Crisis Pregnancy Centers: What Are They Exactly?

Picture this: You walk into what looks like a medical clinic, expecting accurate information and services about pregnancy options. Instead, you’re handed a Bible, a lecture, and a coupon for diapers. Welcome: You’ve just walked into the world of Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), where the mission isn’t exactly what it seems. There are over 2,500 of these centers nationwide– including plenty in Arizona. CPCs are marketed as places to help pregnant individuals make “informed” decisions.  But here’s the catch: many of these clinics don’t actually offer comprehensive healthcare or accurate information. Their main goal is to steer people away from abortion at all costs. 

Crisis Pregnancy Centers are often affiliated with religious organizations, often fundamentalist Christian and Catholic affiliated, or pro-life advocacy groups. Although their stated mission is to provide support for pregnant individuals, their true underlying goal is to dissuade people from choosing abortion. They make themselves sound appealing by offering free resources, counseling, and “nonjudgmental” support; in reality, CPCs are designed to emotionally manipulate individuals into continuing their pregnancies. In Arizona specifically, these centers often establish themselves near actual family planning clinics that offer real services using similar names and branding to confuse people who are seeing reproductive healthcare.

Despite claiming to offer a wide variety of services, CPCs are not actual medical facilities, even if they look exactly like one.  To draw people in, they’ll often advertise free ultrasounds and pregnancy tests with the ultimate goal of delaying decision-making until abortion is no longer an option. They’ll even have staff in scrubs and exam rooms resembling clinics, but their services stop at free pregnancy tests, limited ultrasounds, and baby supplies. They don’t provide contraception, abortion referrals, actual medical advice, or evidence-based information about pregnancy options. In Arizona, these clinics have been known to advertise ultrasounds. The catch is that these ultrasounds are non-diagnostic, meaning they’re not reviewed by medical professionals and can’t reliably determine anything about anything. These ultrasounds are used to create emotional connections to the pregnancy, with tactics like pointing out the “baby’s heartbeat” as early as possible.  

This lack of accurate information at CPCs has serious implications. People walk into these clinics expecting unbiased help but are instead given medically inaccurate claims, like abortion causing breast cancer, infertility, or mental health issues– all of which have been debunked by credible research. These cases also raise significant ethical concerns, especially when it comes to consent, autonomy, and the right to accurate information. By presenting themselves as medical facilities, CPCs create an illusion of legitimacy that misleads vulnerable individuals. 

Arizona has its fair share of CPCs, often operating under names like “pregnancy resource centers” or “women’s health clinics.” These clinics fail to disclose that they don’t actually offer medical care, and some even provide pamphlets with medically inaccurate information about abortion risks. In a place like Arizona, where access to abortion is already limited, such deceptive practices have an even greater impact. Withholding and distorting medical facts violates the ethical principle of “do no harm” and undermines a person’s right to informed consent. How can someone make an autonomous decision if they aren’t given the full truth? 

Sources:

Crisis pregnancy centers of greater phoenix. Idealist. (n.d.). https://www.idealist.org/en/nonprofit/bc62c5a7c4854cd8ae1a8003be633c38-crisis-pregnancy-centers-of-greater-phoenix-glendale 

Free pregnancy tests, limited ultrasounds, pre-abortion consultations, pregnancy help and more. Pregnancy Resource Center of Arizona. (n.d.). https://www.prcaz.org/ 

Interactive map. Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) Map. (2025, February 5). https://crisispregnancycentermap.com/ 

What are crisis pregnancy centers? (n.d.). https://www.plannedparenthood.org/blog/what-are-crisis-pregnancy-centers