to ‘take a step back and think’. She asks women to reflect on ‘their thoughts on the topic last year’, and instructs them to have multiple conversations with their partner. Reading between the lines: women consider abortion when in a crisis, and need to be talked out of it. This isn’t shouting at people entering clinics, but it’s still manipulation.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with stating that somebody who is pregnant should take the time to consider a decision, speak with a partner, or even that some people will feel grief and uncertainty. But, context is key. Cornerstone, and its managing organisation PCN, would never tell women wanting to keep their pregnancy to ‘calm down’, consider the life-changing nature of their decision, or point out that abortion is far safer than pregnancy and UK maternal mortality rates are rising. Supplying misleading information and half-truths, favouring moral, religious, and social arguments over medical ones, and defining your goal as talking women out of abortion is not providing unbiased information.
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Tricking people is part of the plan. Wyatt admits it herself in her lecture: ‘it’s a deliberate choice to adopt a non-campaigning stance: our vision is to reach out to abortion-minded women, and a high-vis pro-life branding and rhetoric is not going to help with that’. In other words, PCN know that most people are not interested in going to pro-life religious groups for support. If they presented themselves truthfully, people wouldn’t seek help. Therefore, they deliberately obfuscate this with a disingenuous narrative of unbiased information.
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Only a very small group may find Cornerstone’s advice useful. For some Christian women, being absolved as a repentant sinner might help – because it is forgiveness within the religious framework they subscribe to. For the vast majority of our community, however, this is a completely inappropriate response. An organisation founded on religious values, and geared towards the former, should not mask itself as offering unbiased support for all.
What’s Cornerstone up to these days?
Cash increase: The UK anti-abortion movement has been emboldened by the fall of Roe v Wade, with huge injections of cash coming from US allies and a sense of momentum in the national campaign. Cornerstone’s charity files record a massive increase in donations – their yearly income in donations from ‘individuals, churches and companies’ has nearly quadrupled in recent years (from £8k in 2016/17 to £37k last year).
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New Cambridge clinic: Cornerstone already runs a clinic in Huntington, but is using this new cash to set up another branch in central Cambridge, using instructors from the Pregnancy Centres Network to train new volunteers.
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Frustrations over telemedicine: Cornerstone’s Trustee Reports complain that new provisions on telemedicine for early medical abortion (meaning patients can take pills in the comfort of their home rather than needing to travel to a clinic) has meant a ‘lack of opportunities to engage with ladies going through this process’. They propose adopting a new approach: ‘meeting in informal outside meetings with clients to offer informal support’. This sounds a lot like standing outside abortion clinics and harassing patients.
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New Trustee a local GP: Students attending Newnham Walk Surgery should be aware that one of the GPs was appointed to Cornerstone’s Board of Trustees. This article does not wish to name the individual directly, but the relevant information can be found here. Students who attend this surgery should be aware of this if seeking help from their GP for reproductive healthcare.