Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), also called “pregnancy resource centers” or “pregnancy help centers,” are anti-abortion organizations that target low-income people facing unintended pregnancies to prevent them from accessing abortion and contraception.
While CPCs have been around since the late 1960s, the anti-abortion movement recently expanded and elevated the role of CPCs in part by facilitating the coordination of sophisticated data collection and exploitation systems. Part of that expansion was a strategic decision to begin marketing CPCs to resemble medical facilities. However, as we found in the Alliance Study Designed to Deceive: A Study of the Crisis Pregnancy Center Industry in Nine States, CPCs do not typically provide medical services and therefore do not generally have to comply with medical privacy protections such as HIPAA.
These findings are especially concerning because the CPC industry amasses data that could be used in pregnancy- and abortion-related prosecutions or fed to citizen vigilante bounty-hunters in states that incentivize anti-abortion civil lawsuits with financial rewards, such as Texas.
The global anti-abortion group Heartbeat International, for example, stores “digital dossiers” on CPC clients, stating “Big data is revolutionizing all sorts of industries. Why shouldn’t it do the same for a critical ministry like ours?”
Now, led by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, a group of U.S. Senators sent a public letter to the head of the global anti-abortion group Heartbeat International demanding information on what the group does with the sensitive personal data collected from people who go to affiliated crisis pregnancy centers.
Categories of data collected include pregnancy status, feelings about the pregnancy, marital or relationship status, medical history like STI treatment, substance use, history of domestic violence, and more.
In the letter, the Senators cited the urgent brief we issued earlier this year warning about the surveillance role the newly expanded and increasingly publicly funded CPC industry is poised to play in the post-Roe United States. Their inquiry is part of a new broader effort to hold CPCs accountable for deceptive practices. In August, Sen. Warren cited the need to hold CPCs accountable for deceptive practices and called to bring the Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act, federal legislation that would direct the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit deceptive and misleading advertising practices, to a vote.
Heartbeat International has been asked to answer questions about the data and information they collect by October 3. Stay tuned.
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.
Sign up for WLP’s Action Alerts. Stay up to date by following us on twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can contact us here.
