A crisis pregnancy center (CPC), sometimes called a pregnancy resource center (PRC) or a pro-life pregnancy center, is a type of nonprofit organization established by anti-abortion groups primarily to persuade pregnant women not to have an abortion.
In the United States, there are an estimated 2,500 to 4,000 CPCs that qualify as clinics and may also provide pregnancy testing, medical ultrasounds, and other services. Many others operate without medical licensing under varying degrees of regulation. For comparison, there were 807 abortion clinics in the United States as of 2020. Hundreds more CPCs operate outside of the U.S., including in Canada, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.
CPCs have frequently been found to disseminate false medical information about the supposed physical and mental health risks of abortion. They sometimes promulgate misinformation about the effectiveness of condoms and prevention of sexually transmitted infections. CPCs are sometimes called fake abortion clinics by scholars, the media, and supporters of abortion rights due to deceptive advertising that obscures the centers' anti-abortion agenda.Multiple sources:
Many CPCs are run by Christian groups that adhere to a socially conservative and anti-abortion viewpoint, and they often operate in affiliation with one of three non-profit organizations: Care Net, Heartbeat International, and Birthright International. In 1993, the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA) was formed to provide legal advice to CPCs in the U.S.NIFLA During the presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009), U.S. CPCs received tens of millions of dollars in federal grants. , more than half of U.S. state governments helped to fund CPCs directly or through the sale of Choose Life license plates.
Legal and legislative action regarding CPCs has generally attempted to curb deceptive advertising, targeting those that imply that they offer abortion services by requiring centers to disclose that they do not offer certain services or possess certain qualifications.
Origin
Catholic carpenter Robert Pearson started the first CPC in Honolulu in 1967 after abortion was legalized in Hawaii. Pearson said that "a woman who wanted to terminate her pregnancy 'has no right to information that will help her kill her baby'." He formed the Pearson Foundation to help others start their own CPCs, offering detailed instructions for CPC management along with propaganda brochures and images to persuade pregnant women not to get an abortion. Originally written in late 1992 for Harvard Law School. In 1968, the first Canadian network of centers was established by Birthright Internationa. Alternatives to Abortion, today known as Heartbeat International, was founded in 1971. Christian Action Council founded its first center in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1980. The Christian Action Council would eventually become Care Net."A Passion to Serve: A Vision for Life" – Pregnancy Resource Center Service Report 2009 Family Research Council. 2009. Page 6. Retrieved May 5, 2011 The CPC movement began as American Catholic activism, but after the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade, interest in establishing CPCs widened to include American evangelical Christians.
Activities To fulfill their mission of persuading pregnant women to forgo abortions, CPCs advertise and offer pregnancy support services. Among the more common ones are free pregnancy tests, prenatal care, screening for sexually transmitted infections, and adoption referrals. Some offer counseling, including religious counseling and post-abortion counseling. Some provide material support, including clothing, maternity housing, food, financial assistance, and other essential supplies. Some offer training in topics such as budgeting, resumé building, and child rearing. An increasing number of CPCs obtain some form of medical certification to be able to expand their capabilities and marketing—for example, permission to perform sonograms in an attempt to convince women to carry their pregnancies to term. In some jurisdictions, such as Louisiana, CPCs are considered safe-haven zones in which parents may surrender custody of newborn infants. In 2020, a Texas chain of CPCs began providing contraceptives to unmarried women, stating that they wanted to help reduce cases of unintended pregnancy.
CPCs have been widely criticized by supporters of abortion rights for providing misleading and/or graphic information or content to patients to dissuade them from obtaining abortions. Their advertising campaigns have been criticized as being carefully designed to reach groups they perceive as being more inclined towards seeking abortion, such as young women, women of color, and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Often, they place billboards near educational institutions and utilize public transportation and bus shelters for promotion.American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. n.d. “Issue Brief: Crisis Pregnancy Centers.” Accessed April 10, 2024. https://www.acog.org/advocacy/abortion-is-essential/trending-issues/issue-brief-crisis-pregnancy-centers. For example, Care Net's "Urban Initiative" aims explicitly to attract Black and Latina women by advertising on platforms like BET and drawing parallels between abortion and historical instances of oppression, such as slavery. The British Pregnancy Advisory Service, an independent abortion-providing agency, warned about the lack of regulation on CPCs by the National Health Service in that young women were dissuaded from abortion without full knowledge of their legal options or the consultation of their general practitioner. CPCs have focused on what they call "underserved" communities in an attempt to lower the high rates of abortion in communities of color.
Use of sonograms
Some CPCs conduct free sonograms as a way to dissuade women from abortion.The Columbus Dispatch January 20, 2008, "Pregnancy centers stir debate" Proponents say that women who visit CPCs and see their embryos or fetuses through the use of ultrasound technology tend to decide against abortion, although scientific research suggests mandatory pre-abortion ultrasound has no effect on women's decisions to continue their pregnancy. Christian organizations like Focus on the Family and the Southern Baptist Convention, a theologically and socially conservative evangelical denomination and the largest Christian group in the US, have aimed to provide more CPCs with ultrasound equipment machines.Focus on the Family Budgets $4.2M To Provide Ultrasound Equipment to Pregnancy Centers With Goal of Preventing Abortions Focus Celebrates Option Ultrasound Success, Focus On the Family
False medical information
CPCs have frequently been found to disseminate false medical information. In some cases, such information may be based on decades-old studies that have been discredited by more recent research. In others, CPCs may falsely claim to be describing an existing scientific consensus. CPCs' false information is usually about the supposed health risks of abortion, saying, for example, that abortion is much less safe for pregnant women than childbirth when the opposite is true. In fact, researchers have found that "the complication rate (of abortions) is less than that associated with wisdom tooth extraction, 7 percent, and tonsillectomies, 9 percent." The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine and the North American Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology characterize the care at these centers as lacking "adherence to medical and ethical practice standards". A joint statement from the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine and the North American Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology said that CPCs "pose risk by failing to adhere to medical and ethical practice standards". For example, CPC staffers commonly assert that the chances of getting breast cancer increase dramatically after abortion, even though major medical bodies, including the National Cancer Institute, note that there is no link between abortion and breast cancer.
Another common assertion is that abortion leads to mental health problems. CPC counselors have warned clients of severely negative psychological consequences, including high rates of depression, "post-abortion syndrome", post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide, substance abuse, sexual and relationship dysfunction, propensity to child abuse, and other emotional problems. These "counselors" are often priests or other religious members—not licensed counselors. "Post-abortion syndrome" has not been validated as a discrete psychiatric condition and is not recognized by the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, or the American Public Health Association. "Currently, there are active attempts to convince the public and women considering abortion that abortion frequently has negative psychiatric consequences. This assertion is not borne out by the literature: the vast majority of women tolerate abortion without psychiatric sequelae." The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists finds no evidence to support an increased likelihood of abuse. In fact, CPCs are known to use disturbing visuals to manipulate pregnant women emotionally. CPCs may claim that surgical abortion is a dangerous procedure, with a high risk of perforation or infection and death. In fact, the risk of complications requiring hospitalization after an abortion is about 2 in 1,000 in the US. These alleged risks are also part of the common assertion that abortion can make future childbearing more difficult or dangerous by increasing the risk of infertility, miscarriages, complications, ectopic pregnancy, or fetal health problems. These claims are not supported by medical data.
CPCs have been found to disseminate misinformation about birth control methods, in particular the idea that contraception and condoms do not work or have harmful effects. False information about pregnancy and the female body, fetal development, the availability of abortion in early pregnancy, and the rate of postpartum depression among women who carry to term may be provided. CPCs may also misinform women about their stage of pregnancy in order to prevent them from seeking an abortion until it is no longer legally possible. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have found that CPCs are "often non-medical facilities who have no legal obligation to provide pregnant women with accurate information and are not subject to HIPAA or required by law to maintain client confidentiality." A mixed-methods analysis of persons seeking care from CPCs found that people seek out CPCs for pregnancy confirmation, lack of access to healthcare, and abortions. The patients reported a range of positive and negative experiences, but mostly reported reduced options and some deception. Care Net denounces "any form of deception in its corporate advertising or individual conversations with its clients", though it also says of its promotion of an abortion–breast cancer link that its "role is clearly to include this possible risk when [they] educate clients about all the risks of abortions."
A July 2006 report by Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) and his minority members' staff in the House Committee on Government Reform noted that CPCs had received over $30million in federal funding since 2001, derived mostly from programs for abstinence-only sex education. For this report, female investigators telephoned CPCs that had received federal funding and posed as pregnant teenagers deciding whether to get an abortion. They found that 20 of the 23 centers (87%) reached provided false or misleading information about the health effects of abortion, particularly about a supposed link between abortion and breast cancer, supposed risks to subsequent fertility, and supposed negative mental health repercussions.