Documentary ‘Preconceived’ Exposes Horrors of Crisis Pregnancy Center Industry: ‘I Came to You for Help. Why Did You Lie?’ - Ms. Magazine (original) (raw)

Preconceived: The Unexpected World of Crisis Pregnancy Centers is a masterful exposé of the stealthy and sophisticated dimension of the antiabortion movement. It’s essential viewing in post-Dobbs America.

A screenshot from Preconceived. Maleeha eventually accessed abortion care; Maria (pictured) had her baby.

Since the fall of Roe, anti-choice politicians have rushed to champion “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) as a legitimate alternative to qualified reproductive healthcare. As they funnel millions of taxpayer dollars into these unregulated clinics, abortion ban states suffer high rates of maternal and infant mortality and widespread maternal care deserts.

As the billion-dollar CPC industry undermines reproductive healthcare nationwide—and the antiabortion movement works overtime to center “pregnancy care centers” in its public relations, obscuring the harrowing impact of its abortion bans—a powerful new documentary about crisis pregnancy centers is streaming online.

The crisis pregnancy center industry is a nationwide network of some 3,000 unregulated pregnancy clinics (also known as antiabortion centers) that target low-income women and teens facing unintended pregnancies to prevent them from accessing abortion and contraception.

While scholars, advocates, watchdogs and journalists have documented how CPCs posture as medical facilities—using deceptive and coercive tactics and medical disinformation to intercept pregnant people seeking healthcare—this industry continues to operate mostly under the radar, branding itself as a benign provider of pregnancy services for poor women. It is, in fact, the ground-game of the antiabortion movement.

Preconceived shines a clear light on this evasive industry, deftly navigating a complex landscape of deception, privacy, finances and faith. It is the brainchild of an all-women team: Heather Keane and Sabrine Keane, a mother-daughter team of first-time filmmakers, partnered with storyteller Kate Dumke (director) and documentarians Maggie Contreras (producer) and Sasha Perry (editor). The story they tell is riveting, probing and alarming.

“Our introduction to crisis pregnancy centers in 2021 was a revelation that sparked an urgent need for exploration,” said Heather and Sabrine Keane. “The pervasive presence of CPCs across the United States left us astounded by our prior lack of awareness. With the possibility of Roe v. Wade being overturned, we felt it was important to document a shifting reproductive healthcare landscape and dive deeper into the resources available to people facing unplanned pregnancies. Though novices in the art of documentary filmmaking, this topic inspired us to take on the challenge with the help of industry veterans as a women-led team.”

Extraordinary Access Inside the World of CPCs

Filmed throughout 2022, during the lead-up to the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe and its immediate aftermath,the documentary weaves incisive commentary from experts who have studied CPC methods with strikingly candid interviews with crisis pregnancy center industry leaders.

The filmmakers gained unparalleled access to CPC and antiabortion movement players—revealing they are one in the same—as well as intimate footage inside both crisis pregnancy centers posing as medical offices, and abortion clinics serving patients desperate to access care.

A screenshot from Preconceived shows how CPCs outnumber real clinics 3 to 1.

Scenes in pregnancy center waiting rooms confirm what experts report: Most pregnant people who visit a CPC are young and low-income, often lured by the offer of free ultrasounds and resources. The CPC footage contrasts with scenes inside a backlogged abortion clinic where staff have to turn women away who were misinformed at a CPC about the date of their pregnancy.

As one clinic staff member notes, “There’s no price for them to pay for just lying at will.”

Preconceived also juxtaposes footage of CPC leaders at an evangelical antiabortion service on the eve of the 2022 “March for Life” with Catholics for Choice (CFC) advocates’ activism that same night, projecting pro-choice messages onto the Basilica of the National Shrine.

In one shot, CPC activist Reverend Patrick Mahoney tells the filmmakers, “We don’t want our faith mixed in with politics. We want our faith to transform politics.”

In another, CFC’s Kate Hoeting said it’s a “myth that religious people cannot support abortion. … The antiabortion movement really has created a successful propaganda machine, and I think crisis pregnancy centers are a great example of the extreme ends of that kind of propaganda.”

Most pregnant people who visit a CPC are young and low-income, often lured by the offer of free ultrasounds and resources.

Expertly edited to weave together antiabortion Christian and pro-choice Catholic actions and interviews, the film begs the question: Why does the religious right get to claim moral authority on abortion and women’s health decisions?

Maleeha and Maria: The Stories at the Heart of Preconceived

At the center of Preconceived are the personal stories of Maleeha in Texas and Maria in Colorado, young women who had life-changing experiences at a CPC. Maleeha eventually accessed abortion care; Maria had her baby.

Maleeha was 20 years old when she emigrated to Texas from Pakistan and found herself pregnant. When she sought an abortion, a relative in medical school unknowingly directed her to a CPC. On camera, Maleeha describes the predatory and shaming tactic the CPC used to prevent her from getting the abortion she wanted, and the lie that continues to gnaw at her.

“They told me the [abortion] pill was so dangerous … that Texas had banned it.” (It had not; this visit took place before Dobbs or the 2021 SB 8 ban on abortion in Texas.)

Maleeha wants to return to the CPC to ask, “I came to you for help. … Why did you lie to me?”

We first encounter Maria at a baby shower and photo shoot for her newborn son, organized by the local pregnancy center and “pro-life influencer,” Christine Yeargin. Yeargin says she “rallies pro-lifers to bless moms with unplanned pregnancies” and helps CPCs “take a financial burden off her shoulders.” She tells the filmmakers, “I want these moms to know it doesn’t stop when the baby gets here… I want to help beyond that.” When the camera cuts back to the baby shower, Maria asks Yeargin if she can help with housing. “I have to move out by the end of this month,” Maria tells her. “My landlord didn’t care that I just gave birth. He’s like no, you gotta go.”

As we watch Maleeha and Maria’s stories evolve over months, their raw reckoning with the impact of their CPC experiences anchors the film, and grounds a rich array of interviews and on-the-ground footage in their flesh-and-blood reality. As Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) struggles to understand his colleagues who vote against abortion while opposing legislation parents and families need, and the Women’s Law Project’s Tara Murtha details how politicians divert tax dollars meant for poor women and children to unregulated pregnancy clinics, witnessing how Maria’s story unfolds cuts especially close to the bone.

I came to you for help … Why did you lie to me?

Maleeha, featured in Preconcieved

SXSW Premiere and Reaction

Preconceived premiered at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Film & TV Festival in March, where it won the “Best in Texas” award—a true honor for debut filmmakers. Viewers were rapt. At screening talk-backs, audience members who thought they knew what crisis pregnancy centers are were shocked at how much they did not know. And viewers new to CPCs were startled to learn that unregulated pregnancy clinics blanket the country and worried about their impact post-Dobbs.

SXSW audience members were particularly struck by how the filmmakers captured CPC leaders on camera talking frankly about their “preconceptions” about women with unplanned pregnancies. Viewers lauded directors Keane and Dumke for their skill in engaging CPC spokespeople, then stepping out of the way when they had them on camera.

A screenshot from Preconceived. Maleeha (pictured) eventually accessed abortion care.

Reviewers agreed. The Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Gyarke wrote, “The strength of Preconceived lies in its access to a broad range of perspectives and in the quiet force of the interviews… Keane and Dumke smartly let their interviewees speak for themselves, interjecting only to fact check in real time.”

IndieWire’s Samantha Bergeson noted, “The amount of access in this documentary is truly incredible. … What makes Preconceived so alarmingly timely isn’t just its devastating subject matter, but the presentation that this is a decidedly American way of dealing with healthcare, women’s rights, and reproductive autonomy … The film’s message is resoundingly poignant.”

Summing up the impact of the film, The Curvy Film Critic, Carla Renata, put it this way: “Preconceived will piss some folks off in the best way possible. It will force you to think outside the box, while being educated and informed on every conceivable angle of these issues.”

Alarming CPC Privacy Practices

As concerns about abortion surveillance have become pressing in the U.S., SXSW premiere audiences found the role CPCs play in collecting sensitive data from pregnant women without privacy protections, to be one of the documentary’s most disturbing revelations.

We want to be listening and observing as best we can and doing our best to reach her so that she never feels forced into that decision which she doesn’t really want.

Heartbeat International president Jor-El Godsey

In one scene, the film takes viewers inside the Stanton Healthcare CPC in Idaho, where a young woman is filling out medical history forms in what looks like a doctor’s waiting room. On camera, Stanton’s director of client services points to a notice on a white wall: “It’s our HIPAA. We’re completely HIPAA compliant. … anything [clients] have done here, any communications, is completely confidential.”

In fact, CPCs are not governed by HIPAA and have no legal obligation to protect client data they collect.

After indicating a locked door protects client records, Stanton staff eventually reveal they also collect client data using software provided by Heartbeat International.

Heartbeat International is a global antiabortion advocacy group, and the largest CPC network in the U.S. Asked on camera about its data practices, Heartbeat International’s president, Jor-El Godsey, tells filmmakers, “She’s on her phone so we want to be there, be on her phone. … We want to be listening and observing as best we can and doing our best to reach her so that she never feels forced into that decision which she doesn’t really want.”

Maleeha told Jezebel that she provided all the personal information the Texas CPC she visited asked for because she believed it was a healthcare facility. “They kept talking to me, trying to make me feel like they’re my friends so I would tell more about myself,” she said. “Actual healthcare workers have never asked me the things they asked, like about my family, my life … To this day, I don’t know what they used it for, if they still have it.”

The CPC called Maleeha for months, even after she had her abortion, until she blocked their number.

Groundbreaking Significance of Preconceived

Preconceived is not the first documentary about CPCs. The first was a 2010 HBO film, 12th & Delaware, focused on a corner in Fort Pierce, Fla., where an abortion clinic operated under threats of violence and constant protests, as a CPC across the street intercepted its patients and spread misinformation about abortion. While 12th & Delaware exposed the lengths to which a CPC used interception, disinformation and scare tactics to prevent women from accessing abortion—and the heart-wrenching impact of those tactics on vulnerable teens—Preconceived makes a critical leap in the public’s understanding of crisis pregnancy centers, and the scope and reach of their impact.

Preconceived tells the story of CPCs as an industry; a network of unregulated pregnancy clinics that dwarfs real reproductive health clinics nationwide, operating at the core of an antiabortion movement ecosystem. The film exposes CPCs to be political groups masquerading as storefront service providers, and explores their connections with powerful advocacy groups that commandeer CPC tactics as well as antiabortion activism on the ground, in legislatures, and in the courts—a coordinated crusade to roll back all reproductive rights and impose a minority religious view on women’s access to healthcare.

While viewers consider what Preconceived uncovers about Heartbeat International’s role in the CPC industry—training volunteers to deceive callers seeking abortion and equipping CPCs to collect client data—further investigation will reveal Heartbeat’s history of legal activism, including to overturn Roe and challenge a ban on LGBTQ “conversion therapy.” Heartbeat is one of multiple national advocacy groups (including Care Net and NIFLA) that provide the marketing, training, funding, online content, digital tools and aggressive legal strategies CPC use to advance their mission.

In short, Preconceived marks an inflection point in the public conversation about CPCs. It calls on viewers to consider how far-reaching an impact this industry of unregulated pregnancy clinics is having on access to the full spectrum of reproductive care, especially for vulnerable women and teens.

As we see our rights to contraception, IVF and even obstetric care threatened in the post-Dobbs U.S., Preconceived reveals that CPCs are core to a political movement for which ending legal access to abortion was only the start.

As Rev. Patrick Mahoney, chief strategy officer for the Stanton CPC’s advocacy arm, says on camera: “Many thought overturning Roe v. Wade was a finishing line. It’s not, it’s a starting line.”

Streaming Preconceived and Hosting Pre-Election Screenings

Preconceived is a singular tool for educating community members and stakeholders about what crisis pregnancy centers are and do, and ways the CPC industry threatens women’s health, privacy and safety.

Since its SXSW premiere, the film has been screened by reproductive rights advocates, grassroots organizers, abortion funds, colleges and universities, medical students, departments of health, hospitals and health clinics, family planning organizations, journalists, state attorneys general and lawmakers. The film is also being used as an advocacy tool.

Susannah Baruch of the Petrie-Flom Health Law Policy Center at Harvard Law School cited the film as evidence of how the CPC industry misuses HIPAA to exploit personal health data in her call for federal policy action.

Reproductive Equity Now (REN) is hosting screenings throughout New England this year to educate and mobilize constituents. REN president Rebecca Hart Holder told Ms.:

“Preconceived brilliantly lends itself to our efforts to educate people across New England on how to identify, avoid, and take action to counter antiabortion centers’ dangerous and deceptive practices. Our audiences walk away from the film screenings feeling shocked, disturbed and wanting to find ways to take action with us. This film is the perfect example of how telling the stories of real people’s experiences with antiabortion centers can educate, mobilize, and move the needle for action and accountability.”

As this critical election approaches, with reproductive rights in the balance, here are ways you can watch and screen _Preconceived_—at home, in your community, and in halls of power:

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