United States: A new study from the University of California San Diego basically looks at how crisis pregnancy centers (CPC) work. These centers are non-profit organizations that are against abortion. The study, published in a medical journal, is the first to explain what happens in these centers in the United States.
That said, this study demonstrates that crisis pregnancy centers offer other needed services to communities such as parenting classes; however, there is apparent need to protect consumers from the dissemination and use of health-misinformation medical services,” advised Dr John W Ayers, the deputy director of informatics at the UC San Diego Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute as well as a scientist at UC San Diego’s Qualcomm Institute, co-creator of ChoiceWatch.org
A key in viewing the operations of crisis pregnancy centers.
To conduct the study, ChoiceWatch.org was employed which is a novel analysis engine that captured and qualitatively analyzed over 470,000 webpages, from 1,825 CPC websites between September 2023 to March 2024.
As reported by the Medicalxpress, “Crisis pregnancy centers have largely not been studied,” said Karan Desai, a University of Michigan Ann Arbor Medical School student, co-founder of Choice Watch, and the first author of the study. “For instance, at present there is no CPC databases or examination of CPC practices as compiled by governmental health departments.”
‘By curating this public database, we are generating explicit documentation of CPC activities and the information necessary for both health care providers and policymakers’, said Mark Dredze, Ph.D., the John C Malone Professor of the Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and the study’s co-author and co-founder of ChoiceWatch.org. “This is good for the public and needs to be done.”
Crisis pregnancy centers: A national presence
The study identified the CPCs across the country having Texas at 143, California at 126 and Florida at 98. There were seen to be 7.45 and 6.48 CPCs per 100000 women of reproductive age in Montana and Wyoming respectively when scaled to population size. The lowest concentrations were recorded in Utah, Hawaii, and Washington D.C.
Crisis pregnancy centers by their nature may be expected to have more locations in states that limit women’s access to abortion than in states that provide more access, but the map contradicts that expectation.