5 minute read
Misinformation and Manipulation: Exposing Crisis Pregnancy Centers
from Advances in Women's Health
by wdms
As the faint line of the pregnancy test darkens, you remember the billboard you drive by daily, “Pregnant? Scared? Need help?” You know that you want an abortion, but don’t have a primary care doctor, and haven’t established care with a local provider. You’re unsure of the cost of abortion care and whether insurance will cover it. Online, the top result reads, “FREE Testing, Support, Abortion Counseling”. You call the number and a friendly voice helps you make an appointment. At the clinic, you’re brought to an exam room and counseled on options for parenting and adoption by a woman in a white coat. Asking about abortion leads her to share pamphlets outlining its risks and providing additional information on parenting. You realize that at this clinic, abortion isn’t an option. This is because you are at a “crisis pregnancy center”.
Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) pose as resource clinics for pregnant individuals, but in actuality are facilities run by anti-abortion groups with an agenda to prevent access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion and contraception. The situation described is not an uncommon occurrence; it mirrors the experiences of individuals who inadvertently turn to CPCs for assistance.
Throughout the United States, there thrives a network of more than 2,750 CPCs. In Massachusetts alone, CPCs outnumber reproductive healthcare providers offering comprehensive counseling on pregnancy intention options, including abortion care, by more than 2:1. This statistic is even more staggering when in the context of a state where abortion care remains legal up to 24 weeks.
CPCs mislead those seeking abortion care into mistaking a CPC for an intended clinic by using tactics such as analogous names, logos, and intentional proximity. Consider, in Worcester, Problem Pregnancy’s location across the street from Planned Parenthood. Despite deliberate attempts to give the impression of a legitimate medical clinic, presenting staff in scrubs and white coats, the use of exam rooms, and offering ultrasounds, these centers are unregulated, faith-based nonprofits exempt from regulatory and legal oversight which govern healthcare facilities.
The majority of centers fail to offer even basic reproductive healthcare such as pap smears or birth control counseling. The use of non-diagnostic ultrasounds by unlicensed staff can lead to inaccurate or misleading results. Recognizing the timesensitive nature of abortion care, these ultrasounds are employed to deceive individuals about how far along they are in their pregnancy. Delays from such practices limit abortion choices or make the procedure entirely inaccessible. Unregulated ultrasounds also lead to significant medical misses of abnormal pregnancy diagnoses. This incident occurred just last year in Worcester when a CPC’s assurance of a normal pregnancy later required emergency surgery to address a life-threatening ruptured ectopic pregnancy. CPC tactics singularly focus on misleading and manipulating to dissuade people from choosing abortion. Their anti-abortion goal should not be allowed to surpass ensuring the well-being and safety of those making reproductive healthcare decisions.
Regardless of terminology, including ‘crisis pregnancy center’ or ‘women’s help/care/counseling/ resource/medical clinic’, these individual centers are affiliated with and supported by a sophisticated and well-funded network of anti-choice parent organizations. Unregulated donations from anti-abortion advocacy groups including Heartbeat International and Care Net are not the only source of financial support. Public funding to these centers includes sales from “Choose Life” specialty license plates, and in at least 10 states, the funneling of federally-funded Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) grants. These funds are diverted from their intended support of vulnerable families to organizations preventing vulnerable pregnant people from receiving comprehensive and safe healthcare.
The absence of operations and funding oversight of the CPC network sharply contrasts the countless restrictions and increasing barriers imposed on abortion providers. The lack of privacy regulations in the increasingly hostile anti-abortion legal landscape makes it easy and frightening to imagine this network of databases being utilized as evidence in the criminalization of seeking and obtaining abortion care.
Many factors contribute to an individual’s reproductive health choices - including interpersonal relationships, financial obligations, pregnancy, and maternal health conditions. Navigating a fraught political landscape and overcoming the increasing barriers to access abortion care, it’s hard to think of a more complex and difficult healthcare decision. Whether or not you entered the correct clinic should never be an additional obstacle.
Despite well-coordinated efforts to conceal motives and dominate search engine results, there are ways to distinguish CPCs from comprehensive health clinics. Identifying their own misinformation can be used as a tool to recognize fraudulent clinics, for example advertising abortion “reversal” treatment, a fabricated treatment lacking evidence of safety or effectiveness. Additionally, promoting false claims regarding exaggerated risks of abortion procedures and links between abortion and breast cancer, infertility, and mental illness. There is widely accepted consensus that abortion is a safe medical intervention. Childbirth is significantly more dangerous than abortion, with the risk of maternal death in childbirth 14 times higher than with an abortion [1,3]. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and American Cancer Society unequivocally state that there is no association between abortion and risk of breast cancer or any type of cancer [4,2]. ACOG and the National Health Service confirm no link between abortions and infertility, in fact, people can become pregnant immediately after an abortion [3,5]. In another blatant distortion of facts, evidence supports that the experience of being denied an abortion is linked to negative mental health impacts including anxiety and depression [3,6].
CPCs are a public health threat. We can mitigate their danger by advocating for legislation mandating regulation and counteracting misinformation by promoting resources that identify known CPCs as well as legitimate reproductive health providers [7,8]. It is crucial that individuals understand their options and are informed of resources available, enabling them to make decisions free from interference or distortion by political ideologies. CPCs, or if we refer to them as what they are, Anti-Abortion Centers, cannot continue to covertly operate to undermine safe, equitable healthcare. It is the responsibility of healthcare providers to recognize potential harms and be guided toward comprehensive reproductive care in the community.
