Crisis Pregnancy Center Profiles

Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) are anti-abortion organizations that falsely convey the impression that they are actual abortion clinics while in fact they do not provide abortion services at all. Rather than providing women with honest information and services, these anti-abortion centers use misinformation, shame and scare tactics to dissuade women who face unintended pregnancies from choosing abortion. Though CPCs were initially an ad-hoc and scattered anti-abortion response to the legalization of abortion following Roe v. Wade, these centers are now highly organized, heavily funded, and outnumber actual abortion clinics. As of 2006, there are an estimated 2,300 to 3,500 CPCs currently operating in the US, while there are only 1,800 abortion clinics. 1

Worse yet, these centers are increasingly funded by both the federal and numerous state governments. Millions of dollars of federal and state-level abstinence-only funding is granted to CPCs each year. CPCs are also being granted government funding to purchase ultrasound machines and even to provide pregnancy support and reproductive health services, despite the fact they do not offer contraceptive services and the vast majority of CPCs are not medical clinics at all.

Legal Momentum examines the origins and activities of four of the most well established networks of crisis pregnancy centers operating in the United States and internationally.

Read a profile of the following organizations: Birthright, Care Net, Heartbeat International, National Institute of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA)

1John Leland, Some Abortion Foes Forgo Politics for Quiet Talk, NY Times, Jan. 16, 2006; Note that the Washington Post gave a slightly different but older estimate of 3,000 CPCs and 2,000-2,500 "family planning clinics and abortion providers" (see Alan Cooperman, Abortion Battle: Prenatal Care or Pressure Tactics?, Washington Post, Feb. 21, 2002) while a Guttmacher Institute report from the same year estimated that there were 2,500 to 4,000 CPCs in the US (Vitoria Lin and Cynthia Dailard, Crisis Pregnancy Centers Seek to Increase Political Clout, Secure Government Subsidy, 5(2) Guttmacher Report on Public Policy, (2002), available at http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/05/2/gr050204.html).