The new VICE documentary Misconception is an exposé of the realities of crisis pregnancy clinics, and anyone interested in women's access to sexual health services should watch it. The pregnancy centers that the documentary profiles are not medical facilities that will or can perform abortions; instead, they are pro-life religious centers that use the millions of dollars they receive from taxpayer money to lure women in with the promise of an abortion. They try to talk women out of the abortion by using false, misleading, or harmful information via counseling, anti-abortion videos, "training and education" sessions, pamphlets, pictures of bloody fetuses, and sonograms. And it's really, really messed up.
As the documentary mentions, these crisis pregnancy centers currently outnumber abortion clinics in the U.S. by a pretty significant number — 3,500 to 1,800. In a smart and important move earlier this year, Google actually banned the advertisements from crisis pregnancy centers that you see in the documentary, but that doesn't make them any less pervasive. CPCs often spring up very close to actual abortion clinics, and oftentimes women seeking to get an abortion accidentally walk into the wrong building. What's even trickier is that these centers don't actually provide any answers to questions women may have over the phone — they usually insist that a "price quote" (for the abortion they never intended on doing) can only be obtained after an in-person evaluation.
The VICE team uses secret cameras and fake pregnancies to obtain this info —since the secrecy behind these clinics is what makes them so dangerous, someone had to go in and show the world exactly what goes on behind those closed doors in an attempt to put an end to it once and for all. Check out the documentary below.
