USA – Crisis pregnancy centers fight for ultrasound use in clinics without government oversight

Even some medical professionals within the pregnancy center movement have started to register their concerns.

By Sofia Resnick
July 29, 2026

The auditors trying to learn how a dozen crisis pregnancy centers in Louisiana had spent nearly $1.2 million ultimately could not figure it out.

Despite a new law, the state had failed to establish a process for the centers or to track how they spent taxpayer dollars. That was surprising enough, auditors said. But then they learned something else: Every center they reviewed offered ultrasounds and other medical services. Yet none was licensed as a healthcare facility.

“They were providing medical services, and no, they were not licensed by our Department of Health,” said Gina Brown, performance audit manager for the Louisiana Legislative Auditor, who oversaw the review. There was no way to confirm the centers had a licensed medical director on staff, she said.

Continued: https://stateline.org/2026/07/29/crisis-pregnancy-centers-fight-for-ultrasound-use-in-clinics-without-government-oversight/

USA – Abortion opponents are coming for mifepristone using what medical experts call “junk science”

Using flawed studies and scientific journal publications, abortion opponents are building a body of research meant to question the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone, a key target for the movement.

Shefali Luthra
May 30, 2025

The effort comes as federal officials have expressed a willingness to revisit the drug’s approval — and potentially impose new restrictions on a medication used in the vast majority of abortions.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2025/05/abortion-opponents-mifepristone-junk-science/

USA – Lawmakers Are Trying to Hold Crisis Pregnancy Centers to Account

Post-Dobbs, the GOP has given them millions in taxpayer dollars.

Laura C. Morel, Mother Jones
April 10, 2025

Last month, during an Indiana state legislative hearing, Republican Sen. Jeff Raatz from Richmond, a small city in the eastern part of the state, discussed a resolution he filed declaring that the state’s General Assembly “strongly supports pregnancy care centers in their unique, positive contributions to the individual lives of women, men, and babies—both born and unborn,” the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported. “We have hospitals in rural Indiana that have no OB-GYNs,” Raatz said during the session. “Why not have an innocent individual stand alongside someone and help them make decisions and connect them with resources?” Abortion is banned in Indiana with limited exceptions.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/lawmakers-are-trying-to-hold-crisis-pregnancy-centers-to-account/

Trump and His New Republican Congress Will Make All U.S. Taxpayers Fund Unregulated Crisis Pregnancy Clinics

Republican-led states have piloted a dramatic infusion of taxpayer funding into the CPC industry. With Republicans in the White House and U.S. Congress, they are certain to ramp up federal funding for antiabortion centers.

January 3, 2025
by Jenifer McKenna

Within days of the election, antiabortion leaders started calling on the incoming administration to defund Planned Parenthood and family planning clinics that refer patients for abortion, and redirect that funding to “pro-life” pregnancy centers.

While serial attacks on abortion rights seize the headlines, the anti-choice movement has quietly built an on-the-ground network of unregulated pregnancy clinics—also known as crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) and antiabortion centers (AACs)—that is eroding access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare and electioneering against abortion rights, mostly under the radar and increasingly on the public dime.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2025/01/03/trump-congress-republicans-funding-crisis-pregnancy-centers-abortion-clinic-women-health/

USA – Some states on track to restore abortion access, while others push for fetal rights in 2025

By: Sofia Resnick and Kelcie Moseley-Morris
January 2, 2025

Heading into the third year since Roe v. Wade was overturned, states will continue to introduce and consider legislation to expand or restrict access to reproductive health care and abortion as legislative sessions begin. In anticipation of President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, states with broad reproductive rights protections have introduced bills to shield patients and doctors if the incoming Republican administration overturns protections implemented under President Joe Biden. States with strict bans, meanwhile, have started floating fetal personhood bans, abortion pill punishments and other restrictions.

Most legislatures will convene during the second week in January or later and adjourn midway through the year.

Continued: https://ncnewsline.com/2025/01/02/some-states-on-track-to-restore-abortion-access-while-others-push-for-fetal-rights-in-2025/

USA – Antiabortion Extremists Are Playing Language Games

Abortion opponents claim that there’s never a medically necessary reason for abortion. That flies in the face of medical reality. So in states with abortion bans, they’re simply redefining abortion to make their point — and make it easier to criminalize.

BY ANNE RUMBERGER
May 25, 2024

Nearly two years into our post-Roe reality, the effect of state abortion bans is every bit as bad as expected.

Physicians in Louisiana report that the state’s near-total abortion ban, which went into effect in July of 2022, has resulted in pregnant patients being denied care for miscarriages, given unnecessary C-sections, and made to wait until their lives are at risk before receiving abortion care.

Continued: https://jacobin.com/2024/05/antiabortion-roe-bans-propaganda-medicine

Junk science is cited in abortion ban cases. Researchers are fighting the ‘fatally flawed’ work

Researchers are calling for the retraction of misleading anti-abortion studies that could influence judges in critical cases

Jessica Glenza
Sun 28 Apr 2024

The retraction of three peer-reviewed articles prominently cited in court cases on the so-called abortion pill – mifepristone – has put a group of papers by anti-abortion researchers in the scientific limelight.

Seventeen sexual and reproductive health researchers are calling for four peer-reviewed studies by anti-abortion researchers to be retracted or amended. The papers, critics contend, are “fatally flawed” and muddy the scientific consensus for courts and lawmakers who lack the scientific training to understand their methodological flaws.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/28/junk-science-papers-abortion-cases

USA – Fearing Legal Threats, Doctors Are Performing C-Sections in Lieu of Abortions

Some physicians are doing unnecessary and invasive surgery on pregnant patients “to preserve the appearance of not doing an abortion.”

MARY TUMA
April 17, 2024

When news that Lizelle Gonzalez was suing the local prosecutor’s office for more than $1 million in damages, after being falsely imprisoned for murder over an attempted self-managed abortion in 2022, reproductive rights advocates cheered the move as a pathway to justice for the wrongfully charged southern Texas woman. However, a revelation in the lawsuit gave them pause: At the same hospital that reported her self-induced abortion to authorities, Gonzalez underwent a “classical C-section” for the delivery of her stillborn child, instead of abortion care. Major invasive surgery, Cesarean sections carry much higher risk for health complications, like hemorrhaging, compared with D&E abortion, and can jeopardize subsequent pregnancies.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/c-sections-abortions-terrifying-new-reality/

18.04.2024

Commentary

Abortion on Our Own Terms

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

American Association of Pro-Life OB-GYNs

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists

Association of American Medical Colleges

Center for Reproductive Rights

Charlotte Lozier Institute

Dr. Daniel Grossman

Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi

Dr. Michele Heisler

Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act

forced C-sections

forced cesarean sections

Physicians for human Rights

Physicians for Reproductive Health

Reproductive Health Impact

USA – Researchers call for more abortion studies to be retracted

The criticism of four older studies alleging abortion causes mental illness follows high-profile retractions of studies claiming the abortion pill is dangerous.

BY: SOFIA RESNICK
FEBRUARY 27, 2024

Health and science experts published a commentary in the British Medical Journal on Tuesday calling for the retraction of four older abortion-related studies that, despite documented flaws, have influenced major anti-abortion decisions over the past 20 years, including the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned federal abortion rights.

The commentary comes the same month academic publisher Sage Journals retracted studies calling into question the long-established safety record of the abortion drug mifepristone, which were produced by anti-abortion activists shortly before they sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the same drug.

Continued: https://kentuckylantern.com/2024/02/27/researchers-call-for-more-abortion-studies-to-be-retracted/

A New Study on Medication Abortion Refutes the Arguments Conservatives Are Taking to the Supreme Court

A study of more than 6,000 medication abortions obtained through telehealth found 98 percent were effective and 99.8 percent were safe.

JULIANNE MCSHANE, Mother Jones
Feb 16, 2024

A key argument from anti-abortion activists bringing a case to the Supreme Court is that medication abortion—which accounts for more than half of all abortions nationwide, according to the Guttmacher Institute—is unsafe and ineffective.

A new study provides even more evidence that this is not true and that medication abortion is just as safe when it’s prescribed virtually as in person. Published Thursday in the journal Nature Medicine, the study examined more than 6,000 medication abortions that people from 20 states and Washington, D.C. obtained from three virtual clinics between April 2021 and January 2022. Researchers found that about 98 percent of them were effective in terminating pregnancies without any additional interventions and that 99.8 percent were safe and “not followed by serious adverse events.”

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/a-new-study-on-medication-abortion-refutes-the-arguments-conservatives-are-taking-to-the-supreme-court/

16.02.2024