"Aga, do you not think you are giving an awful lot of credence to their stated aims and leaflets, when they are part of a network which has been proven on multiple occasions to say one thing and do quite another?"
There is no central control though. They are independent charities.
For example, per The Guardian
"A counsellor at Alternatives Pregnancy Choices Newham, a Care Confidential affiliate in east London, was said to have been friendly, well-informed and able to recommend abortion providers, including Marie Stopes and BPAS."
so a particular charity affiliated to Care was fine.
however
'A counsellor at Choices Haringey in north London, part of a network overseen by Care Confidential, a Christian organisation, did not know the legal time limit for abortion, claimed that there were no statistics on the number of women who have terminations and had little idea about local services.
The counsellor frequently referred to "The Journey" – a training manual – and handed out photocopied pages from its 10-step "road to abortion recovery", including steps entitled "guilt and shame" and "forgiveness".
Other sections of the manual (which were not given to the researcher) state: "Part of the healing journey to post-abortion recovery involves repentance – the only remedy for guilt. If we are to walk this journey with a woman then we need to clearly see which boundaries she has crossed … immorality, coveting, lying, as well as taking innocent life."'
another one wasn't.
In response:
"Julia Acott, Care Confidential's counselling and support services manager, said the organisation was sorry the service provided at Haringey "fell below the standards expected". The adviser in question would be retrained.
She said Care Confidential became an independent charity on 1 July, adding: "One of the first actions we are implementing is a full review of quality control, training and support across the centres.
"Part of this will include a review of all the published materials, from websites to training manuals, including that for The Journey, where circumstances, thinking and language has moved on in the years since it was published. The training manuals will be updated and rewritten in language that reflects the diversity of people, of different faiths and none, who will use and benefit from it.""
That was in 2011, and there was no suggestion that all Care Confidential-affiliated charities were bad.
In 2014, Care's materials have been replaced, and their Pregnancy Counselling course is now an accredited further education course.
And FWIW, the same investigation showed that individual Marie Stopes counsellors were not impartial either:
"On the phone, the operator repeatedly tried to book me in for a medical assessment, the first step to getting an abortion — despite me stressing that I hadn’t yet made up my mind.
I felt bulldozed into starting the termination process and had to insist on having counselling. In real life, a worried woman might have gone along with whatever she was told.
When contacted later, a Marie Stopes spokeswoman admitted their adviser was ‘slower to understand the client’s needs than we would have liked, but we are pleased that after contacting our One Call service, face-to-face counselling was provided’.
That counselling session took place the next day in Bloomsbury, central London. It cost £80 for just 30 minutes, but would have been free had I been referred by my GP.
It quickly became apparent that my counsellor was quite happy to influence my decisions. Her overwhelming advice was that I ‘must’ tell my boyfriend, even though there is no legal requirement to do so.
She was openly disapproving when I said I hadn’t spoken to him, and seemed reluctant to talk about any option other than termination. ‘There’s a huge danger to your relationship,’ she said. ‘If you did have an abortion without telling him?.?.?.?you could end up resenting him for something he knows nothing about.’
Questioned about the size of the foetus, or the risks of infertility caused by abortion, she said ‘You’ll have to talk to a nurse about that’, or ‘I don’t have the exact statistics’.
Nevertheless, the message seemed very much to be that abortion was the best option. ‘It goes against our very nature to have an abortion,’ she said. ‘But we do things every day that go against our very nature.’
This was followed by: ‘You want what you want?.?.?.?is it worth having a child because you don’t want to deal with a bit of guilt?’
And this was compared with another Care affiliate in Islington:
"What I can do is tell you what your options are. I can’t tell you what to do: that’s completely your decision.’
And that’s exactly what she did. Over the 50-minute session, she encouraged me to talk through my thoughts on continuing or terminating the pregnancy. She also provided detailed, accurate information about where I could go for an abortion and what it involved. Her only advice was that I made a decision soon, as I was already quite late on in the pregnancy."
That's Care's published approach.
There are allegations of bias on both sides - counsellors organisations that perform abortions may have a bias towards abortion, and those at Christian charities may have a bias against it, but the counselling approach that Care proscribes is not of itself problematic, and there is no evidence that Acorn, Worthing does anything objectionable.