Protesters in front of a pregnancy crisis center in 2013.

Protesters in front of a pregnancy crisis center in 2013.

For years, one of the forced-birthers' many tactics to curtail women's reproductive freedom has been the establishment of so-called "pregnancy crisis centers." There are now more than 3,000 of these centers in about half the states. A good portion are connected to two anti-abortion religious organizations—Care Net and Heartbeat International.

Many centers trick women seeking abortions past their doors with deceitful advertising and then guilt-trip them and frequently lie in an effort to convince them not to get the abortion they want. One of the chief deceptions is their claim or implication that they provide abortion or birth control. Once inside, women are typically subjected to anti-abortion propaganda, including the long-since-debunked claim that having an abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. As Jenny Kutner wrote at Salon this summer, the crisis centers can be "misleading, manipulative or downright coercive, pushing a distinctly antiabortion agenda that relies heavily on lying to clients."

An investigation by Cosmopolitan magazine found that 11 states fund these religiously based centers with tens of millions in tax funds. Pennsylvania, for example, is providing $30 million to 98 such centers over the five-year period ending in 2017.

Reproductive rights activists have made numerous efforts to curb the centers' abuses and the outright harm they cause women. However, they've frequently collided with federal courts over free speech issues. That's why reproductive rights activists in California hope a new law just signed by Gov. Jerry Brown—AB 775—will be a model for laws in other states. It is a sensible if modest effort, requiring only that such centers must inform women about the availability of public financial assistance for reproductive services and to notify patients when there are no medical professionals on staff.

The always excellent Molly Redden explains at Mother Jones:



It is the first time reproductive rights groups have succeeded in pushing regulations on crisis pregnancy centers across an entire state; only a handful of cities or counties have passed similar laws. Shortly before the act became law, Amy Everitt, the director of NARAL Pro-Choice California, a reproductive rights group that helped draft the bill, said in an interview, "There is more to come." But the new law may represent the outer limit of what legislatures can do to regulate crisis pregnancy centers. The measure [...] almost certainly faces the same fraught legal battles that stalled similar regulations in cities including Baltimore, New York, and Austin. Those battles forced NARAL and its allies to be conservative in crafting the new regulations. For instance, the law cannot force unlicensed centers to inform women that the state health department encourages women to visit licensed medical providers for prenatal care. A new court fight could erode their options even further.

There's more below the fold.