Rebecca Hart Holder
Four Women’s Health Services is a legitimate reproductive-health-care clinic and abortion provider in Attleboro. Directly behind the clinic is a larger building bearing the sign “Attleboro Women’s Health Center.”
This second facility advertises free ultrasounds, free pregnancy testing, and “pregnancy counseling.” Its website features the term “abortion” so many times that it’s the first result when one locally Google searches “abortion clinic near me.”
However, Attleboro Women’s Health Center does not provide abortions. It’s an anti-abortion center — or “crisis pregnancy center” — that aims to deceive, delay, and dissuade pregnant people from accessing abortion care.
Anti-abortion centers promote themselves as reproductive-health-care providers, but typically aren’t licensed to provide medical care. Frequently, like in Attleboro, they set up shop next to legitimate care providers and use deceptive advertising and misleading names to trick patients into seeking care there.
These deceptive facilities subject patients to enormous amounts of disinformation to dissuade them from seeking an abortion — or even make them believe they can’t. These centers deliberately target low-income people, communities of color, and non-English speaking communities with deceptive advertising and the promise of “free services” — but it always comes with a catch.
From stigmatizing medical lies to staff practicing out of their scope, patients don’t receive credible health information at these facilities. We saw this up close in Worcester, when a patient unknowingly visited an anti-abortion center called Clearway Clinic to confirm her pregnancy.
The patient was told by a nurse, allegedly practicing out of her scope, that her pregnancy was healthy and in utero. Weeks later, the patient learned she was actually experiencing an ectopic pregnancy when she was forced to undergo emergency surgery that resulted in the loss of her fallopian tube.
Because most anti-abortion centers aren’t licensed medical institutions, they’re also not subject to regulations on privacy for patient data, such as HIPAA. Patient data is often stored on insecure servers and harbored without the consent of patients. That lets these centers surveil people as they navigate their reproductive health care — an alarming threat in a post-Roe world.
Anti-abortion centers are meant to confuse, deceive, and shame patients for making their own informed choices. Even in states with legal protections for abortion access, these centers create barriers to urgent and necessary care.
Nationally, there are somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 anti-abortion centers, around three times the number of abortion clinics. The disparity is worse in abortion-hostile states — but since Dobbs, they’ve been expanding in all 50 states.
Fortunately, we have a powerful tool to fight back.
It begins with public education. States can play a critical role to ensure residents have the tools and resources they need to make informed reproductive-health-care decisions — and avoid dangerous and deceptive anti-abortion centers.
In Massachusetts, my organization is working with public-health authorities to inoculate our communities against the deceptive practices of these facilities. This past June, Massachusetts launched a first-in-the-nation public-education campaign to ensure residents are well-informed.
We’re lucky to have support from our state government. But residents in less supportive states can still protect patients through grassroots work. We’ve seen informative, creative grassroots education materials produced by people across the country — even in places where these centers receive state funding.
Person-to-person conversations with friends, family, and neighbors are an excellent place to start. Make sure your loved ones know what anti-abortion centers are, how to avoid them, and where they can access legitimate care.
Patients seeking legitimate abortion care can find clinics near them using Reproductive Equity Now’s New England Abortion Care Guide or at www.ineedana.com.
Seeking abortion care in this nation continues to be cumbersome for many patients, even in protected states. However, information is power. That’s why we’re putting power in the hands of our communities by raising awareness about anti-abortion centers.
Rebecca Hart Holder is the President of Reproductive Equity Now. This column was adapted from a longer version at Inequality.org and syndicated by OtherWords.org.
