For nearly 60 years, crisis pregnancy centers have been a pillar of the anti-abortion movement.
Largely staffed by volunteers or part-time workers, these centers — sometimes referred to as pregnancy resource centers — offer limited services related to pregnancy and are guided by a religious mission to stop people from considering abortion.
States Newsroom conducted a 50-state investigation examining state and federal funding for these centers. Between 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortion rights, and the end of fiscal year 2025, 21 states have funneled nearly a half-billion dollars to crisis pregnancy centers. Physicians and researchers told reporters they’re concerned about the magnitude of public money crisis pregnancy centers are receiving while Planned Parenthood clinics and other community clinics offering reproductive health care are defunded.
Read our investigation: Taxpayer dollars flood pregnancy centers. Oversight hasn’t followed.
As part of an ongoing series to shed light on the issue, States Newsroom spoke with dozens of doctors, patients and people who found themselves in crisis pregnancy centers. These are some of their stories.
Alabama
When Valkyrie Brodt, 30, became pregnant for the first time last year, she did an online search to find a clinic that would take someone without insurance. She and her husband were waiting to be approved for health insurance, and she was hoping to find a provider who would confirm her pregnancy and check that it looked healthy so far. In her search results, she found what she thought was a pregnancy-focused medical clinic a couple of blocks from the hospital in her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama. She booked an appointment.
The couple arrived and began to fill out the clinic’s paperwork, but Brodt said something felt off.
“A lot of the questions were less about medical history and more so faith-based questions, and other questions like, ‘What’s your relationship with the baby’s father?’ ‘What’s your plan for this pregnancy?’ I think it did specifically ask what your religion was.
“At that point I realized, OK, this is clearly a Christian-run kind of place. I grew up Church of Christ, and I have a lot of religious trauma from the way that I grew up. I would not consider myself religious at this point. I’m very open-minded towards people who are religious, no bias other than just not wanting it shoved on me.
“I was also under the impression they were going to do the blood test analysis to confirm pregnancy, but it was just another urine sample. And I was like, well, I’ve already done four of these, and they were all positive.
“Then when they called us back, she (the clinic staffer) literally used the words ‘divide and conquer.’’’
Brodt was taken to one room, while a male counselor took her husband to another room. She said she understands why staff might want to separate them, in case of concerns about possible domestic violence or coercion. But Brodt said she was never asked about the couple’s relationship or whether she felt safe. The counselor confirmed that Brodt wanted to keep the baby, asked more faith-related questions, and told her that if she attended counseling sessions she could earn “baby bucks” to redeem on baby items from their store.
“At one point, towards the end, she (the counselor) said, ‘Well, if you know anybody who’s thinking about getting an abortion, send them our way.’ So it was very clear at that point that that was their goal. They gave us probably three or four different pamphlets, and only one of them was a piece of paper with the pregnancy confirmation on it. The rest was ministry stuff, like faith-based parenting classes.”
The clinic scheduled an ultrasound for her, but she and her husband decided not to go back.
“It felt very predatory to me as a 30-year-old woman that’s married. So I can’t imagine how it would feel to a teen mom or a single mom having to walk in there by herself.”
Read more: Federal funding for people in poverty heading to anti-abortion centers instead
Idaho
Dr. Cate Heil knew people in her hometown who worked at crisis pregnancy centers, and she didn’t have much of an opinion about the centers, other than they seemed like good places for pregnancy counseling.
That perspective changed.
During her training to become a family medicine physician in Idaho in 2020, she saw a 17-year-old patient who had gone to a pregnancy center, where she received a transabdominal ultrasound. The center told the patient there was “a lot of fluid.”
“Based on her period, she would’ve been about eight weeks and three days. It didn’t seem like they told her much else.
“We did a transvaginal ultrasound and saw some concerning things. This patient had a molar pregnancy, which shows up pretty characteristically on ultrasound and is considered a pre-malignancy. Her uterus at supposedly eight weeks was 1 centimeter above her pubic bone, which is much larger than would be expected. She underwent surgery the next week.
“It was concerning to me that this wasn’t recognized as something that’s abnormal. This is not quite an emergency, but it’s something that needs to be managed within a week or so, or needs immediate referral for a surgeon — and that made me nervous.
“Is there other stuff that we’re missing? This is a fairly rare thing, but it’s not unheard of, and it should be able to be recognized by people who are operating an ultrasound, in my opinion. … It made me want to double-check things when someone has gone to a crisis pregnancy center.”
Oregon
Emily Gartman wanted to keep her baby. Unexpectedly pregnant at 21, a friend recommended a pregnancy center, saying nice people would quickly confirm the pregnancy without an appointment. She took a test there, but before the results came back, Gartman said the staff asked her what she would do if she were pregnant.
They showed her pictures of how an embryo develops into a fetus and told her that it would respond to painful stimuli at 13 weeks, an idea that is not supported by science. Multiple studies have shown that a fetus does not have the capacity to experience pain until at least 24 weeks’ gestation.
Emily Gartman said a friend suggested that she go to a pregnancy center when she suspected she was pregnant to get confirmation. (Photo by Amanda Loman for States Newsroom)“They just kept driving home that if I got an abortion, my baby would be in pain. That it would feel itself being chopped up.
“I was 11 weeks pregnant, and they were clearly trying to make me feel like a piece of s— if I did get an abortion because I was hurting the baby. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but they basically told me if I waited any longer, I wouldn’t have a choice.
“There’s a very high chance that I would’ve kept it. The person I was pregnant by had Marfan syndrome, and the thing I wanted to wait for was an amniocentesis.”
Severe forms of Marfan syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, can cause fatal heart problems. Gartman had wanted more information about her options. An amniocentesis is typically performed between 15 and 20 weeks of pregnancy.
“I ended up having that abortion three days later. I felt like if I didn’t do it right away, I was going to have no choice, and that they’d be right, that I would be a monster.”
Despite many years passing, Gartman, 45, of Portland, said the trauma she endured is one of the main reasons she never had any children. The shame stuck with her, she said, and she thought she had no right to try to have another baby after having an abortion.
“Seeing public money going to these places pisses me off a lot. That’s my money. I don’t want my money being used to do this to someone else.
“My experience with them has been to just tell everybody I know who’s going to go to them to just not do it. I would never set foot in one of those places again.”
North Carolina
After Carley Causey discovered she was pregnant last year, she wanted to know how far along she was.
So she searched online for a place to “get an ultrasound to try and date how pregnant” she was.
Causey, 36, said she had originally called an OB-GYN’s office, but she was told that she couldn’t get an appointment for at least seven weeks.
“Well, most doctors’ offices won’t see you until you’re, like, 12 weeks pregnant. I did call, and they were like, like, not very helpful, because they were like, ‘You’re not far enough along,’” Causey said.
So she ended up calling a crisis pregnancy center.
“And this place is totally free. If you wanted to go to the ER and get an ultrasound, that’s like hundreds of dollars. And this is a community resource that charges you nothing, right?”
Causey said center volunteers told her that it may be too early to do an ultrasound and that she could potentially have an ectopic pregnancy for which she would have to go to the emergency room. But she wanted a transvaginal ultrasound, and she found out that she was almost two months pregnant.
Causey said her mom used to volunteer at “pregnancy support centers,” and she felt more comfortable going there. And as a Christian woman and family ministries director at a church in Durham, North Carolina, she said she felt awkward going to a place like Planned Parenthood, which she associated with abortion, although it offers a range of medical services.
“I know that they (pregnancy centers) totally have this reputation of trying to scare women into not having abortions, but that’s just not been my experience with the people who work there,” Causey said. “And I want to give space for that, because I don’t know all these Christian pregnancy centers, but the truth is like, yeah, they do value life, but they also want to provide resources that make it seem possible.”
Florida
Taylor Biro was sleeping under bridges all over Tallahassee when she found out she was pregnant in 2006. She called a local pregnancy center, telling them she was homeless and seeking an abortion.
Taylor Biro. (Courtesy of Taylor Biro)“I was 19 … I was pregnant, and I had no business having a child — I had a lot of difficult things going on around me at the time.
“I remember being very clear. I talked to them on the phone. I told them what I wanted to do. They said, ‘Great, come on in.’
“I went in, and they counseled me — and it ended up not being an actual place that helps, or had any means to help, with abortions. They were more like a faith-based group and wasted a lot of my time. I ended up passing the window when I was able to get an abortion.’’
It was “degrading” when she’d have to attend their classes to earn “mommy bucks” before she could have a few diapers — not even a full pack, she said.
“Less than a week after I gave birth, I was working at a sandwich shop. I remember standing there taking someone’s lunch order, hoping the pad in my underwear was thick enough to last till my break. For the first five years of my son’s life, I worked four jobs and made less than $11,000 a year. I was exhausted and trying to hold on to some version of myself before all this.”
Being pregnant and giving birth as a homeless teen, Biro experienced violence.
“It forces you to play into relationships that you probably never would have had to endure. You don’t have all the safety nets. It opened me up to domestic violence; it opened me up to sexual violence.”
Biro went on to start her own drop-in center for runaway and homeless youth. She and her team raised money for teens who needed abortions and provided Plan B for those over age 18.
After her experience with the crisis pregnancy center, she made diapers much more accessible for the new parents who came to the drop-in center, telling them: “You want to take five packs of diapers? Take six.”
She also worked with officers investigating sexual violence and human trafficking of youth, and helped write legislation requiring special training for law enforcement interviewing victims of sexual assault. Biro works with the National LGBTQ Task Force, and also founded Bread and Roses Collective, a team of grant writers for social justice organizations. Her child is now 18.
“It took me years to understand that the shame was never mine to carry. A Christian organization manipulated a homeless teenager into having a child when it was not safe, but (I) should be embarrassed? I know now that my struggle and trauma was not some penance for being young and irresponsible. But that experience, being tricked out of health care, was my origin story.
“It’s strange that even now, I feel compelled to preface it all by saying how much I love my son. As if naming my trauma or the loss of my autonomy could mean I love him less. That guilt buries stories like mine. We hear more about how a child ‘saved’ someone, when the truth is my life had meaning on its own.”
States Newsroom’s investigation is ongoing. If you have had an experience with a crisis pregnancy center, please get in touch at cpcproject@statesnewsroom.com.
This story was originally produced by News From The States, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes NC Newsline, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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