The Fake Clinics Taking Over Reproductive Healthcare
As abortion clinics disappear nationwide, “crisis pregnancy centers” are transforming reproductive healthcare into a far-right fantasy—quietly collecting hundreds of millions in public funds as Medicaid faces historic cuts.
Sonia Chajet Wides
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. — A small crowd of abortion rights advocates gathered at a public comment session of the Gwinnett County Department of Planning and Development in July 2025. The most diverse and second-most populous county in Georgia, Gwinnett County distributed millions of dollars in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grants to local nonprofits in 2025, with most recipients receiving something in the tens of thousands.
One organization, Georgia Wellness Group, was set to receive a much bigger prize: $450,000.
According to its website, Georgia Wellness is a clinic that provides “compassionate,” “holistic care” for women and families. But this is a rebrand from its longstanding religious, explicitly anti-abortion identity. The group arguably fits into a category known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” or CPCs, part of a project from the Christian Right dedicated to replacing public reproductive healthcare with anti-abortion “clinics.”
CPCs have been a central force in the anti-abortion movement for decades. There are at least 3,000 nationwide, with an estimated $2.5 billion in revenue for 2025, cultivating what Debra Rosen, executive director of Reproduction Health and Freedom Watch, calls an “image of medical legitimacy.” Many open near abortion clinics and advertise themselves as medical facilities, but most are not medically licensed. They might provide pregnancy tests, “limited ultrasounds” and STI tests, but not treatment. About 25% of the centers offer free baby supplies — but only for those who go through hours of religious education.
CPCs have been roundly denounced by the American medical community for pressuring and misinforming clients. Without medical licenses, most CPCs are unaffected by federal privacy laws, like HIPAA.
Georgia Wellness is a former affiliate of Obria, a national CPC conglomerate dedicated to replacing public reproductive health with “medicalized” anti-abortion clinics. When Roe was in effect, writing CPCs into state budgets was an anti-abortion workaround. Now, as abortion clinics shutter and the growing Christian Right funnels more public money to CPCs, Obria’s plan may be coming to fruition.
Georgia is one of 10 states that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. It consistently ranks among the highest in the nation for maternal mortality (with a doubled rate for Black women), which could be because, as of 2024, more than half of the state’s 159 counties lack a single OB-GYN. After Roe was overturned, a six-week abortion ban went into effect. Since then, four of the state’s roughly 14 abortion clinics have shuttered; CPCs now outnumber them 6 to 1. ProPublica found multiple cases in Georgia in which the abortion ban has killed pregnant women.
At the same time, Georgia allocates roughly $2 million annually to CPCs through an “Alternatives to Abortion” or “A2A” program, which provides steady state funding to CPCs. Through similar policies, Florida sent $29.5 million to CPCs in 2024, while Texas leads with a whopping $140 million.
About a hundred miles from Gwinnett County, Julia Callahan has experienced these dual realities. In 2022, early in her second pregnancy, Callahan lost one of the twins she was carrying and faced a bout of terrible illness. She faced difficulties getting consistent OB-GYN appointments, considering only two offices in her region even took the Medicaid that had long covered her family.
Callahan sought another option when friends recommended a downtown facility offering free ultrasounds. At the center, staff in nursing attire conducted Callahan’s ultrasound and told her that something didn’t look right with her baby’s kidneys; they advised her to go to her OB-GYN right away. “I threw up in the parking lot of my OB-GYN because I was so distraught,” Callahan says.
When she arrived at her OB-GYN’s office and handed the ultrasound over the counter, the first question the doctor asked was, “How did you end up at a crisis pregnancy center?” He then quickly reassured Callahan that everything was completely fine with her pregnancy — and wanted her to be wary of the center, which does not employ doctors.
Later on, Callahan says, she got a Facebook message from the center checking in on her. When Callahan expressed her anger at their misguided care, the woman responded, “We’ll pray for you.”
The experience launched Callahan into political action to address Georgia’s reproductive health crisis. While, as Callahan says, there are only two actual OB-GYNs who take Medicaid in the region, there are six CPCs. One CPC in Macon has received state funding for at least the past three years. “There’s no wonder why [CPCs] are kept busy,” Callahan muses. As she sees it, Georgia’s reproductive health crisis comes from a severe lack of care, combined with the deceptive tactics of CPCs.
Georgia’s situation — including that of Georgia Wellness — is a salient example of national trends. In the summer of 2025, Republicans approved the largest cut to Medicaid in the history of the program. At the same time, the public funding of CPCs is skyrocketing, with $430 million in federal funding from 2017 to 2023, plus a nearly $500 million increase in state funding in just the first two years after the Dobbs v. Jackson decision.
Much of this money comes without any oversight.
As CPCs have worked toward the goal of “replacing” reproductive healthcare, they’ve used a tactic called “medicalization,” an attempt to create a patina of legitimacy through integrating more medical services. As one anti-abortion activist explained at a 2012 Heartbeat International conference, “We want to look professional. … We want to appear neutral on the outside. The best client you ever get is one that thinks they’re walking into an abortion clinic.”
But with expanded services have come new risks — like in 2025, when one CPC was sued for failing to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy during an ultrasound, even though scans for the condition are often advertised by CPCs.
At the Gwinnett County public comment session, Georgia Wellness CEO Robin Mauck claimed Georgia Wellness was not a CPC, touting a list of services, including pediatric care. Abortion rights activist Desirrae Thomas, an advocate with the group Amplify Georgia Collaborative, disputed this characterization simply: “They’ve changed their image to be more societally palatable.”
The connection between Georgia Wellness and Obria was also a focus of advocates’ ire. Obria has a history of deceptive tactics, shady finances and white nationalist statements— former CEO Kathleen Eaton-Bravo once said that abortion and contraception “threaten our culture’s survival” and had made Christianity begin to “die out” in Europe, where “immigrant Muslims came to replace [Christians].”
While some conglomerates are explicitly religious, Obria brands its clinics as indistinguishable from standard medical facilities.
In its strategic plan for 2019 to 2025, Obria identified itself as part of the “pro-life medical industry” and said it would bolster clinics with more medical services to bring in clients, who would then be informed about “alternatives to contraception,” leading to “decreased abortion rates.”
In 2021, then-CEO Kathleen Eaton-Bravo told the host of a religious podcast that Planned Parenthood offered STI testing to get “girls on that slippery slope of drugs, plugs, jellies and jams.” She had previously said that Obria would try to “get patients out of Planned Parenthood clinics” by “matching their services, minus contraception and abortion.”
Dawn Hughes, Eaton-Bravo’s successor, didn’t split hairs when she left Obria in 2023, calling the organization “zealots” and arguing the medical facade was misleading and unethical.
Obria did not reply to a request for comment.
But it seems that federal and state governments are on board with Obria’s plan. Obria received $5.1 million in Title X family planning funding during the first Trump administration (later revoked, under the Biden administration, in 2021). Elsewhere, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt’s new MOMS Act would even establish a federal website with a list of CPCs and federal funding opportunities for them, to “build a comprehensive culture of life.”
Days before Gwinnett County’s funding decision was announced, Georgia Wellness said it was no longer affiliated with Obria, though it remains a “faith-based organization.” The Georgia Wellness website is now filled with bland grays and adages about holistic care, promoting a roster of medical services.
But look more closely and more signs of a CPC (and Obria) are there. For one thing, Georgia Wellness discloses (at the bottom of its website) that it does not refer for or perform abortions— only “abortion consultations.” Contraception is nowhere to be found on its list of medical services, though the clinic will remove an IUD. In a recent blog post, the clinic endorses cycle tracking and “natural birth control.” Another outlines exaggerated “abortion risks.”
Georgia Wellness’ sex education curriculum, which is utilized by a number of organizations in the county, is simple: Don’t have sex before marriage. The group also provides “Thrive Education,” which an older version of its website called “a Christ-centered foundation” for parenting.
Prior to its recent rebrand, pages on the center’s website even promoted abortion pill reversal, a practice touted by CPCs but decried as unproven and dangerous by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The center’s CEO, address, phone number, and much of its staff also remain the same as it did while it was called Obria.
The vast majority of Georgia Wellness’ $450,000 grant will be used to build a “maternity home,” another project in tune with the rising Christian Right. These postwar-era shelters for unmarried pregnant women waned after Roe but have risen steadily in the wake of Dobbs. While maternity homes can offer services, they are often hotbeds of religious coercion and strict rules. According to Jennifer McKenna, a senior adviser at the watchdog organization Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, maternity homes (and CPCs) often act as “feeding mechanisms” for the Christian adoption industry.
Georgia Wellness has been unclear about what practices its maternity home will use, but if its history is any indication, the home will likely include religious curriculum for marriage and parenting. Mauck herself once served as the executive director of a nearby maternity home called the Haven at Hebron, which is proudly anti-abortion and affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.
Mauck and Georgia Wellness declined to comment to In These Times.
Marvin Lim is one of a slate of state Democratic lawmakers who have introduced counter-legislation in Georgia to block funding for CPCs. State Rep. Anne Allen Westbrook, who helped introduce the legislation, explains that, “For most of us, when we are patients in a healthcare setting, we want evidence-based information to make decisions. If you were seeking any other kind of care, you wouldn’t want it through someone’s political or partisan or faith-based lens.”
Lisa Battisfore, founder of the anti-CPC group Reproductive Transparency Now, puts it more bluntly: “If you had a serious heart condition, would you want to find out that your cardiologist was against heart surgery?”
The anti-CPC legislation would require more transparency from CPCs and reallocate their funding toward evidence-based public health programs. While the progress has been slow, advocates say the bills have led to necessary discussions within the legislature. Georgia, a center of anti-CPC activism, also houses the national CPC Map at the University of Georgia (under professors Andrea Swartzendruber and Danielle Lambert) and has seen collectives like Amplify Georgia and SPARK foster more education about the impact of CPCs on health outcomes.
And across the country, other attempts have been made to counter CPCs.
In Texas, controversy over the state’s massive CPC funding program led to some success. Though the state has the lowest insurance coverage rate in the country and ranks among the last in giving cash assistance to poor families, the state sent $70 million a year to CPCs in 2024 and 2025 through a program left largely unmonitored for years. After a 2024 ProPublica investigation revealed many CPCs were overbilling the state, the program now requires CPCs to document expenses. CPCs and anti-abortion activists lobbied against the change, calling it “red tape.”
“I think that’s really a good first step to dismantling this industry — getting some accountability in the first place,” says Annie Romano, an organizer with the advocacy organization Reproaction. But it’s still only a small victory.
Battisfore believes that some of the counter-legislation has been futile — or even done more harm than good — by allowing court precedents to be set in CPCs’ favor. In 2015, for example, the California FACT Act required CPCs to disclose that they did not provide abortion care and provide resources on where clients could access it. But in 2018, that law was struck down by the Supreme Court, based on First Amendment rights.
“That Supreme Court decision has been the basis of why pretty much all legislative attempts have failed,” says Battisfore, because it “set the precedent for CPCs to use the free speech defense” and “no one’s going to take the risk on that type of legislation, because it failed so miserably.”
That being said, similar legislation targeting deceptive advertising has been successful so far in Connecticut. Battisfore and other experts say they think legislation to stop public funding might prove most successful if state lawmakers could be mobilized.
She also says that, because of legislative gridlock, her organization Reproductive Transparency Now focuses most on face-to-face discussions and education — essentially, trying to warn people about CPCs before they reach them. Amplify Georgia has adopted similar approaches in its #StopFakeClinics initiative, alongside its legislative attempts.
By the day of the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners budget vote, Amplify Georgia’s state campaign director, Allison Glass, Lim and Swartzendruber and nearly all of the advocates who spoke out at the meeting had received a cease-and-desist letter from Georgia Wellness. The letter to Lim called for him to stop his “false and defamatory statements” on social media, including that “Obria is active in Georgia” and “Georgia Wellness pushes an anti-abortion, religious agenda.”
Instead, Lim posted the letter on social media.
At the meeting, Glass shared testimony from the former medical director of Georgia Wellness, Dr. Marc Jean-Gilles (with his permission). “The organization offers prenatal care to patients without having a provider who has admitting privileges at any hospital,” Glass read, quoting Jean-Gilles. “Many of their patients are misled.”
Ultimately, the commissioners voted 3-2 to approve the budget, with two yes votes from Democratic county commissioners, including Nicole Love Hendrickson, board chair. In an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Hendrickson said she was concerned the county could be sued if it “rejected the grant application over political or ideological considerations.”
The vote happened quietly and without much fanfare. But it’s one among many in a patchwork of decisions rapidly reshaping the reproductive health landscape into a far-right fantasy.
Despite the vote, Glass says Amplify will continue its #StopFakeClinics campaign.
“It feels more important than ever that we are communicating the truth,” Glass says.
Sonia Chajet Wides is a reporter and researcher based in Brooklyn, New York.
