Supreme Court case about ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ highlights debate over truthful advertising standards

December 17, 2025
Carly Thomsen

The latest Supreme Court case related to abortion is not technically about the legal right to have one. When the court heard oral arguments on Dec. 2, 2025, the word “abortion” came up only three times. The first instance was more than an hour into the 82-minute hearing.

Instead, First Choice Women’s Resource Centers Inc. v. Platkin hinges on whether First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association give a chain of five crisis pregnancy centers in New Jersey the right to protect its donor records from disclosure to state authorities. The centers are Christian nonprofits that try to stop pregnant women from obtaining abortions.

Continued: https://theconversation.com/supreme-court-case-about-crisis-pregnancy-centers-highlights-debate-over-truthful-advertising-standards-271254

Canada – Anti-abortion billboards in West Kelowna, B.C., coming down

December 9, 2025
Video – 2:24 minutes

Billboards with anti-abortion messages may soon be coming down in the Kelowna area. For many years, a local billboard company has allowed the signs along Highway 97 through West Kelowna. As Brady Strachan reports, pressure from a local pro-choice advocate has led to a policy change.

Continued: https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7009750

09.12.2025

Videos/Images

anti-choice billboards

anti-choice lies

anti-choice misinformation

BC Billboards

BC Humanist Association

USA – This Confusing Supreme Court Case Could Reshape Oversight of Crisis Pregnancy Centers

New Jersey’s broad subpoena against an anti-abortion chain has made for some strange bedfellows.

Nina Martin, Mother Jones
Dec 1, 2025

Even if you have no idea what a crisis pregnancy center is, the donor website for the First Choice Women’s Resource Centers chain in northeastern New Jersey offers plenty of clues: Prominent logos for the anti-abortion groups Heartbeat International and CareNet. A home page banner proclaiming “Sanctity of Human Life Sunday 2026.” An agreement for prospective volunteers that states, “I openly acknowledge my personal faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior,” and “[I] reject abortion as an acceptable option for any woman.”

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/12/this-confusing-supreme-court-case-could-reshape-oversight-of-crisis-pregnancy-centers/

Ethiopia’s Fight Against Anti-Abortion Propaganda

How Ethiopians are resisting U.S.-backed disinformation on abortions.

By Maya Misikir, a reporter and editor based in Ethiopia.
November 13, 2025

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—It’s the faces of the women and girls receiving treatment for botched abortions that still haunt nurse Hanna, 47 years into her nursing career.

“They had a look in their eyes. It was a plea to be saved from their misery,” she said in Amharic, during an interview last month.

Continued: https://archive.is/RQ7rE
(https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/13/ethiopia-abortion-fight-propaganda-america-trump-pro-life/)

The War on Mifepristone: How Junk Science and False Narratives Threaten US Abortion Access

October 2025
Kelly Baden, Joerg Dreweke, Rachel K. Jones, Guttmacher Institute

False information and faulty science regarding the safety of the drug mifepristone, which is used in the vast majority of medication abortions in the United States, is at the center of a narrative that may further reduce abortion access. Mifepristone, and medication abortion more broadly, is safe, effective and widely used in the United States and globally. Despite its demonstrated safety, relentless policy and legal attacks aim to restrict or even ban access to this method of abortion.

This analysis will explore and counter several pernicious aspects of such attacks. These include the misrepresentation of normal signs a medication abortion is working as intended—for example, cramping or bleeding—as serious medical complications; and the conflation of routine or precautionary care-seeking by medication abortion patients with emergency treatment for serious adverse events.

Continued: https://www.guttmacher.org/2025/10/war-mifepristone-how-junk-science-and-false-narratives-threaten-us-abortion-access

Canada – Fake ‘crisis pregnancy centres’ run by right-wing religious groups use ‘deception and manipulation’ to trick vulnerable women

Taxpayer scam: ‘No charity should be in the business of deceiving people who are considering an abortion and possibly delaying them from seeking health-care’

by Paul Henderson
Oct 19, 2025

The ad on the bus stop bench in front of Chilliwack Senior Secondary School has been there for many months, maybe years: “Cherish Women’s Resource Centre.” It includes a logo with arms forming a heart, hands clasping with the words “Pregnant? Unplanned? Here to help.”

The location in front of a high school where the ad is seen daily by hundreds of teenage girls is no coincidence.

But while “The Cherish Project” claims to be there to support girls and women with information and guidance about reproductive health, in reality it is simply a group of non-medically trained evangelical Christians intent on misleading vulnerable young women into doing what church fathers say they should do with their bodies. Continued: https://www.pauljhenderson.com/fake-crisis-pregnancy-centres-run-by-right-wing-religious-groups-use-deception-and-manipulation-to-trick-vulnerable-women/

UK – What is the truth about crisis pregnancy centres? The anti-abortion facilities creeping across Britain

Many faith-based crisis pregnancy centres are believed to offer an 'ethical' service, but there are some which have been found to be 'misleading' women. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell which as centres may 'hide their ideological aims'

Isabella McRae
14 Oct 2025

Crisis pregnancy centres, which have been known to “misinform” women around abortion, have become increasingly “professionalised” in the UK and are often unregulated, experts have warned.

These centres are commonly run by Christian groups and promise to offer “impartial” and “ethical” advice for free, but some have been found to be promoting “medically inaccurate” information with an anti-abortion agenda which risks leaving women “traumatised”.

Continued: https://www.bigissue.com/news/social-justice/abortion-uk-crisis-pregnancy-centres/

A doctor’s story shows ‘late-term’ abortion access is politically charged – but crucial

September 2, 2025
Prudence Flowers, Senior Lecturer in US History, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University

Review: Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care – Shelley Sella, MD (Random House)

In the United States, around 1% of abortions occur after 21 weeks. Yet these abortions are intensely vilified. Recall Donald Trump’s graphic and false claim that US laws allowed doctors to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day”.

For two decades, Dr Shelley Sella provided abortion care in the US into the third trimester of pregnancy: that is, after 26 weeks gestation. Her new book Beyond Limits offers an intimate account of health care and politics, written from the front lines of America’s abortion wars.

In Australia, abortion after 20 weeks gestation is also statistically rare – and most Australians agree that people need abortions after 20 weeks for a variety of medical and social reasons. However, in the last year or so, the focus on later abortions seems to be intensifying here, along with misinformation.

Continued; https://theconversation.com/a-doctors-story-shows-late-term-abortion-access-is-politically-charged-but-crucial-263920

02.09.2025

anti-choice lies

anti-choice terrorism

third-trimester abortion

Tony Abbott

Texas Overhauls Anti-Abortion Program That Spent Tens of Millions of Taxpayer Dollars With Little Oversight

After a ProPublica and CBS News investigation revealed that Texas’ funding pipeline for anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers is riddled with waste, nonprofits in the program must now provide a detailed accounting of their expenses.

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Jeremy Kohler
July 10, 2025

Texas health officials are overhauling a program designed to steer people away from abortion following a ProPublica and CBS News investigation that found that the state had funneled tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into the effort while providing little oversight of the spending.

The money has been flowing to a network of nonprofit organizations that are part of Thriving Texas Families, a state program that supports parenting and adoption as alternatives to abortion and provides counseling, material assistance and other services. Most of the groups operate as crisis pregnancy centers, or pregnancy resource centers, which often resemble medical clinics but are frequently criticized for offering little or no actual health care and misleading women about their options.

Continued: https://www.propublica.org/article/texas-overhauls-anti-abortion-crisis-pregnancy-centers-funding

USA – An Open Letter to Rep. Kat Cammack From a Medical Doctor: It’s Abortion Bans That Make Doctors Afraid to Act, Not ‘the Radical Left’

July 10, 2025
by Chloe Nazra Lee

I remember the day I heard about Dobbs. It was a summer morning during my final year of medical school. I’d awakened in the damp basement apartment I’d rented for a clinical rotation in Pittsburgh. As I scrolled through my news feed, my heart plummeted. There was a resigned and tacitly understood melancholy among the women in the hospital that day. A sisterhood predicated on shared despair was quietly forming during the upheaval of perceived judicial betrayal. Even those of us who barely knew each other might wearily exchange passing glances in the hallway, signaling, “Well, shit. Girl, I know. And it’ll only get worse.”

No woman may escape the cruelty of the nebulous and varying restrictions on reproductive healthcare in the post-Roe world—as Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) discovered in May 2024 when faced with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy shortly after Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/07/10/rep-kat-cammack-medical-doctor-abortion-bans-that-doctors-afraid-act/