Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra, and welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. This week would have marked 51 years of Roe versus Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case that declared a constitutional right to abortion until it was overturned in 2022. And even though Californians have since voted to protect abortion access in the state, that doesn’t mean getting one here is always easy.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It’s not just a question of access, either, but misinformation. California has more so-called crisis pregnancy centers than abortion clinics, many of them front as community health centers. But their main goal is to persuade people not to have an abortion. And for a procedure where time is everything, these centers can be a huge barrier. So today, we’re sharing this episode from February of last year about crisis pregnancy centers in California and the dangers that they pose in a state where abortions are protected. Stay with us.
Emma Silvers: I visited a street. It’s Jefferson Street in in Napa. It’s in the main downtown area.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Emma Silvers is a digital editor and producer for KQED.
Emma Silvers: And it’s one short block. There’s a Planned Parenthood center that has been there for, I want to say, at least 20 years. And in the last few years, a group called Napa Valley Culture of Life purchased the only other building on that street and opened a crisis pregnancy center called the Napa Women’s Center. They’re right next door to each other. They’re connected by a fence. The Napa Women’s Center has a huge banner outside that says free pregnancy tests. It’s designed to look like a yeah, a health center.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Once you got there, what did you see? Who did you encounter?
Emma Silvers: The first thing I saw was a woman sitting outside Planned Parenthood on a folding chair. She was wearing green scrubs. She was intentionally dressed like a nurse, and she was approaching people as they entered the Planned Parenthood or left the Planned Parenthood and asked them if she could talk to them about free resources, read a about their care and contact. They’re afraid to ask because all you do is you learn. She gave them pamphlets. Some of these pamphlets were full of misinformation about abortion, and one of the cards she gave them was for the Napa Women’s Center.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This volunteer’s name was Teresa Conemac. She told Emma she was with a group called 40 days for life. I know you later found out she’s actually not a nurse. And. And you actually talked with her yourself? What did she tell you?
Emma Silvers: She saw it as her duty as a Christian to sit outside the Planned Parenthood and try to help people, quote, choose life. This organization is an anti-abortion organization. A few times a year, they have these really intensive periods where for 40 days, they have protesters present nearly around the clock in front of abortion clinics, praying, handing out literature full of misinformation.
Emma Silvers: They call it sidewalk counseling. It’s interesting because there is supposed to be a buffer zone around abortion clinics. She was sitting right next to the sign that informed people of the buffer zone that protesters are not supposed to be that close to the entrance. Some of the abortion rights advocates I spoke with told me that law enforcement have seemed hesitant to enforce that rule.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Did you eventually go inside the building?
Emma Silvers: I did, it was very serene and, you know, soothing colors. It was sort of a converted old craftsman house. And I spoke with Julie Morillo.
Julie Morillo: We’re trying to help people make a decision for life.
Emma Silvers: Who is the executive director of the Napa Women’s Center?
Julie Morillo: We’re not a medical clinic yet. We’re hoping to be one in the future. So the pregnancy tests that we do are of self self-test. So they read them themselves because we’re not medical professionals.
Emma Silvers: She told me that people wind up at that center mistakenly all the time. Yeah. How often would you say that kind of thing happens?
Julie Morillo: Times a week? Probably. Okay. Yeah.
Emma Silvers: And looking for birth control or abortion?
Julie Morillo: All of the above.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: When I kind of zoom out and talk about these centers a little bit more broadly, how many centers like this are there in California, in the Bay area?
Emma Silvers: Yeah, by most accounts, there are between 170 and 180, anti-abortion centers in California. There are more of these centers than there are legitimate clinics that provide abortion care. To be clear, there’s something like 140, I think, abortion clinics in California currently. There’s the one in Napa, Santa Rosa, Novato, San Jose. There’s several in Redwood City. They’re really everywhere. Once you start looking.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra Crisis pregnancy centers have been around since Roe v Wade was first decided, but they really started picking up in the 80s as evangelical Christian groups got involved. Republican presidents like George W Bush and Donald Trump have also spent taxpayer dollars on these centers under the banner of abstinence education. The Trump administration gave $5.1 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to a California network called obra medical clinics, which runs centers like these.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: It’s all part of a wide network across the country and even the world, and they’re very savvy and aggressive at marketing their crisis pregnancy centers. I mean, it seems like the branding and this sort of marketing is a huge part of this entire enterprise. Can you tell me about what that strategy is? For many of these crisis pregnancy centers.
Emma Silvers: The geographical choices are a big one. The vast majority of them are intentionally set up next to legitimate reproductive health clinics in the hopes of diverting people. There are certain communities that they target, without a doubt. We know that in their promotional materials, they are likely to feature black women.
Emma Silvers: They also target Latino women. I spoke with someone from California, Latinas for Reproductive Justice, and she talked about how blatant it is in Los Angeles, where they’re based, that these centers both set up and by advertising in heavily Latino communities.
Emma Silvers: And in some cases, could be targeting undocumented immigrants who might feel fearful of visiting a state or city funded clinic. There are documented efforts that show that some of these networks have initiatives. The quote unquote Urban Initiative attempts to set up in communities of color to buy advertising on like Bet and in a really targeted way, focus their efforts in communities of color.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, what reproductive rights advocates say about the harm these centers cause.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I want to talk about the harm that these clinics cause. I mean, it does seem misleading to say that you offer reproductive health services, but actually, you’re an anti-abortion clinic, and I can imagine people getting really confused by that. Is that what makes these clinics so worrisome to advocates of reproductive rights?
Emma Silvers: I reported this story for months, and I am still struggling to come up with the right adjectives for some of these stories that I heard.
Gloria Martinez: It gets a little dicey in Napa.
Emma Silvers: Gloria Martinez is the senior director of operations for a Planned Parenthood of Northern California. I spoke with Gloria after I saw that scene in front of Planned Parenthood and the Napa Women’s Center, and she gave me a little bit of background about how. That crisis pregnancy center has affected their work at that location of Planned Parenthood.
Gloria Martinez: Patients will to sometimes get confused, especially if it’s their first time seeing us.
Emma Silvers: There are facilities that offer what are called non diagnostic ultrasounds. It’s a belief in the anti-abortion movement that ultrasounds are a really powerful tool for convincing someone to continue their pregnancy. There are stories in which someone might visit a crisis pregnancy center, and they say, we need to perform an ultrasound, and then they give that patient a sonogram, a printed out picture with a falsified image of a fetus that’s at a later stage of development.
Emma Silvers: It’s an overwhelming number of tactics. One way they track how successful those anti-abortion activists are at diverting people is no shows at Planned Parenthood. And during those 40 days for life campaigns, when there are protesters outside in large numbers nearly constantly. The no-show rate pretty much doubles. It’s usually around 19%, and it speaks to 40 to 50%.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: You know, I know that as we’ve been talking about the end of Roe v Wade, California is expecting thousands of people to come here from other states for abortions. So there’s going to be a lot of people who may be even less familiar with the lay of the land here, maybe ending up at one of these crisis pregnancy centers. Right. How do these centers actually end up harming people’s health?
Emma Silvers: I think one thing you have to be realistic about, when we talk about potentially 16,000 people a year coming to California for abortions is how much work that takes. You know, you are talking about people who are taking time off work, who are maybe arranging childcare, who are paying for costly and time consuming public transit, who are figuring out a place to stay.
Emma Silvers: When those people get here. If it turns out their appointment is not at a legitimate health clinic, but at a crisis pregnancy center, a number of things happen. For one, they are going to, almost across the board, experience feeling misled and deceived. After that, if you decide, okay, no, I need this abortion, do you then have the time to make another appointment to research where to go to get real health care?
Emma Silvers: Can you stay out of work that long? Does your child care that all of these things. It’s so much work. There are so many barriers to accessing something that is perfectly legal here. If they are successful in at least delaying the procedure, they’ve achieved really what they wanted.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I just want to go back to Napa because I am curious, how are things going for folks who are actually working next door to this anti-abortion clinic at the Planned Parenthood? Like, what impact has being next door to this crisis pregnancy center had?
Emma Silvers: I mean, it’s it’s terrible. The folks who worked at that Planned Parenthood were not allowed to speak with me on the record, but from what I gathered, it’s a really intense daily experience of dealing with people outside every day, trying to lure people away from the door. They are moving to a new, larger facility somewhere in Napa that they do not want public because they do not want anti-abortion activists to get a jump on planning their activities for that location as well.
Emma Silvers: But they are moving to a new location, and they were very clear that a big reason is how uncomfortable and unpleasant and harmful the experience is for patients at that current location, because of the anti-abortion activists and because of the crisis pregnancy center next door.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What is being done about these crisis pregnancy centers? Are state lawmakers aware of these centers, and have they tried to do anything about them?
Emma Silvers: Democrats, at least in California, have been trying to regulate these places and mostly failing for a very long time.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: California passed the Reproductive Fact Act in 2015. It required health care facilities to tell people about state programs that provide abortion services. It also forced centers without medical licenses to post notices acknowledging that they were not licensed. But in 2018, the Supreme Court struck it down on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. And that’s where many attempts to regulate these centers run into trouble.
Emma Silvers: Freedom of religion. And I think in the case of the Fact act, forcing them to give out information that went against what they wanted to do, you can’t force someone, can’t compel a religious organization to distribute information about where to get an abortion. Rebecca Bauer Cohen of Orinda just introduced AB 315, which really focuses on the deceptive advertising element.
Emma Silvers: California Attorney General Bonta issued a consumer alert in June, basically just laying out the differences between crisis pregnancy centers and abortion clinics and basically just directing people to do their research. So, okay, we can’t force these places to tell you where to go to get an abortion. What we can do is say you are not allowed to advertise as offering a full range of reproductive health services, when in fact you do not.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What do you hope that people take away from this story?
Emma Silvers: I hope people will realize that the rollback of reproductive rights in this country really affects everyone. The volatility of the abortion rights discussion in the US, the the political and financial power that the church and the right wing Christian anti-abortion movement in this country really has, and the way that touches every corner of the country, even even the supposedly very liberal Bay area in the sanctuary state of California.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Emma, I want to thank you reporting on this story and for joining us and sharing your reporting with us. I appreciate it.
Emma Silvers: Thank you so much for for your interest.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: That was Emma Silvers, a digital editor and producer for KQED. This episode originally ran back in February of 2023. Since then, the Planned Parenthood in Napa has moved to a new location. And in September, Attorney General Rob Bonta office filed a lawsuit against two anti-abortion groups, Heartbeat International and Real Options O’Brien, which operates five crisis pregnancy centers in Northern California. Bounty’s office alleges that the groups used misleading and fraudulent claims to promote an unproven experimental procedure called abortion pill reversal.
