There are over 2,500 “crisis pregnancy centers,” or CPC’s, in the United States. These centers receive tens of millions of dollars from the federal government, and more money from 23 state governments, to provide “crisis pregnancy counseling” to people with unintended pregnancies. Several states require pregnant people to receive counseling at one of these centers before they can get an abortion. Christian volunteers generally make up the entire staff at these centers (they must legally refer to themselves as “centers,” rather than “clinics,” because usually none of the staff members are trained in medicine).
Despite not being genuine reproductive health clinics, these centers generally set up shop right next to real reproductive health clinics, make visitors fill out “intake paperwork,” and have their volunteers wear white lab coats and carry clipboards in the hope that pregnant people will confuse their center for a real clinic that gives accurate information about reproductive health. They then proselytize anti-abortion rhetoric, using phrases like “your baby,” “your preborn child,” and “you’re already a mother now”; framing the pregnancy in terms of the pregnant person’s “relationship with Jesus”; and reciting objectively false medical information about abortion and birth control, including:
Along with the false claims above, CPC’s have frequently been caught giving inaccurate readings of ultrasound images, such as when one recently told a pregnant woman that her IUD was a baby, because no one on site is actually trained in reading ultrasound images. Given all this information about crisis pregnancy centers, the federal government should immediately cut off funding to these centers for practicing medicine without a license, impersonating real medical clinics, dispersing false medical information under the guise of being a licensed medical clinic, and proselytizing Christianity, making the federal and state funding of these centers a violation of the separation of church and state. Women who have been deceived by these false clinics are the real #womenbetrayed.
