The Fraud of Crisis Pregnancy Centers

“Crisis pregnancy centers,” first opened in 1967, have proliferated across the country during the last 50 years and vastly outnumber health care facilities and providers that offer abortion care. At least 29 states fund crisis pregnancy centers with taxpayer money, including through the diversion of federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds.

But the biggest problem is what crisis pregnancy centers are legally allowed to do. Because they are not medical facilities and don’t charge a fee, and neither the federal government nor the states have altered the policy choice to allow these facilities to remain unregulated, the centers’ practices are governed as protected speech. And they definitely do involve speech. They were designed around an information-based abortion deterrence strategy, an effective and inexpensive discouragement tactic compared with coercive approaches. In the case of crisis pregnancy centers, however, the manner in which the information is delivered is specifically designed to deceive pregnant people, making the approach both coercive and expensive for their targets. 

Read the full piece, written with Tamara Kay and Susan Ostermann in the Chicago Tribune