What It's Really Like Inside One Of Kentucky's Crisis Pregnancy Centers
On the surface, a CPC purports to distribute proper care to pregnant people considering their options; the bulk of their advertising dollars are spent targeting girls they imagine to be “abortion-vulnerable,” some days with ads so egregious that Google has determined to remove them. In reality, these CPCs are anti-choice facilities that don't allocate abortions or perhaps refer patients to facilities that do distribute abortion services; as an alternative, they offer free or low-cost pregnancy tests and ultrasounds. (Critics mention they do this sort in attempt to lure unsuspecting patients categorize in attempt to convince, guilt, or maybe trick them out of receiving an abortion.) They’re not legitimate doctors’ offices and have not been regulated as such. So any time If I heard they were increasingly targeting college students, I reached out; none of the five facilities I asked accepted my formal interview request, so I determined to check out what they were doing for myself.
To be clear, any time Once I went into the CPC, I didn’t believe I was pregnant; I also entered the facility with the intention to learn what these centers tell clientele. The center I went to in Louisville, Kentucky — a blue dot in a largely red state — is one a number of CPCs clustered around the University of Louisville, almost strategically so. Kentucky is also one of six states In the United States with one remaining abortion clinic, located in the same town; state legislators recently tried to enact a highly-restrictive ban prohibiting abortions right after six weeks, which is before most people know they’re pregnant, and significantly earlier than the timeframe protected by Roe V. Wade.
Nothing about the CPC’s website mentioned they were operated by religious volunteers; it was only any time While I seen a Bible verse on the wall that their affiliation as a faith-based categorize was clear. The supply here was not the fact they were religious, although the long history of people weaponizing religion because the basis for subjecting an anti-choice stance onto other people. (Catholic hospitals have identically come under fire for restricting actual doctors from performing the procedure, even at unaffiliated clinics.)
“Everything we do here's medical,” a volunteer informed me in the evaluation room, despite the fact she wasn’t a licensed medical professional.
She proceeded to ask for the last four digits of my Social Security number, which to me was bizarre; only a couple of companies have a legal right to use your SSN — your employer, banks and lenders, investment funds, the IRS, and government-funded programs like workers’ compensation. There’s no legitimate reason for any entity with which you’re not financially involved to ask for your Social. “It’s just one of the things we do here,” she mentioned. I pushed back. It’s “what you do anytime you do anything online,” she responded, which is blatantly false.
Her tone became hostile and she continued to prod me into giving her my data. I’m still unclear as to why this particular CPC pushes so aggressively for potentially pregnant people’s Socials, however I might visualize how more weak girls would conveniently hand over their statistics. It was alarmingly predatory, and yes it was only soon after minutes of back and forth that we started talking about pregnancy.
I instructed her I had a IUD. She mentioned that there’s routinely that “one percent, two percent” chance a IUD could fail, which are around the same rate as a condom. In reality, according to OB/GYNs, IUDs have a much less than one percent chance of failure — around 0.2-0.8%. The error wasn’t surprising: Contraceptives are notoriously contentious among the religious right, who falsely claim that birth control could cause abortions, often without any medical proof to support that narrative.
Once it finally came time to take a pregnancy test, the volunteer mentioned it could be with a pee stick — the same kind you get at the drugstore. She claimed theirs were more accurate because they were not expired, nevertheless there really is no evidence to support the likelihood of someone purchasing an expired test from the store. Planned Parenthood also advocates for drugstore pregnancy tests given that medical pregnancy tests often test urine in the exact same way. Some people cannot afford the roughly $12 for a pack of pregnancy tests, or otherwise fear for their own safety if their pregnancy is discovered; to that end, it might be life-saving to have access to free or low-cost tests. The problem, then, is what occurs at these testing appointments.
As soon as my test came back negative, I thought the appointment was over. As I got prepared to leave, she asked, “Have you thought about STDs?” And handed me a chart equating my sexual activity to promiscuity. Based on this chart if I’d slept with 12 people, and each of these 12 people slept with 12 people, then I could have actually slept with 4,095 people and been exposed to all their STDs.
Behind the fact that this chart was not based on a structured mathematical logic nor a peer-reviewed study, I was bewildered — it had nothing to do with pregnancy. Linking sexual activity and pregnancy is based on the shaming of ladies for having sex — and the false assumption that every woman who might be pregnant not only failed to use protection although has also been exposed to every STD in the book.
“You need to be cute on the indoor and also you have got to respect yourself,” the volunteer finished.
The experience abandoned me irritated at the center for slut-shaming females seeking proper medical care. I had more questions than answers, namely: How do these centers get away with giving false statistics? Who regulates them?
I called the city’s health department and so they directed me to the Kentucky State Department of Health; there, I got an answering service, and left a message for their spokesperson. No one got back to me. Yet as irritating as their silence is, the lack of accountability for CPCs comes from higher up in the form of a Supreme Court decision last summer that effectively gave CPCs the okay to lie to their patients.
In a 5-4 decision in the National Institute of Family member and Life Advocates v. Becerra, the Supreme Court reversed a California law that required anti-choice CPCs in the state to clearly state their mission. Because of that, CPCs in California right now never have to state their non-medical affiliations or disclose that they’re anti-abortion facilities; it is assumed that the decision will be upheld in other states.
Once I went to the abortion clinic in Germany, it never once crossed my mind that the clinic was fake or that the statistics given to me was unscientific. I was okay with waiting three days and traveling two hours each time to get to the clinic, because I knew the mandatory counseling session was done by a proper professional. I was grateful that I had the alternative to access the care I required and empowered in knowing that my doctors and nurses were licensed to keep me medically sound.
It’s not to mention the waiting period wasn’t hard, yet it was perhaps easier for me than for other people; I was on vacation and so did not have to take time off work the way other pregnant people do. I also went in early enough in the pregnancy — if I didn’t know I was pregnant up until the end of my first trimester, that waiting period could have pushed me past the legal time quota to have the procedure at all. And I was resolute. I knew I couldn’t raise a kid at 18. However I can visualize how the wait could wear on others who may not have the emotional support and resources that I did. Or how distressed I would have been if I’d walked into a CPC and experienced the things did in Kentucky As soon as I was under duress and pregnant.
Even with the fragile Roe v. Wade decision upholding abortion, the lies spread by CPCs already greatly outnumber proper medical truths in Kentucky. Seventy-six of its 120 counties do not have OB/GYNs — and not all OB/GYNs perform the procedure. Refinery29 estimates there really are 69 CPCs to the state’s one abortion clinic. Conservative lawmakers are routinely outspending progressives in anti-abortion messaging campaigns on Facebook, several of which reach young people. (MTV News has reached out to Facebook for comment.)
Medical lies are more widely accessible in Kentucky than real doctors. As soon as that happens, the people who suffer the most are susceptible people putting their trust in an entity with ulterior motives, who lie to them about their rights and options, and who guilt them into believing that the only choice is no choice at all.
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