Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers Are Asking Patients About Religion, Past Abortions
Reproductive rights advocates have warned that CPCs are “the surveillance center of the anti-abortion movement.” A new look at their client intake forms backs this up.
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Some time ago, a Colorado woman identified as Willow needed an abortion, she told NBC News in a Sunday report. Since she was struggling financially at the time, she unknowingly went to an anti-abortion pregnancy center—also called a crisis pregnancy center, or CPC—since they pose as abortion clinics and offer free services like pregnancy tests and ultrasounds. “One of the first things they had asked me is, what do you plan to do from here? And I told them that I plan to terminate this pregnancy,” she said. “They just told me that they advised me against this decision and showed me videos on abortion and how dangerous it was. They tried to scare me away from my decision. They pressured me into keeping it by offering their services and free supplies for raising a child.”
Inside the Colorado CPC, Willow took pregnancy tests and had an ultrasound. “They made me wait a week to get the first pregnancy test to confirm that I was pregnant, just so I could get an ultrasound. I had to then wait two weeks to get an ultrasound.” As a result of these delays, when Willow eventually tried to schedule an abortion appointment at actual clinics, she learned she was too far along and was turned away from three clinics. This is a common tactic among CPCs. According to Guttmacher Institute, most of the people who visit CPCs are young and low-income, lured by the misleading offer of free ultrasounds and other free resources. CPCs then subject them to torrents of disinformation with the end goal of convincing someone against abortion or delaying them enough to make it impossible to get one.
In May, I spoke to Moji Alawode-El, who’s currently an organizer at Abortion Access Front. But in 2003, she was a young woman in her mid-twenties seeking an abortion in New York when she unwittingly found herself at a CPC she believed was an abortion clinic. “They said, ‘We’re out of stock right now, but call us next week.’” So, she waited a week, but was told they were still out of stock and to call again next week. A week passed; she called again. They were still “out of stock.” Three weeks passed—three weeks of Alawode-El being forced to remain pregnant when she didn’t want to be.