The Bill That Could Make Crisis Pregnancy Centers Untouchable

10.22.25

Right now, the nation’s anti-abortion power players are testing out their next major strategy in Wyoming—and they’re betting no one will notice. Republican lawmakers there are advancing a bill crafted by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the group responsible for the end of Roe. The CARE Act would effectively outlaw the regulation of anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, even allowing the groups to sue state leaders who try to stop them.

Giving fake clinics unprecedented and unchecked power would be bad enough, but the CARE Act goes even further. The legislation is part of a broader plan to informally ban birth control and eliminate abortion ban exceptions for women’s lives. Conservative lawmakers have already passed ADF’s blueprint in Montana, introduced it in South Carolina, and are pushing near-identical legislation in Congress. As is often the case, this isn’t just about one state or one strategy—the bill is a multi-pronged effort, doing several jobs at once for ADF and the anti-abortion movement.

Let’s start with the power that the CARE Act bestows on fake clinics.

Making Crisis Pregnancy Centers Indestructible

Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are already barely regulated in anti-abortion states, yet they rake in hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars. Only a fraction of that money reaches women, who often have to ‘earn’ basic supplies like diapers through Bible study classes. The rest goes to staff salaries, travel—even exercise equipment.

Research has shown for years that these centers routinely lie to women about their health and pregnancies, and accountability organizations report that CPCs falsely tell women their private medical information is HIPAA-protected. (They’re not real medical clinics, so the federal privacy law doesn’t apply.)

Despite all this public money with virtually no oversight, conservatives still paint CPCs as the real victims. ADF and other groups have filed a flood of free speech lawsuits recently, claiming the fake clinics have a First Amendment right to lie about ‘abortion reversal’—or that holding them accountable for deceptive ads is censorship.

That’s the same argument behind Wyoming’s CARE Act. ADF attorney Denise Burke says the bill “was designed to protect Wyoming’s pregnancy centers from censorship or discrimination.” In reality, this legislation would make it illegal—and expensive—to interfere with the groups in any way. Damages would start at $5,000, and anti-abortion activists and groups could sue for up to “three times the actual damages sustained.”

The goal is simple: to make crisis pregnancy centers unregulated and untouchable, freeing them up to spread conservatives’ extremist agenda nationwide. And a tremendous part of that agenda is quietly and informally banning birth control.

Attacks on Contraception

Republicans won’t ban birth control outright—at least not yet. They’re smart enough to know it would be a political disaster. Besides, they don’t need a law explicitly banning contraception; they just have to make it impossible to get. I warned about the central role CPCs would play in that strategy back in 2023:

The GOP’s Plan to Ban Birth Control (Part II)

Since the end of Roe, conservative lawmakers and activists have pushed CPCs as reasonable replacements for the real clinics their laws have shuttered. (Republicans even introduced the CARE Act as a supposed solution to Wyoming’s growing maternal health deserts.)

It’s the same justification they’ve used for the exponential increase in taxpayer funding for the centers: Republicans claim they’re simply meeting the post-Dobbs moment to support women, and showing that their ‘pro-life’ bonafides go beyond banning abortion. Last month, anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute even released a ‘study’ arguing that women don’t really need Planned Parenthood clinics because “alternative providers”—like crisis pregnancy centers—can fill the healthcare gap.

But CPCs aren’t real medical clinics. Sure, some offer ultrasounds or dollar-store pregnancy tests handed out by volunteers in lab coats, but most don’t have medical staff or provide actual reproductive care.

They certainly don’t offer contraception. In fact, their policies forbid them from even mentioning birth control unless it’s to warn about its supposed dangers.

Under the CARE Act, it would be illegal to require the centers to offer contraception, refer women somewhere else for birth control—or even post a sign with information about contraception.

In communities where CPCs are the only available ‘care’, birth control would effectively disappear. And that’s the point: to run real reproductive healthcare providers out of town—along with any birth control access—and replace them with ideologues who refuse to even talk about contraception.

I also can’t help but wonder if the CARE Act’s language about ‘discrimination’ is meant to open the door for CPCs to access Title X funds. That’s certainly what Project 2025 was getting at. Last year, I flagged that the conservative roadmap calls for ending “religious discrimination in grant selections” for Title X:

What that means in plain English is that they want to give those millions of family planning dollars to crisis pregnancy centers and other religious groups that oppose birth control.

And now, here we are. But the danger to women’s health doesn’t end with contraception. Let’s talk about the CARE Act’s language on ‘separation procedures.’

Ending Exceptions for Women’s Lives

One of the most chilling truths about the anti-abortion movement is that it wants to do away with exceptions for women’s lives—and one of the tactics to make that happen is hidden in plain sight within the CARE Act.

Buried in the bill, you’ll find the term ‘pre-viability separation procedure’, defined as “a medical procedure performed by a licensed physician to remove an unborn child from the mother’s uterine cavity” before fetal viability.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ve heard about “separation procedures” before. For anyone who hasn’t, watch my video explainer here or read about the term here. The short version is that this is a completely invented term—created with the sole purpose of claiming abortion is never necessary to save a woman’s health or life.

Rather than allowing patients with life-threatening pregnancies to get standard abortion care—which is safer, easier, and less painful—conservatives want doctors to force women into c-sections or induced labor, even when it’s too early for a fetus to survive. Sometimes even when a fetus has died.

Why would anyone want women to undergo major abdominal surgery or a traumatic vaginal delivery when there’s no chance for fetal survival? Because the anti-choice movement wants to ‘prove’ abortion is never medically necessary. If they have to torture and kill women in the process, so be it.

I first came across ‘separation’ a few years ago in a “Glossary of Medical Terms” from the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), an extremist group that doesn’t believe in life-saving abortions. Since then, I’ve watched the term show up in bill after bill—Republicans quietly codifying the fiction in as many places as possible.

The result has been catastrophic, with doctors in states like Louisiana increasingly performing c-sections or forcing patients into labor out of fear of prosecution. In an affidavit, one physician described a patient whose water broke at 16 weeks. Denied a standard abortion procedure, she was made to deliver a nonviable fetus over several excruciating hours: “She was screaming—not from pain, but from the emotional trauma she was experiencing.” The patient hemorrhaged and lost nearly a liter of blood.

The more places Republicans are able to enshrine ‘separation’, the easier it is for them to argue that this kind of nightmare is normal.

The ultimate goal? End any and all abortion exceptions, even for women’s lives. I laid out what that looks like, step-by-step, last year. Redefining and replacing abortion with ‘separation’ is a huge piece of the puzzle:

Conservatives Want to End 'Exceptions' for Women’s Lives

The CARE Act

I’ll have more on where the CARE Act is headed in Wyoming in tomorrow’s daily report. In the meantime, consider this another reminder that when ADF writes a bill, it’s never just about one state or one piece of legislation.

Nearly two years ago, I warned that Republicans were making a big bet on crisis pregnancy centers—counting on the fake clinics to fix their image problem with women voters while seeding an extreme anti-abortion agenda across the country.

This bill is one of their most ambitious swings toward that goal yet.