The operators of a mobile “pregnancy resource center” plan to open its doors on Cape Cod later this summer, according to Joe Meeks, cochair of the Harwich-based Cape Cod Pro-Life Alliance.
The unit, which has been in Western Massachusetts, has been relocated to Cape Cod, according to Teresa Larkin, executive director of Your Options Medical, which operates the mobile facility.
Its impending arrival follows a recent development in access to reproductive health care: medication abortions becoming available on Cape Cod for the first time in 15 years. Larkin is hoping the mobile unit will begin operating “right after Labor Day,” she said, but that will “depend on when we can get staff trained and get the doctor on board.” The unit is not winterized, she said, so it will cease operations in early November and resume in the spring.
Your Options Medical is a nonprofit that provides “free pregnancy confirmation services,” according to its website. The organization has three fixed locations in the state: in Brookline, Fall River, and Revere.
Operations like Your Options Medical run what are commonly called “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs). They exist to dissuade women from having abortions.
Research reported in Ms. magazine shows that women who seek medical services at clinics that do not offer abortions are often not aware of the operators’ mission. Deceptive advertising is a feature of these clinics, according to a report published this summer by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Those ads boost CPCs’ standing on search engines, even when users are specifically seeking abortion services.
“I’ve seen patients that have been to crisis pregnancy centers because they provide services that are attractive to pregnant women,” said Dr. Nicola Moore, an abortion provider who lives in Truro. Those services include abdominal ultrasounds.
The Mass. attorney general warns of the risks of CPCs: “CPCs may appear to be reproductive health care clinics, but do NOT provide abortion care or abortion referrals, contraception, or other reproductive health care, despite what they may advertise.”
These centers “all have the same goal of performing ultrasounds on women and then appealing to their guilt — or they try to bestow personhood status on the fetus,” said Laurie Veninger of Truro, who leads the Indivisible Mass Coalition’s Feminist Action Team.
“They’re doing this under the guise that they are providing free resources,” said Carly Thomsen, a professor at Middlebury College and one of the few scholars whose research focus is mobile CPCs.
Larkin said the Cape Cod mobile clinic will offer “pregnancy testing, counseling, and assessing needs for women that are testing positive for pregnancy.” She said that limited obstetric ultrasounds, detailing the location, gestational age, and viability of a pregnancy, will be available.
Larkin confirmed that Your Options Medical does not provide abortions or referrals for them.
The clinics do, however, refer callers to the Abortion Pill Reversal hotline. “It’s only beneficial if they’ve only taken the first pill, not the second,” Larkin said.
Medication abortions consist of two FDA-approved pills: mifepristone, which prevents the pregnancy from growing by blocking progesterone, and misoprostol, which contracts the uterus. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “Claims regarding abortion ‘reversal’ treatment are not based on science and do not meet clinical standards.”
Carrie Baker, a professor at Smith College and contributing editor of Ms. magazine, sees the timing of the mobile unit’s arrival as telling. “The fact that they’re showing up right as there’s medication abortion available on the Cape shows that they are businesses trying to inject themselves and interfere,” she said.
Thomsen said that mobile units “are known to park directly in front of abortion clinics, and they’re targeting high schools.”
The fact that medication abortions are newly available on Cape Cod “maybe makes it more convenient” for Your Options Medical to set up now, said Meeks. The goal, said Larkin, is “to be able to offer another type of service to women who think that abortion is their only option.”
Larkin denied that the unit would be stationed outside Health Imperatives, the Hyannis clinic offering medication abortions. “We believe in reaching a woman before she’s made her decision,” she said.
Moore said that there has been a CPC “essentially across the street from nearly everywhere I’ve worked as a provider.”
Your Options Medical offers “abortion recovery counseling” led by an advocate or nurse. Ninety percent of the facilitators have had abortions themselves, Larkin said. “A lot of women struggle with that decision that they made years ago,” she said, “and there needs to be space for that woman who feels guilt, shame, remorse over that decision.”
The highly personal feel of most crisis pregnancy centers is, according to critics, part of the charade. “They try to appear as if they are mom-and-pop shops popping up in communities to help people,” Thomsen said. “They’re part of a well-funded, well-coordinated global industry.”
Larkin said that Your Options Medical follows up with women who come to their clinics and decide to follow through with their pregnancies. “We work with a lot of agencies that supplement the resources we provide,” she said. Birthright, an international network of CPCs “with hundreds of centres throughout Canada, the United States and Africa,” according to its website, provides Your Options Medical clients with diapers, clothing, and cribs, Larkin said.
Larkin said that sonographers at Your Options Medical all undergo “very intensive training that usually takes close to a year.”
One of the places that trains staff, Larkin said, is Sparrow Solutions Group, a self-described “Christian business” that provides advice to what it calls pregnancy medical clinics (PMCs). “Our in-house team and our team of instructors and consultants are equipped by God to build and strengthen both sides of the PMC ministry,” its website says.
Hard to Regulate
There are about 32 CPCs in Massachusetts, according to an online database. Nationwide, there were 2,527 catalogued in 2020, and two-thirds of those “offered limited medical services,” according to a study from that year. Nationally, there were 3.2 CPCs per abortion facility.
According to Thomsen, all mobile CPCs operate differently, which makes their schedules hard to predict. Some vans operate on a cycle with a certain number of locations in rotation, while others “go out every day and target certain areas,” she said.
Moore said, “A mobile CPC is mobile because the organization that owns it hasn’t established a brick-and-mortar presence close to the place that provides abortion services.” In Houston, she said, she saw a mobile clinic that parked outside the same abortion clinic “every day of the week.”
Part of what makes mobile units dangerous, according to Thomsen, is that their mobility makes their limited services harder to pin down. “They’re unregulated,” she said. “They don’t have to report their routes. They don’t have to report to anybody. There’s no database or repository of information.”
Mobile CPCs are as trackable as they choose to be. Larkin said that once the mobile unit is operating on Cape Cod, it will have established routes so that clients can find it. She said the location involves questions of convenience and privacy. “There’s a fine line between being accessible and confidential,” she said.
Meeks said, “The intention of the mobile clinic is to go where it’s needed.” He said that need is “based upon inquiries that we have from any woman that might need assistance” and that the van will accept appointments and walk-ins.
Thomsen said that mobile CPCs have been known to gravitate specifically to underserved areas where many people lack health insurance and struggle to access medical care. “The idea is people would see them, and they would pop in,” she said. It’s in these places, Thomsen said, where people are “more vulnerable to the claims that CPCs make, including mostly bogus offers for services.”
A Licensing Mystery
Two of Your Options Medical’s four locations are licensed as clinics by the state Dept. of Public Health (DPH): the clinic in Revere and the mobile unit, which is licensed in Southbridge.
Asked about licensing, Thomsen, who studies mobile CPCs, said, “I’ve been trying to figure that out for a couple of years.”
The DPH said that “A crisis pregnancy center may be licensed as a clinic if it offers medical services.” Larkin said that the two medical services Your Options Medical provides are lab-quality testing and ultrasounds.
The clinics’ licenses must be reapproved by the DPH every two years, Larkin said. “For a clinic, a lot of it is building-code related,” she added. She said their clinics get checked for handicapped accessibility, air circulation, and lighting. They also need to have an advising doctor and a list of policies and procedures, she said.
“Mobile clinics are tricky because they’re moving from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” said Baker. “They’re harder to license.”
Larkin said that, at Your Options Medical, “All the ultrasounds are read by a registered physician” and that they are all either obstetricians or radiologists. She added that, comparing the licensed and unlicensed branches of Your Options Medical, “there really is no difference in terms of quality of service or how we operate.”
Because nonprofit clinics that don’t provide abortions offer free services, while most abortion clinics charge, they can be appealing to low-income populations. A report in Vox found that 10 states (not Massachusetts) have redirected money from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, designed to support low-income families and pregnancies, to CPCs.
“They are not a social service,” Thomsen said. Their goal is “not lifting people out of poverty so they can make the reproductive decisions that they would make if they had every option available to them,” she added.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article, published in print on Aug. 3, incorrectly described Dr. Nicola Moore of Truro as a “former” provider of abortion care. Dr. Moore is still practicing.
