I Took an Oath to My Patients. Fake Clinics Didn’t.

An OB-GYN on the Harm of Crisis Pregnancy Centers

I grew up going to Mass every Sunday in a region where Catholic identity wasn't just religion — it was geography, family, community. I learned the rosary before I learned to ride a bike. I also learned, from the nuns who taught me, that care for others is a moral imperative. This sense of justice is part of what drew me to medicine, and eventually to obstetrics and gynecology.

My Catholic formation is what makes me so troubled by what I see happening in the name of faith outside my clinic.

In Wisconsin, the state where I live and practice, there are over 26 Crisis Pregnancy Centers for every brick-and-mortar abortion facility. They advertise free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and "options counseling." They position themselves, deliberately, to intercept patients who are looking for reproductive healthcare. And for many of my patients — particularly those who are younger, lower-income, or new to navigating the healthcare system — these centers succeed. By the time a patient reaches me, weeks have sometimes passed. Weeks matter enormously in reproductive medicine.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers are not medical clinics. The vast majority are unlicensed, unstaffed by clinicians, and unbound by the legal and ethical obligations that govern my practice. I am required by law and by my medical oath to provide my patients with accurate, complete information. CPCs are not. And many of them don't.

What CPCs do provide is a convincing simulacrum of medical care — the waiting rooms, the ultrasound machines, the clipboards — wrapped around a singular mission: to prevent abortion, regardless of what the patient actually needs or wants. That mission is religious in origin and religious in operation. Many CPCs are funded by Catholic dioceses, evangelical networks, or explicitly faith-based nonprofits. Some display Scripture on the walls. Others require staff to sign statements of faith. The "counseling" they offer is not neutral information. It is theology, delivered in a medical costume.

I want to be precise here: I am not arguing that religious people have no place in healthcare. Some of the finest clinicians I know are people of deep faith who deliver excellent, patient-focused care. I am arguing that an institution that presents itself as a healthcare provider while withholding accurate medical information — because that information conflicts with its religious commitments — is engaged in deception. And deception causes harm.

I've seen that harm. I've had patients tell me they were told by a CPC that abortion causes breast cancer (it doesn't), that medication abortion can be "reversed" (the evidence does not support this), and that they were further along in their pregnancies than they actually were — information that, if acted on, could have pushed them past the legal gestational limits in our state. I've had patients break down in my office, not because of their pregnancies, but because they had spent two weeks being misled and shamed. They felt that they had run out of options, but they hadn't.

This is what religious overreach looks like in an exam room. It doesn’t announce itself as ideology. It masquerades as help.

The Catholic tradition has a robust intellectual heritage around conscience, truth, and the dignity of persons. I do not recognize that heritage in institutions designed to deceive vulnerable people at one of the most consequential moments of their lives. Whatever one believes about abortion theologically, I would ask: Is a lie — about medical facts, about options, about gestational timing — consistent with human dignity? Is deception consistent with care?

There are 2,633 CPCs operating in the United States, compared to fewer than 800 abortion providers. They receive hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal funding. They operate in the gaps of our healthcare system, and those gaps are widest for the patients who can least afford to lose time.

I took an oath to my patients — not to a denomination, not to a political outcome, but to the people sitting across from me who deserve honest information and genuine care. The Scripture on the wall of a Crisis Pregnancy Center does not fulfill that obligation. And it should not be mistaken for medicine.

Dr. Kristin Lyerly is a board-certified OB-GYN, abortion provider, and Fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.