“They’re misleading ... and that’s a problem”
As Colorado becomes haven for access, advocates target crisis pregnancy centers
Alternatives Pregnancy Center sits next to a King Soopers grocery store in Denver, tucked in a maze of hallways in a blocky office building. A bowl of candy greets visitors. A row of portraits of mothers and their children cover a wall in a corner office. Other than a room with an ultrasound machine and a row of fetus figurines, the office is largely unremarkable.
But the pregnancy center and others like it represent contested outposts in the escalating fight over abortion access in Colorado and the United States. The facilities — known as crisis pregnancy centers — are staunchly anti- abortion and offer limited medical services and family counseling, with the intent of steering women away from terminating their pregnancies. There are dozens of the facilities in Colorado, more than doubling the number of abortion providers.
Critics say the organizations — which they call anti- abortion centers — use deceptive advertising and promote the use of unproven medical treatments. A coalition of abortion access groups, together with Democrats in the Colorado statehouse, are preparing a landmark bill to regulate how the centers operate and confront those concerns.
The facilities have long been features of the abortion debate. Blue states such as California and Connecticut have sought to regulate their advertising practices, while red states such as Ohio provide them direct funding or elevate some of their medical claims. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision — which overruled Roe vs. Wade — was leaked in May 2022, a number of facilities, including at least one in Colorado, were vandalized.
The Dobbs decision escalated Colorado’s status as a sanctuary state for abortion and has renewed focus on the centers. What’s more, the limitation on surgical abortions in many states has increased the use of approved medications to terminate pregnancies, drawing renewed scrutiny to unproven claims by pregnancy centers that the effects of those medicines can be reversed.
“( Dobbs) has absolutely turned the volume up on the need ( to regulate the facilities),” said Rep. Karen Mccormick, a Boulder Democrat who’s part of a group of lawmakers scrutinizing the pregnancy centers.
“They’re misleading, ads or no ads, and that’s a problem.”
Supporters of the facilities
say the centers offer newly pregnant women supportive services such as counseling, limited ultrasounds, STD testing and donated supplies including diapers. And they defended the claims about abortion pill reversal. The facilities are often faith- based, use religious materials and are directly affiliated with churches. Although the services that they offer vary, the facilities are universally opposed to abortion.
“We really try to assess the needs that people who are coming in to be served have,” said Leticia Lopez Higdon, Alternatives Pregnancy Center’s director of client operations. “We kind of look at their whole life picture. We understand what’s going on in their lives and where they have needs. Sometimes it’s around housing. Sometimes it’s around employment. Sometimes it’s around mental health.” Alternatives does not directly provide aid to address those needs and instead refer patients elsewhere.
Critics, meanwhile, accuse the facilities of using deceptive advertising, like masquerading as abortion clinics or pushing digital ads to jump to the top of Google search results to coax women through their doors. The ultrasound services they offer, opponents say, are often performed by nonmedical personnel as manipulation tactics, and the centers typically are not licensed medical facilities. Although Alternatives offers diapers for nothing in return, other centers require families take classes to earn them. COLOR Latina, a Colorado abortion access group, said crisis pregnancy centers often target nonEnglish speakers and college students.
The bill being drafted by Colorado lawmakers, described to the Post by two lawmakers and several advocates involved, would ban the pregnancy centers from using deceptive advertising. It also would make it a deceptive trade practice to advertise for the so- called “abortion pill reversal” treatment, and it would threaten medical providers who facilitated the treatment with licensure penalties.
“It’s not only unprofessional but morally unethical because you’re lying to a patient in need,” said Aurea Bolaños, the strategic communications director for COLOR.
The measure is part of a broader package of abortion access bills being drafted by Democrats in the Capitol. None of the bills has been introduced, and lawmakers involved said they weren’t sure when the legislation would be unveiled formally. McCormick and Denver Democrat Rep. Elisabeth Epps told the Post they’re the prime sponsors on the crisis pregnancy bill, along with Sen. Julie Gonzales.
Efforts to regulate pregnancy centers have been tried elsewhere. The town of Somerville, Mass., outright banned them in April and described them as deceptive. California attempted to regulate centers’ advertising and require them to provide information about abortion services, but the U. S. Supreme Court ruled against the law in 2018. In June, a group of Democrats in Congress introduced legislation to “crack down on false advertising” they said is used by the centers, according to a release from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D- Mass.
The coalition and lawmakers drafting Colorado’s bill modeled it somewhat off of a similar measure passed in Connecticut in 2021, Bolaños said. But the proposal her group is pushing would be the first in the country to target abortionpill reversal and label its use as a deceptive trade practice, she and others said. ( Rep. Scott Bottoms, a Colorado Springs Republican, is sponsoring a competing bill that would require health care providers who prescribe medication abortion to also give information about abortion- pill reversal; given Democrats’ firm control over the Capitol, Bottoms said, his chances are “nil.”)
Representatives for Alternatives and Heartbeat International, a national anti- abortion group that works with pregnancy centers, told the Post they didn’t use any deceptive advertising and that they, too, thought that facilities should be honest with women and families. But they expressed alarm about the bill’s proposals.
“We definitely are in agreement that everything should be straightforward and women should not feel at all manipulated on any aspect on both sides of this aisle, but I guess I would have to see the bill to speak too much into it,” said Andrea Trudden, the vice president of marketing for Heartbeat. “I agree that there should be no deceptive advertising, but what are you considering deceptive advertising?”
Advocates such as Bolaños want the centers to be barred from suggesting that they’re medical facilities or that they’re abortion providers themselves. But what’s perhaps most concerning for medical experts, abortion access groups and their allies in the Colorado Capitol is what Alternatives and other pregnancy centers call “abortion pill reversal,” an unapproved use of existing medication that the facilities claim can stop the effect of medication abortion. The American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists have criticized the treatment and said it is unproven and unsupported by evidence.
“I’m sorry — it doesn’t fit. There’s no science that proves it works,” said Dr. Mitchell Creinin, an OBGYN and family planning researcher at the University of California- Davis. In 2019, he began what other experts said was the only gold- standard study to examine the reversal treatment, research that ended within months because three women involved experienced hemorrhaging. He and others dismissed case reports used by the pregnancy centers as evidence of the treatment’s efficacy as low- level, nonrigorous and lacking in follow- up.
Chemical or medication abortion — colloquially called the “abortion pill” — is the use of two medications, taken one to two days apart, to terminate a pregnancy, said Dr. Daniel Grossman, an OBGYN and researcher at the University of CaliforniaSan Francisco. The two- medication regimen is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, he and Creinin said, and studies have shown it to be safe.
What Alternatives and other facilities offer is a supposed intervention in that two- step process. A woman who goes to one of the pregnancy centers and says she changed her mind after taking the first pill — a wavering that Creinin and Grossman described as exceedingly rare — may be given progesterone, a hormone used in fertility treatments, in lieu of the second, planned medication.
Laura Johnson, the nurse manager at Alternatives, said progesterone is safe and has been used for decades. ( It has been used for years but as a fertility treatment, among other things, and under the guidance of physicians). She, as Bottoms did, pointed to personal stories as real- life evidence of the treatment’s efficacy.
But Creinin, Grossman and various national medical groups have been unequivocal in their rejection of it — the American Medical Association sued North Dakota because of that state’s embrace of the claim — and advocates in Colorado are urging lawmakers to curtail its use.
“When people come to Planned Parenthood, of course, we talk about all options,” said Jack Teter, the governmental affairs director for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. “We talk about pregnancy, we talk about abortion, we talk about adoption. All patients deserve all of the info they could possibly need to make informed, thoughtful decisions. That’s not the same thing as deceiving people or trying to convince them to change their minds.”