Half a century after Christian abortion opponents founded the first crisis pregnancy centers, the centers receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. But a powerful legal group is working to shield them from taxpayer oversight.
Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian legal group that helped overturn Roe v Wade, has taken the lead in promoting “CARE Acts” in three states:
- Montana enacted its CARE Act into law in May
- A Wyoming bill is working its way through the legislature
- A South Carolina bill was introduced in January
The near-identical bills prevent states from regulating the centers. Legislators who attempt to regulate them may face potential fines. ADF says the bills protect “Pregnancy Center Autonomy and Rights of Expression,” and are needed because the centers are under threat.
“While pregnancy centers can fulfill that need, they face real and growing threats. Thankfully, the CARE Act prohibits state and local officials from discriminating against pregnancy centers simply because they do not provide, counsel in favor of, or refer for abortion,” said ADF.
Critics say the bills are intended to insulate the centers from oversight while eliminating access to abortion.
Critics say the bills are intended to insulate the centers from oversight while eliminating access to abortion.
“Right now, the nation’s anti-abortion power players are testing out their next major strategy in Wyoming — and they’re betting no one will notice,” wrote feminist author and abortion expert Jessica Valenti. “Giving fake clinics unprecedented and unchecked power would be bad enough, but the CARE Act goes even further. The legislation is part of a broader plan to informally ban birth control and eliminate abortion ban exceptions for women’s lives.”
Jessica Valenti
Valenti says the centers’ history shows their need for oversight. “They are barely regulated in anti-abortion states, yet they rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars. Only a fraction of that money reaches women, who often have to ‘earn’ basic supplies like diapers through Bible study classes. The rest goes to staff salaries, travel — even exercise equipment.”
The CARE Acts come at a time when crisis pregnancy centers already are receiving more taxpayer money. States spent more than $1 billion funding crisis pregnancy centers from 1995 to 2024, with nearly half of that total coming after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, according to a study by Equity Forward, which supports abortion rights.
The country’s crisis pregnancy centers had combined revenue of $1.7 billion in 2022, says another abortion rights group.
Texas has given $438 million to crisis pregnancy centers since it started funding them 20 years ago. That spending ballooned, reaching nearly $200 million for the past two years. But oversight has been lax, and a report from ProPublica and CBS News showed why oversight might be called for:
- Many clinics overcharged the Texas government for services by billing separately for services, including diapers and informational brochures, at a flat rate, and pocketing the surpluses.
- Two clinics used their surpluses to invest in real estate.
- One clinic used its surplus to quintuple the value of its assets.
- One clinic “spent taxpayer money on vacations, on a motorcycle and to fund a smoke shop business owned by its president and CEO.”
In Montana, the Republican-led legislature has sought to restrict abortion access while voters have overruled them to increase access. Legislators passed restrictions in 2021, but lawsuits kept them from going into effect. Legislators tried again with more bills in 2023. And Gov. Greg Gianforte has donated to a center in the state.
But last year 58% of voters supported an amendment to the state constitution granting abortion access.
Critics of the centers say they should be regulated because even though they are not medical centers they dispense medical advice, sometimes poorly. Critics cite a litany of problems:
- Deceiving vulnerable women by using online ads that suggest they provide abortion services or referrals, which they refuse to do
- Routinely offering women misinformation about their pregnancies or the risks of abortion
- Pressuring or shaming women into keeping their babies
- Employing workers who lack health training who misinterpret sonograms and other tests they offer
- Lying to women by falsely telling them their pregnancies are beyond the legal limits for abortions or abortion medications.
The CARE Act bills also promote what they call a “pre-viability separation procedure,” defined as “a medical procedure performed by a licensed physician to remove an unborn child from the mother’s uterine cavity.”
Feminist writer Valenti calls this “a completely invented term — created with the sole purpose of claiming abortion is never necessary to save a woman’s health or life.” She wrote: “Rather than allowing patients with life-threatening pregnancies to get standard abortion care — which is safer, easier and less painful — conservatives want doctors to force women into c-sections or induced labor, even when it’s too early for a fetus to survive. Sometimes even when a fetus has died.”
Alliance Defending Freedom was founded four decades ago by James Dobson and other conservative leaders. It has removed the term “Christian” from some of its publicity and calls itself “an alliance-building, nonprofit legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, parental rights and the sanctity of life.”
Meanwhile, female Congressional Democrats have introduced a bill that would “Stop Crisis Pregnancy Centers from Spreading Anti-Abortion Disinformation.” An announcement from U.S. Representatives Emilia Sykes (Ohio), Suzanne Bonamici (Oregon) and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts) explains: “Crisis pregnancy centers often falsely and deliberately advertise themselves to potential clients as comprehensive reproductive health care providers. Each year, thousands of people seeking objective and medically sound reproductive care instead receive inaccurate information about abortion and contraception from these fake clinics.”
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