Anti-abortion pregnancy centers are collecting troves of data that could be weaponized against women
Many of the millions of women who visit these pregnancy centers stumble into them by accident, as Ashley did. The centers often present themselves as medical facilities and mirror abortion clinics’ logos, using names like Your Choice and Women’s Health Clinic. Prestonwood’s—aat the center of three concentric circles—looks very similar, for instance, to that of Planned Parenthood.
have dominated recent headlines about sensitive abortion data, the troves of personal information that pregnancy centers collect and store arguably pose a much more immediate privacy risk, legal and privacy experts tell TIME. Pregnancy centers, many of which are affiliated with national anti-abortion advocacy groups, including Care Net and Heartbeat International, collect personal data from the millions of women they interact with every year in person, by telephone, and through online chats.
Small, locally operated pregnancy centers first cropped up in the 1960s, as mostly Catholic groups looked to prevent abortion by offering mothers counseling and social-service referrals. After the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973, larger groups, including evangelical activists, joined the so-called “pregnancy help movement,” according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an anti-abortion think tank associated with Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
This decision to “go medical” was part of a national strategy to draw in more women explicitly considering abortion, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute. But the shift also compounded confusion over what the centers do. “Our data show that many people who go to crisis pregnancy centers have misconceptions about what the centers are,” says Swartzendruber, who surveyed people who visited Georgia pregnancy centers. Many were “expecting an abortion facility or a medical facility.
During in-person consultations and counseling sessions, pregnancy-center staff use the same data systems, which often feature drop-down menus or color-coded systems to categorize how likely a client is to get an abortion. The fine print on pregnancy-center forms and websites is also expansive. According to the terms of use on Heartbeat International’s data management system, the organization can share any and all client information with any “affiliates, partners, vendors, or contract organizations, or as legally necessary.”
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