We recently expanded on our groundbreaking report on the modern crisis pregnancy center industry published in collaboration with our partners in the Alliance and California Women’s Law Center by releasing an urgent brief focused on alerting you to the ways the CPC industry is poised to conduct surveillance of pregnant people sanctioned – and financed – by state governments post-Roe.
Thanks to privacy advocates, we already knew that the national and international anti-abortion groups that steer the CPC movement leverage these facilities – which may appear to be local but are often plugged into the global anti-abortion network through an affiliation model – to collect alarming amounts of personal data on people who go there, including sensitive medical, reproductive and relationship history, marital status, and income. Though CPCs have pivoted to marketing themselves as medical facilities, most do not provide medical care and therefore do not need to comply with medical privacy laws. A person doesn’t even have to go to a CPC for them to capture their data. Such information is also collected through online chats and smart phone apps.
Unbeknownst to the person sharing their information in the hopes of finding help, their data is often sent to a mega database intended to share data across the entire anti-abortion movement.
If that isn’t alarming enough, a new wave of legislation advancing in multiple states seeks to force pregnant people seeking abortion care to consult with a state-funded anti-abortion activists before they would be permitted to obtain an abortion. They would be subsequently assigned a “unique identifying number” and their information would be shared between anti-abortion activists and state government.
WLP’s Tara Murtha, co-author of Designed to Deceive: A Study of the Crisis Pregnancy Center Industry in Nine States, will appear on the FBK Live! today at 4PM to talk about this threat with Lizz Winstead and Moji Alawode-El of Abortion Access Front.
The show will air on Abortion Access Front’s YouTube channel, which you can find here. The show also features comedian and author Leighann Lord!
Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing and defending the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in Pennsylvania and beyond. As a non-profit organization, we can not do this work without you. Please consider supporting our work.
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