These organizations and their friendly volunteers may seem innocuous, but the centers are often staffed by evangelical women who lack professional licenses and belong to religious organizations that actively discourage them from recommending contraception, let alone abortion. Two such organizations, Heartbeat International and Care Net, coach staff members to seem credible to “abortion-minded” women by scrubbing their websites, signage and waiting rooms of all evidence of their underlying evangelical goals. Staff members themselves say their centers are most appealing to young women without anywhere else to turn.

In a yearlong investigation published in Cosmopolitan, I found that the information the centers gave women was often rife with omissions and misinformation. When I attended a conference for Heartbeat International, multiple speakers and attendees discussed strategies to tell women that abortion could cause difficulties ranging from infertility, suicide, breast cancer and failure to bond with future children. The medical research supports none of these claims.

Some of the states that are trying to defund Planned Parenthood are welcoming these centers. Eleven states fund them directly, sometimes with federal funds, and often through programs intended for low-income women and children.

In Ohio, legislators provided $1 million over the next two years for the centers. Meanwhile, the Ohio State Senate passed a bill last month that would restrict funding for Planned Parenthood affiliates, cutting access to breast and cervical cancer screenings, H.I.V. testing and violence against women programs. Since Gov. John R. Kasich took office in 2011, the state has passed restrictions that have cut the number of abortion clinics by about half.

Last month, California enacted a law that requires unlicensed centers to disclose that they are not licensed medical providers and requires licensed centers to tell women that the state has programs for affordable family planning, abortion services and prenatal care. A right-wing legal organization immediately sued to block the law, arguing that it infringed on the religious freedoms of the centers. Similar transparency laws elsewhere have been weakened or struck down.

When a woman is coerced to continue an unwanted pregnancy through misinformation or lack of access, she loses control of her body, education, finances — her future. The struggle for reproductive rights is inextricable from other movements for racial and economic justice. We will not achieve equal opportunity until a poor woman has the same sovereignty over her body and her future as a wealthy man. We must roll back the anti-choice legislation in our states that holds back equality.