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This week, we at Rewire News Group published another do-not-miss exclusive by Garnet Henderson, this time a deep dive into the hundreds of millions of dollars funneling through so-called crisis pregnancy centers and what, if anything, those fake clinics are doing with that money.

The article isn’t just a classic example of “follow the money” journalism—it’s that Garnet asks all the right questions of who funds these organizations and how are they spending their war chests. It tells a really important post-Roe story that nobody else has told or could tell.

And that’s the grift of “crisis pregnancy centers.”

Anti-abortion advocates love to play up their narrative of political persecution, and nowhere is this more true than their ongoing spin campaign around CPCs. If you listen to folks like the Charlotte Lozier Institute, “crisis pregnancy centers” are a collective of scrappy, religiously affiliated nonprofits and church groups offering “free” services to pregnant people in need. Most media have, unsurprisingly, bought into that narrative at least to some degree. And it’s that unwillingness to question the picture painted of CPCs by the anti-abortion movement that has allowed an entire commercial ecosphere to blossom, one that manipulates and targets the most vulnerable patients.

As Garnet lays out in her reporting, the CPC industry is moving around a lot of money—possibly north of $1 billion a year. And large portions of that money are simply unaccounted for, despite the fact that even the “free” services offered by many CPCs are not really free at all.

If ever an industry needed national oversight and regulation in a post-Roe world, it’s the “crisis pregnancy center” industry.