Fake Clinics, Real Damage

When a person facing an unplanned pregnancy searches for help, they are at their most vulnerab

le. Organizations like HELP Pregnancy Center present themselves as welcoming havens, offering free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and counseling. But a closer look reveals a deeply deceptive operation that prioritizes a religious anti-abortion agenda over women’s health and safety. Here is why this organization, and others like it, is fundamentally misleading and why it must never receive a single dollar of government money.

The most dangerous aspect of centers like HELP Pregnancy Center is their practice of dispensing medical misinformation without the oversight or liability of a real clinic.

According to a major 50-state investigation, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) like this one have been documented giving women dangerously false medical advice. In one harrowing case in St. Louis, a patient with an ectopic pregnancy, a condition that is never viable and is life-threatening to the mother, visited a mobile pregnancy center. She was told the pregnancy could be saved. Days later, she arrived at an emergency room with a ruptured fallopian tube and a belly full of blood. In Dallas, a fake sonogram also put the mother’s life at risk. (Source)

Unlike legitimate medical clinics, these centers often operate without licensed medical staff. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warns that these organizations endanger public health by “causing delays in accessing legitimate health care” . Because they claim religious or “counseling” exemptions, they face few regulations, and if they lie to you about your health, they often cannot be sued for malpractice because they are not acting as medical providers.

HELP Pregnancy Center explicitly states it advocates for the “unborn” and uses ultrasound technology specifically to prevent abortions, not to provide comprehensive prenatal diagnostics . When medical care is provided by ideologues rather than doctors, women get hurt.

On its donation page, HELP Pregnancy Center drops the mask of secular "crisis support" and reveals its true goal. The organization states its mission is not just to help pregnant women, but “to reach vulnerable women and men in our community with the Gospel and love of Jesus Christ” .

While religious freedom is a right, using taxpayer money to fund religious evangelism is a violation of the separation of church and state. Women seeking medical advice or financial assistance for an unplanned pregnancy are often desperate. They are a captive audience. To offer them diapers or a free ultrasound only if they sit through a Bible study or listen to anti-abortion lectures is coercive.

Furthermore, critics report that centers often lure people in by suggesting they provide comprehensive options (including abortion referrals), only to ambush them with graphic anti-abortion materials and religious dogma. As one editorial noted, these centers "use deceptive practices to lure in vulnerable pregnant people, like providing false information about abortion [and] misleading people about how many weeks they have been pregnant" .

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, over half a billion dollars in taxpayer money has been funneled to CPCs like HELP Pregnancy Center. In states like Ohio, Missouri, and Florida, funding has increased by millions, yet oversight has not kept pace .

When you give government money to a real health clinic, that money pays for cancer screenings, birth control, STI treatment, and licensed doctors. When you give money to HELP Pregnancy Center, you are paying for a specific agenda: "empowering individuals to choose life".

These centers do not provide ongoing primary health care, do not offer or refer for birth control, and certainly do not provide abortion services . In many documented cases, funds that could have gone to rural maternal health deserts are instead diverted to these unregulated facilities. For example, while some states funnel millions to CPCs, actual OB-GYN access continues to collapse, leading to rising maternal mortality rates .

There is also a track record of financial waste. Audits in states like Louisiana (Source) and Oklahoma (Source) have found that these centers sometimes cannot account for how they spent the money, or they serve a fraction of the women they promised to help .

This is the most critical point of deception. HELP Pregnancy Center may offer "ultrasounds" and "testing," but they are not subject to the strict privacy laws of a hospital. HIPAA, the federal law protecting your medical privacy, does not apply to most crisis pregnancy centers because they are not recognized as covered medical providers .

This means that the "private and confidential" conversation you have with a peer counselor is not legally protected in the same way a doctor-patient conversation is. Furthermore, the "volunteers" providing medical advice are often not doctors. While some centers employ a traveling nurse, the majority of staff are volunteers trained to persuade, not to practice medicine.

Mayor Burns' wife is one of the fraudulent “counselors” at the HELP Pregnancy Center in Monroe. Will he recuse himself from the vote? Just kidding, he's corrupt as hell.

There’s no surprise that this fake organization would be supported by the Burns coalition, but it’s insane to think that they should be given any kind of special treatment, much less funding, from our City Council. We have a homeless shelter being underfunded, the Spay and Neuter Clinic is being threatened, and don't even get me started on the number of people visiting the food pantries in our county. And Mayor Jackass thinks it's a good idea to fully fund a religious institution that does nothing but provide misinformation and puts citizens at risk?

HELP Pregnancy Center may have the word "Help" in its name, but its mission is deception. It exists not to provide healthcare, but to prevent abortions through misinformation and religious pressure. In a country where maternal mortality is already a crisis, we cannot afford to divert scarce government dollars to organizations that lie to patients, delay critical medical treatment, and operate without accountability.

We must demand that no government monies, federal, state, or local, go to HELP Pregnancy Center or any crisis pregnancy center that engages in deceptive medical practices. If these organizations want to exist as religious ministries, they have the right to do so on their own dime. But they do not have the right to trick vulnerable women using taxpayer funds.