Anti-abortionists videotaped spewing bullshit
In October, investigative reporter Olivia Raisner visited five anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers—clinics that often receive state funding, despite providing no medical services and pushing disinformation to dissuade pregnant people from choosing abortion—in Indiana. She entered each clinic armed with her pregnant friend’s urine, a button on her shirt that secretly doubled as a camera, and scheduled appointments. There, she declined to sign any paperwork that asked her not to record conversations to “make sure everything I did was legal,” Raisner told me in a phone interview. “The anti-abortion movement has been filming, not legally, for years now, and we don’t want to stoop to their level,” Raisner said.
The clinic worker featured in Mayday’s video specifically emphasized the (false) claim that if Raisner used medication abortion, she had the option to “reverse” the abortion through a special pill, via a dangerous, non-proven method called “abortion pill reversal.” Raisner told Jezebel that as medication abortion becomes more widely used, given its continued availability in all 50 states, anti-abortion activists are increasingly pushing this bogus, medically dangerous claim.
As Raisner explains in the video, it’s common for staff at crisis pregnancy centers to pose as actual doctors in order to push random, inaccurate medical claims about abortion—almost like anti-choice improv. The staffer Raisner interacts with proceeds to run through all the hits, including that abortion causes infertility (it doesn’t) and medication abortion pills are unsafe because of “high levels of estrogen and progesterone” (they don’t have either.) “They offer free ultrasounds, financial assistance, all the resources necessary, and make it very tempting to lean on them,” Raisner told Jezebel. “Unfortunately, we know they’re fake medical clinics whose only agenda is to spread lies, to shame people away from abortion.”