Crisis Pregnancy Centers and College Campuses

Guest post by Professor Molly O'Donnell

Thanks to your support I’m able to host guest writers like Molly O’Donnell, who I was delighted to meet at our WGS South conference in March. Dr. O’Donnell teaches Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Her recent research examines the Harvard Implicit Association Test in the context of the WGSS classroom and will appear in her edited collection Women’s and Gender Studies: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives (2024). Her piece below on CPCs should be required reading for everyone in higher education… please share widely.

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Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) are on the rise and a major threat to the reproductive justice  movement and feminism. CPCs are community-facing organizations that support the pro-life  movement by luring people into their clinics under the false pretenses that they are real health centers focused on helping. Instead, their core mission is to bully people into bringing unwanted pregnancies to term. Their agenda is intentionally hidden and is reflected in their advertising: free services like pregnancy and STI testing. Often, their offices are set up to look like innocuous medical clinics and sometimes to look like real abortion providers’ facilities.  

The first CPC was opened in the U.S. in 1967 in Hawaii as a way to promote the agenda of the  pro-life movement. Today most CPCs are under the control of one of three national Christian groups: Heartbeat International, Care Net, and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates. Yet, none of their advertising, online presences, or offices suggest that they are essentially Evangelical Christian organizations.  

As of 2019, there were 2,537 CPCs across the U.S., and that number has increased every year.  Aside from the intentional deception CPCs use to get people in the door, once they are there, they threaten and coerce clients into continuing unwanted pregnancies, strategically dispense false medical information (including how far along a pregnancy is), and share private information for further harassment. (CPCs are not medical facilities and, therefore, are not bound  by HIPPA law and regulations.) Added to CPCs’ predation is how they target communities of  color and steal government funds originally intended to help impoverished families.  

Source the Crisis Pregnancy Map & Finder. Find your local and protest them!

Still, CPCs continue to thrive, often serving as bad substitutes in areas where medical  professionals and social services are lacking. As Kissling et al. (2023) have pointed out, “CPC services reflect ideas about personal responsibility…appealing to lawmakers in conservative states eager to transfer responsibility for disadvantaged residents to other entities” (1024). This model of CPC staff as social service workers offers insight into a grim reality: where the state  fails to protect, the political motivations of the few have a greater advantage over the already disadvantaged. CPC advertising’s focus on “free” services makes this clear.  

Despite what we know about CPCs and their damaging effects, feminists and reproductive  justice activists and advocates have often turned a blind eye to the activity of CPCs. As Thomsen and Morrison (2020) observe, “crisis pregnancy centers have not been a central focus of reproductive justice activism, [and] they have also been largely ignored by feminist scholars and  activists writing about reproductive politics” (709). Ignoring CPCs has hardly shut their doors, especially in light of recent legislation. 

On January 17^th, 2024, the U.S. House vote passed the Pregnant Students’ Rights Act (H.R.  6914) to require institutions of higher education to distribute resources and information to pregnant students about their rights. However, the Act does not include a requirement to share information about abortion services or contraception. This legislation fails to give students a full range of reproductive health care information and uses Title IV against students and university abortion advocates to further support CPC advertising on college campuses.  

CPCs target college campuses. Many WGSS students have spoken with me about their own traumatic experiences visiting our local CPC, including staff shaming, bullying, and harassing them once these students figure out the CPC’s real agenda and attempt to go elsewhere for  services. Students are tricked into visiting this CPC by advertisements like the below that litter campus bathrooms, are plastered on the sides of campus busses and bus stops, and appear on  digital displays at every major athletic event. The university and city seem to gladly accept the  advertising revenue and likely have since the CPC opened their doors in 1984.  

Our WGSS program has attempted to combat the damage done by our local CPC. We have hosted panel discussions with experts from Catholics for Choice, Planned Parenthood, and the Blue Ridge Abortion Fund, among other organizations. I am also currently working on an IRB approved project that assesses student knowledge about CPCs and their advertising on campus  along with a counter-information campaign. The campaign uses stickers with a QR code that links to a Planned Parenthood article that offers facts about CPCs and their practices (see below). Stickers are placed on CPC advertisements around campus to attempt to level the playing field,  so to speak, with real information about this organization and those like it. Despite our best efforts, however, extending the counter-information campaign to digital displays has not yet been  possible. Further, our university not only still accepts our local CPC as an approved advertiser, but the university health center lists the CPC as a resource for students and as a community  partner for student volunteer opportunities. 

So, my central concern in trying to combat CPCs on my campus and others is thinking about past activism and new practices in getting the right information in the hands of people who need it. Past tactics for combating CPCs include vandalism, online reviews or dog piling, and laws that seek to limit false advertising and require CPCs to talk about their lack of licensing and HIPPA accountability. All of these approaches have had limited success in different states. Press conferences with major politicians have gained some traction, and ReproAction recommends letters to the editor in their CPC action toolkit. But, those of us living in reproductive health  deserts are also usually living in local news deserts. In the case of the CPC near my campus, the local TV news has only reported glowing things like community partnerships and grants the CPC  has received from the area hospital system for STI testing. 

Other, more traditional tactics have also met with varying levels of success. Protests and marches  at places like Midddlebury College have received national attention but little support from college administration. The University of California, Santa Barbara, has effectively banned CPCs  from advertising on their campus. As documented by Thomsen and Morrison (2020), “in 2012, End Fake Clinics, a student club… worked with their student government to make UCSB the  first university in the country to ban CPCs from falsely advertising on campus. Six years later, UCSB remains the only school to have passed such legislation” (703). 

Grassroots efforts must, therefore, focus on directly engaging both interested populations and university policymakers. The latter group could increasingly be less attentive to reproductive  justice concerns, though petitions have been a powerful force for change in the past at my institution (many of the campus’s buildings named for historical Confederate figures were renamed after an open letter and petition).  

Importantly, these grassroots efforts must deemphasize choice. Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) rightly asserts that “the language of choice fails to take into account how different women have different access to different choices; it removes from analysis the conditions under  which women and families make decisions about reproduction” (161-162). Conversations about  choice begin with the assumption that we all have access to the same information, means, time, and health(care). Decontextualized emphasis on choice can mirror CPC emphasis on personal responsibility. As Michelle Jarman offers, “reproductive justice and feminist disability  frameworks move more radically toward the ‘we’ - acknowledging that reproduction has to take  place within communities” (63). Moving toward a partnership between disability, queer, and reproductive justice activists can more effectively approach what Jarman calls, “the complex  relational-decision-making processes for all” (63). 

Deemphasizing choice and focusing on the “we” in communities, in and outside activism, allows us to see the interconnectedness of our common cause. As Kafer argues, “Abortion for any  reason and under any circumstance must then be accompanied by accessible and affordable prenatal care for all women, as well as reliable and affordable child care, access to social services, and the kind of information about and supports for disability” (167). We must allow for, and pave the way for, the possibility of a radically different and more positive future. But we can only be ready for this future together. 

Further Reading 

Baker, Carrie N., and Jenifer McKenna, “Grassroots progress to hold anti-abortion crisis pregnancy  centers accountable,” Ms. Magazine, February 7, 2023, https://msmagazine.com/2023/02/07/crisis-pregnancy-center-fake-abortion-clinic/.

Edelman, Adam, “Democrats eye a new approach to rein in crisis pregnancy centers,” NBC News, May  18, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-eye-new-approach-rein crisis-pregnancy-centers-rcna81603. 

Gottheimer, Josh, “Release: Gottheimer launches campaign to shutdown deceptive anti-choice clinics  posing as women’s healthcare providers in NJ,” Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey’s Fifth  Congressional District, October 6, 2023, https://gottheimer.house.gov/posts/release-gottheimer launches-campaign-to-shutdown-deceptive-anti-choice-clinics-posing-as-womens-healthcare providers-in-nj. 

Iqbal, Mawa, “Illinois agrees to stop enforcing a controversial new law cracking down on crisis  pregnancy centers,” WBEZ Chicago, December 13, 2023, https://www.wbez.org/stories/anti abortion-activists-claim-victory-in-illinois-over-cpcs/74c93963-aee7-4cab-a298-6cdf0a0f136c. 

James Madison University (JMU) Community Engagement & Volunteer Center, 2024, https://jmu.galaxydigital.com/agency/. 

Jarman, Michelle, 2015. Relations of abortion: Crip approaches to reproductive justice. Feminist  Formations, vol. 27 (1), 46–66. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2015.0008. 

Kafer, Alison, (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press. 

Kim, J. B., & Schalk, S. (2021). Reclaiming the radical politics of self-care. The South Atlantic  Quarterly, vol. 120 (2), 325–342. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8916074. 

Kissling, Alexandra, Priya Gursahaney, Alison H. Norris, Danielle Bessett, and Maria F. Gallo, “Free, but  at what cost? How US crisis pregnancy centres provide services,” Culture, Health & Sexuality,  2023, vol. 25 (8), 1024–1038, https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2022.2116489. 

Lu, Rachel, “Student-run initiative to ban crisis pregnancy centers holds protest at involvement fair,” The  Middlebury Campus, September 29, 2022,  

https://www.middleburycampus.com/article/2022/09/student-run-initiative-to-ban-crisis pregnancy-centers-holds-protest-at-involvement-fair. 

Montoya, Melissa N., Colleen Judge-Golden, Jonas J Swartz, “The problems with crisis pregnancy  centers: Reviewing the literature and identifying new directions for future research,”  International Journal of Women’s Health, 2022, vol. 14, 757–763. 

Murtha, Tara, “Why are anti-abortion activists taking money meant for children in crisis?” Women’s Law  Project, March 16, 2023, https://www.womenslawproject.org/2023/03/16/why-are-anti-abortion activists-taking-money-meant-for-children-in-crisis/ 

National Abortion Federation Report, “Crisis pregnancy centers: An affront to choice,”http://prochoice.org/pubs_research/publications/downloads/public_policy/cpc_report.pdf

Noor, Poppy, “Pro-choice militants are targeting ‘pregnancy crisis centers’ across US,” The Guardian,  June 11, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/11/pro-choice-militants-pregnancy crisis-centers-attacks-us. 

ReproAction, “Taking bold action against anti-abortion fake clinics: Version 2,” August 2020,  https://reproaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/CPC-Action-Toolkit-2.0.pdf.

Rosenblatt, Kalhan, “Google and Yelp disable reviews on some crisis pregnancy center pages amid  activist ‘spam’ campaign,” NBC News, July 7, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech news/abortion-crisis-pregnancy-center-google-yelp-review-spam-rcna37212. 

Thomsen, Carly, “Animating and sustaining outrage: The place of crisis pregnancy centers in abortion  justice,” Human Geography, 2022, vol. 15 (3), 300–306. 

Thomsen, Carly, and Grace Morrison, “Abortion as gender transgression: Reproductive justice, queer  theory, and anti-crisis pregnancy center activism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and  Society, 2020, vol. 45 (3).