Have Crisis Pregnancy Centers Morphed into Substandard Medical Clinics?

A recent Essence article about anti-abortion pregnancy centers highlighted a problem with these centers that I had not thought about before. I knew that these centers shamed the women who came into them and spread misinformation about the risks associated with abortion. I also knew that these centers out on sex-education programs in local schools that involve both shaming and misinforming students.

I had not, however, thought about the full implications of these centers presenting themselves as though they were medical facilities. It’s not just that misleading people is wrong—although it is. Making someone think you are a medical facility when you are not is also dangerous.

Anti-abortion pregnancy centers have for many decades presented themselves as places where women with unplanned pregnancies can go for solutions—or in other words, as abortion clinics. The idea was that by luring women considering abortion into their facilities, they could dissuade them and change their mind. However in recent years these centers have become more medical in their presentation.

In other words, anti-abortion pregnancy clinics are no longer simply masquerading as abortion clinics. They’re masquerading as medical clinics where a woman might come for prenatal care—even though many of these clinics neither provide prenatal care nor have medically trained professionals on the premises.

Compounding this problem, Tatsha Robertson writes in her Essence article, pregnancy care centers often target neighborhoods that are low income and minority majority—areas where what looks like a free medical clinic (but is not) is especially appealing. Robertson centers her story on Dartricia Rollins.

In December 2013 Dartricia Rollins had a hunch that she might be pregnant.

“I went to apply for Medicaid and they gave me a list of places I could go to get a free pregnancy test, because obviously if you don’t have health insurance, you more than likely don’t have a doctor, and more than likely you can’t afford to pay for a blood test,” she says.

She was only 22 years old—a freshman majoring in psychology at Atlanta Metropolitan State College. On the list was a pregnancy services center in Marietta, Georgia, which was located close to her home in the suburbs of Atlanta.

“D’Juan, my boyfriend at the time—he’s my husband now—looked them up online. We didn’t see anything alarming. We called and scheduled an appointment for later that weekend,” she recalls.

Rollins walked into a well-lit facility with staff members in medical scrubs. She provided them with her medical records, her driver’s license, her social security number and a urine sample and was immediately called in to see a counselor to talk about her pregnancy. She was given an ultrasound as well.

Rollins believed the staff who served her, including the person who had conducted her ultrasound, had medical backgrounds. She was likely wrong. She assumed that they were there strictly to provide medical services. She was probably wrong about that too.

…

In a letter to state legislators, Dartricia Rollins, who is now 26, explained that the deception was more than frustrating for her. She believes it was fatal to her unborn child.

Yes, you read that right—fatal. Remember when I said that pretending to be a medical facility when you are not can be dangerous? This is what I was talking about.

Before explaining what happened in the aftermath of her visit, Robertson writes about what Rollins went through at her appointment at the clinic:

Although Rollins and her boyfriend told the counselor at the center they wanted to keep their child if they were pregnant, the counselor spent hours trying to persuade them not to get an abortion, scolding them about their sex life and their lack of religion and trying to persuade them to get married.

“I came in for an ultrasound, but instead I was subjected to hours of invasive questions about my sexual and religious life. Instead of being told about prenatal care, I received hours of hurtful comments about how my loving boyfriend could never be a good father unless he had the same religious beliefs as the people in the center,” Rollins wrote in her letter.

“We ended up leaving crushed and frustrated. We both respected the counselor’s religious beliefs, but I was there for medical care and medical care only, and I am hurt and angered by the fact that convincing my boyfriend to attend church was more important to her than making sure I had the information I needed to have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby, and the consequences of that were fatal.”

Yes, fatal.

Before leaving the clinic, Rollins was given an ultrasound and was then told she was in the earliest stages of her pregnancy. Two months later she visited a doctor, who told her she was actually much further along.

On March 12, 2014, Rollins began cramping and bleeding at work. She called her doctor, who told her to head to a nearby hospital. “I found out that day that I had an incompetent cervix,” she notes. “But because I came to him later than normal, due to misinformation I’d received earlier in my pregnancy, I did not have the proper procedure to confirm this condition and treat it, resulting in the loss of my baby. His name would have been Noah.”

I am not a medical professional and am not qualified to assess Rollins’ belief that the misinformation she received at an anti-abortion pregnancy care center led to her incompetent cervix going undiagnosed. I looked the condition up and it appears that it often goes undiagnosed, but also that it can sometimes be detected by tracking the cervix to assess any dilation.

Regardless of whether the information she received at the pregnancy care center played a role in her incompetent cervix going undiagnosed, Rollins alleges that she received misinformation, and that misinformation led her to delay her first pregnancy-related doctor’s visit.

Rollins tried to forget what happened: “I was sad about it for a long time, and I just let it go. I was in the middle of midterms, and I just tried not to think about that again.”

She doesn’t know if she or husband D’Juan will ever get over the loss or the deception. “My friend asked, ‘Do you think that is why you are afraid to have a baby now?’ And it totally is. We have been trying to make sure everything is perfect—that our health is perfect, that we have health insurance.

Plenty of our friends say, ‘People can get pregnant at any time. You shouldn’t worry too much.’ But I need to worry. I need to be sure of the doctor. I need to make sure I never go to one of these places again.”

Robertson adds this as well:

Yashica Robinson, M.D., who runs both a large medical practice and a health clinic that offers abortion in Huntsville, Alabama, says the CPCs are so integrated in the medical system that patients often believe they have to get referrals from them before coming to see her.

“The CPCs’ goal is to capture those abortion-minded people, so
 if that means they will have to lie, then they will do that,” she says.

Although some crisis pregnancy centers hire legitimate medical experts, Robinson says, many do not, which can create a big problem. When counselors at the clinics don’t have medical training, a woman can get misinformation, such as an incorrect due date, which will delay visits with a prenatal doctor. Some are told they are not pregnant at all or that they are earlier than they really are and must come back over and over.

“This can be dangerous to women because most are not aware these are not real clinics,’’ Robinson says. They may think these visits count as prenatal care. The centers can get away with it because they are practicing free speech and offering free services, she says.

Go read Robertson’s entire article.

Three decades ago, these offices advertised themselves as “crisis pregnancy centers” and were more transparent about what they offered—they were designed for women undergoing a crisis pregnancy, in an effort to dissuade these women from seeking an abortion and to push them toward parenthood or adoption, often employing a mixture of shame and religion, and scare tactics vis a vis the risk of abortion.

As the years went by, many of these centers had begun to disguise themselves as abortion clinics, with similar names and locations in the same building or nearby. This I knew. I’d read articles of women who thought they were walking into an abortion clinic, but instead found themselves being confronted with pictures of bloody fetuses and pamphlets linking breast cancer to abortion.

Until reading Robertson’s article, I hadn’t considered the extent to which many these clinics are now presenting themselves as free medical clinics, rather than disguising themselves as abortion clinics. As a result, these offices are now pulling in women like Robertson, who was not actually considering abortion.

There is an argument to be made, within the pro-life framework, that misleading women about the nature of these centers in order to dissuade women from having abortions is ethically responsible. That argument becomes far more shaky if these clinics are pulling in non-abortive women and providing substandard medical care, as Rollins, Robertson, and and Robinson allege.

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