Abstract
Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) are faith-based, free pregnancy care facilities designed to attract vulnerable pregnant individuals, especially those who may be considering abortion. Through the use of deceptive practices, CPCs, which far outnumber abortion clinics, are able to intercept pregnant people seeking care and discourage or prevent them from receiving abortion care. Pro-life legal groups aggressively wage legal battles on states who seek to curb CPC-propagated deception. In 2018, one of these groups achieved a victory for CPCs in NIFLA v. Becerra, where the Supreme Court held that California’s regulations requiring CPCs to inform clients about state-sponsored abortion services and to notify clients if the CPC is not a licensed medical facility to be an unconstitutional abridgment of the CPCs’ free speech. Because of the broad scope of protections that the NIFLA Court recognized for CPCs, states have been generally unsuccessful in regulating CPCs’ deceptive practices. This Note explains the history of CPCs and the tactics they use to deceive pregnant people. It then provides evidence of the harm CPCs cause to pregnant people, showing why it is imperative for states to take regulatory action to protect those impacted by CPC rhetoric. After surveying the solutions that states and the federal government have attempted to use to combat the pregnancy and abortion misinformation that CPCs disseminate, it proposes a solution that uses state-sponsored counterspeech to intercept potential CPC victims before they are harmed. This would first require states to impose a licensure identification requirement on all state-licensed medical facilities so that CPCs, who are typically unlicensed, can be easily identified by the public. Second, it would require each state to create and publicize education campaigns and publish a list of the abortion providers available which can be easily found and referenced by pregnant people considering the options available to them. Together, these state actions can minimize the deception and damage caused by CPCs to protect individuals who want or need abortion care without infringing on the CPCs’ rights recognized by the Court in NIFLA.
Recommended Citation
Abigail Gainer,
Lies Begin at Conception: Crisis Pregnancy Centers and the Right to Deceive,
91 Brook. L. Rev.
1041
(2026).
Available at:
https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol91/iss3/7