How Abortion Pill “Reversal” Became a Powerful Right-Wing Legal Weapon

Blue-state attempts to crack down on the treatment could end up shielding “fake clinics” from any oversight.

Garnet Henderson, Susan Rinkunas, Mother Jones
Oct 15, 2025

Crisis pregnancy centers have played a central role in the anti-abortion movement since the 1960s, often misleading and confusing people seeking abortions while purporting to help them. They mimic the appearance of abortion clinics, with similar-sounding names and even lookalike logos. Their volunteers sometimes pose as clinic staff to divert abortion patients from getting care. Their websites are teeming with disinformation, including claims that abortion is unsafe or linked to future mental illness, breast cancer, and fertility issues. “A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby,” Robert Pearson, founder of the very first CPC in the US, once declared.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/how-abortion-pill-reversal-became-a-powerful-right-wing-legal-weapon/

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/

Kamala Harris Put Abortion at the Center of the Election. What Her California Record Shows

Kristen Hwang, CalMatters
Aug 24, 2024

At a fundraiser in San Francisco last week, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke bluntly about the future of reproductive rights: California is not immune to a national abortion ban, she said.

“The stakes are high,” Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said to a cheering crowd at the Fairmont Hotel that included Gov. Gavin Newsom and other high-profile Democrats. She continued the theme this week at the Democratic National Convention, where delegates have stressed their fears that reproductive rights could be curtailed nationwide.

Continued: https://www.kqed.org/news/12001799/kamala-harris-put-abortion-at-the-center-of-the-election-what-her-california-record-shows

USA – Anti-Abortion Centers Spent Over $600M in One Year. That’s the Tip of the Iceberg.

Documents reviewed by Rewire News Group suggest the total may have been closer $1 billion. Where is all that "crisis pregnancy center" money going?

AUG 30, 2023
GARNET HENDERSON, Rewire News Group

“Crisis pregnancy centers,” or anti-abortion centers, are known for deceiving and manipulating people seeking information about abortion. They often pose as legitimate abortion clinics, intentionally obscuring their real purpose. They promote dangerous medical misinformation such as abortion pill “reversal.” They also discourage safer sex practices, and because few of them are actual medical facilities, they don’t adhere to medical standards for confidentiality and safety.

For example, a Massachusetts woman sued a CPC in June for failing to diagnose her ectopic pregnancy, which resulted in an emergency surgery and the loss of her fallopian tube. Months earlier, a Kentucky nurse came forward to reveal that a CPC where she had volunteered was failing to properly sterilize its transvaginal ultrasound equipment.

Continued: https://rewirenewsgroup.com/2023/08/30/anti-abortion-centers-spent-over-600m-in-one-year-thats-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/

USA – Anti-abortion pregnancy centers are deceiving patients – and getting away with it

One Florida case shows just how little authorities are doing to hold pregnancy centers accountable, even when the risks to women – and evidence – are significant

Laura C Morel for Reveal
Thu 15 Dec 2022

Patricia Henderson stood in the parking lot next to the Florida Women’s center in Jacksonville, wearing a white lab coat and greeting patients as they emerged from their cars. Their abortion appointments, she told them, were in the flat-roofed building across the road.

Once inside, Henderson handed them three pages of paperwork to fill out – questions about everything from their highest level of education to the date of their last period. State investigative documents lay out what clients say happened next: she led them to a pink-walled ultrasound room, where she would reveal their pregnancies in grainy images that, according to leading medical groups, only a licensed physician or a specially trained advanced practice nurse should interpret.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/15/us-anti-abortion-pregnancy-centers

USA – A woman who mistakenly visited an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center said she was met with pushback for seeking an abortion

'I just was not ready, and words can't make you ready for that'

Hannah Getahun, Isabella Zavarise, and Katie Nixdorf
Dec 5, 2022

Estefanía thought she was making an appointment to get an abortion.

Fearing she might be pregnant after a missed period, she typed "abortion pill near me" into Google and went to the first clinic that came up on the web page. When she got to The Keim Center in Virginia Beach, it didn't look or smell like a medical clinic — it was too nice, too inviting.

Continued: https://www.businessinsider.com/crisis-pregnancy-centers-target-women-seeking-abortions-with-misinformation-pushback-2022-11

USA – As abortion access shrinks in the South, tax dollars flow to fake clinics

By Elisha Brown
October 14, 2022

Since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling in June, at least 66 clinics in 15 states have stopped offering abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and policy organization. In the South, 22 clinics have closed across eight states.

As options for abortion care shrink, pregnant people may encounter so-called "crisis pregnancy centers," or CPCs: anti-abortion organizations that have proliferated in recent years.

Continued: https://www.facingsouth.org/states-funding-anti-abortion-crisis-pregnancy-centers

This Is What It Was Like to Be an Abortion Escort Before Roe Ended

A volunteer and a legal scholar take you into a job that is about to become much more dangerous.

a. l. Dawson and J. Shoshanna Ehrlich
June 30, 2022

All across the country, with its wildly uneven distribution of reproductive health services, anti-abortion protesters continue to wage a war of attrition against abortion access—often transforming the public spaces in front of clinics into hostile zones that clients must navigate in order to access essential care.

It will only get harder now that the Supreme Court has gutted Roe with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. While abortion access has become increasingly difficult in recent years, particularly for marginalized communities in abortion-hostile regions, we will soon face the grim reality that abortion most likely will be banned in at least 25 states. (Oklahoma didn’t even bother to wait for the Supreme Court to institute such a ban, which the governor signed at the end of May.) At the same time, abortion clinics that still remain are anticipating more protests by emboldened and potentially more aggressive anti-abortion activists who are seeking to transform the nation into a unified abortion wasteland.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/06/this-is-what-it-was-like-to-be-an-abortion-escort-before-roe-ended/

Byron Calhoun says abortion is never necessary to save a mother’s life. He’s the only high-risk OB/GYN in central West Virginia.

By Caroline Kitchener
Sept. 10, 2021

At a 2019 antiabortion conference in Ontario, Canada, Byron Calhoun was introduced as a “messenger of God.”

The doctor assumed the podium in a pinstripe suit and bow tie, his high forehead glinting underneath the hotel ballroom’s bright fluorescents. Dozens of conference-goers clapped, then grew quiet, eyes fixed on Calhoun and the statistic that brought them all there, blown up on a banner behind him: “1 out of every 5 babies is killed by abortion.”

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2021/the-lily/antiabortion-doctor-obgyn-care/

10.09.2021

American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists

American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists

Charleston Area Medical Center

Christian Medical Fellowship

Family Policy Council

National Institute of Family and Life Advocates

perinatal hospice

polycystic kidney disease

state medical boards

Steve Calvin

Women’s Health Center

Feminists Fight Fake Abortion Clinics: “No One Should Be Lied To”

Organizations like SPARK, ReproAction and Abortion Access Front are exposing the deceptive tactics of fake abortion clinics and organizing to stop them from harming women.

8/8/2021
Ms. Magazine
by CARRIE N. BAKER and JULIET SCHULMAN-HALL

“My high school was down the street from a crisis pregnancy center. My house that I grew up in was next door to a crisis center. I drove by it every day and saw ‘pregnancy resource center.’ I just assumed that it was a medical provider. I wasn’t the only person fooled,” says Agbo Ikor, Director of Programs at SPARK Reproductive Justice NOW in Atlanta, Georgia.

“My best friend when she was pregnant, she was taken to a crisis pregnancy center. And while she was there, they shamed her. They made her feel like if she had an abortion she was just this terrible person. It was very traumatizing for her,” says Ikor. “It is infuriating. It’s just really, really hard to think about.”

https://msmagazine.com/2021/08/08/feminists-fight-fake-abortion-clinics-no-one-should-be-lied-to/

08.08.2021