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Colorado becomes abortion haven, advocates target crisis pregnancy centers

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Alternatives Pregnancy Center sits next to a King Soopers grocery store in Denver, tucked in a maze of hallways in a blocky office building. A bowl of candy greets visitors. A row of portraits of mothers and their children cover a wall in a corner office. Other than a room with an ultrasound machine and row of fetus figurines, the office is largely unremarkable.

But the pregnancy center and others like it represents contested outposts in the escalating fight over abortion access in Colorado and the United States. The facilities — known as crisis pregnancy centers — are staunchly anti-abortion and offer limited medical services and family counseling, with the intent of steering women away from terminating their pregnancies. There are dozens of the facilities in Colorado, more than doubling the number of abortion providers.

Critics say the organizations  — which they call anti-abortion centers — use deceptive advertising and promote the use of unproven medical treatments. A coalition of abortion access groups, together with Democrats in the Colorado statehouse, are preparing a landmark bill to regulate how the centers operate and confront those concerns.

The facilities have long been features of the abortion debate. Blue states like California and Connecticut have sought to regulate their advertising practices, while red states like Ohio provide them direct funding or elevate some of their medical claims. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision — which overruled Roe v. Wade — was leaked in May 2022, a number of facilities, including at least one in Colorado, were vandalized.

The Dobbs decision has escalated Colorado’s status as a sanctuary state for abortion and  prompted a renewed focus on the centers, as more women travel here for services unavailable in their home state.

Spray-painted messages are seen at Mother and Child Education Center in Portland, Oregon, on June 26, 2022, after the property was vandalized by demonstrators the night of June 25, 2022. The center, which claims not to be an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center, connects mothers and children to social services. (Photo by John Rudoff/AFP via Getty Images)

“(Dobbs) has absolutely turned the volume up on the need (to regulate the facilities),” said Rep. Karen McCormick, a Boulder Democrat who’s part of a group of lawmakers scrutinizing the pregnancy centers. ” … They’re misleading, ads or no ads, and that’s a problem.”

For McCormick and others, the facilities’ position on medication abortion is particularly alarming. The overall rate of abortions has decreased for the past two decades, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, but the use of medication abortion has increased. As a result, anti-abortion groups have escalated efforts to push an unproven claim that the effects of those medications can be reversed while suing to block access to the treatment. Those claims have drawn criticism from Democratic lawmakers, medical experts and abortion access groups who note that there’s no scientific evidence or federal approval to back them up.

Supporters of the facilities say the centers offer newly pregnant women supportive services like counseling, limited ultrasounds, STD testing and donated supplies like diapers, and they defended the claims about abortion pill reversal. The facilities are often faith-based, use religious materials and are directly affiliated with churches. Though the services that they offer vary, the facilities are universally anti-abortion.

“We really try to assess the needs that people who are coming in to be served have,” said Leticia Lopez Higdon, Alternatives Pregnancy Center’s director of client operations. “We kind of look at their whole life picture, we understand what’s going on in their lives and where they have needs. Sometimes it’s around housing, sometimes it’s around employment, sometimes it’s around mental health.” Alternatives does not directly provide aid to address those needs and instead refer patients elsewhere.

Critics, meanwhile, accuse the facilities of using deceptive advertising, like masquerading as abortion clinics or pushing digital ads to jump to the top of Google search results, to coax women through their doors. The ultrasound services they offer, opponents say, are often performed by nonmedical personnel as manipulation tactics, and the centers are typically not licensed medical facilities. Though Alternatives offers diapers for nothing in return, other centers require families take classes to earn them. COLOR Latina, a Colorado reproductive rights and abortion access group, said crisis pregnancy centers often target non-English speakers and college students.

The bill being drafted by Colorado lawmakers, described to the Post by two lawmakers and several advocates involved, would ban the pregnancy centers from using deceptive advertising. It would also make it a deceptive trade practice to advertise for the so-called “abortion pill reversal” treatment, and it would threaten medical providers who facilitated the treatment with licensure penalties.

“It’s not only unprofessional but morally unethical because you’re lying to a patient in need,” said Aurea Bolaños, the strategic communications director for COLOR.

The measure is part of a broader package of abortion access bills being drafted by Democrats in the Capitol. None of the bills has has been introduced, and lawmakers involved said they weren’t sure when the legislation would be formally unveiled. McCormick and Denver Democrat Rep. Elisabeth Epps told the Post they’re the prime sponsors on the crisis pregnancy bill, along with Sen. Julie Gonzales.

Efforts to regulate pregnancy centers have been tried elsewhere. The town of Somerville, Massachusetts, outright banned them in April and described them as deceptive. California attempted to regulate centers’ advertising and require them to provide information about abortion services, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the law in 2018. In June, a group of Democrats in Congress introduced legislation to “crack down on false advertising” they said is used by the centers, according to a release from Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

The coalition and lawmakers drafting Colorado’s bill modeled it somewhat off of a similar measure passed in Connecticut in 2021, Bolaños said. But the proposal her group is pushing would be the first in the country to target abortion-pill reversal and label its use as a deceptive trade practice, she and others said. (Rep. Scott Bottoms, a Colorado Springs Republican, is sponsoring a competing bill that would require health care providers who prescribe medication abortion to also give information about abortion-pill reversal; given Democrats’ firm control over the Capitol, Bottoms said, his chances are “nil.”)

Leticia Lopez Higdon, left, director of client operations, Lori Ann Satriano Arfsten, director of communications and community development, and Laura Johnson, RN, BAN, right, nurse manager, gather in the offices of Alternatives Pregnancy Center on January 26, 2023, in Denver, and together describe their faith-based services as a safe and trusted environment for women facing pregnancy. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)
Leticia Lopez Higdon, left, director of client operations, Lori Ann Satriano Arfsten, director of communications and community development, and Laura Johnson, RN, BAN, right, nurse manager, gather in the offices of Alternatives Pregnancy Center on January 26, 2023, in Denver, and together describe their faith-based services as a safe and trusted environment for women facing pregnancy. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)

Representatives for Alternatives and Heartbeat International, a national anti-abortion group that works with pregnancy centers, told the Post they didn’t use any deceptive advertising and that they, too, thought that facilities should be honest with women and families. But they expressed alarm about the bill’s proposals.

“We definitely are in agreement that everything should be straightforward and women should not feel at all manipulated on any aspect on both sides of this aisle, but I guess I would have to see the bill to speak too much into it,” said Andrea Trudden, the vice president of marketing for Heartbeat. “I agree with that there should be no deceptive advertising but what are you considering deceptive advertising?”

Advocates like Bolaños want the centers to be barred from suggesting that they’re medical facilities or that they’re abortion providers themselves. But what’s perhaps most concerning for medical experts, abortion access groups and their allies in the Colorado Capitol is what Alternatives and other pregnancy centers call “abortion pill reversal,” an unapproved use of existing medication that the facilities claim can stop the effect of medication abortion.

Both the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists have criticized the treatment and said it is unproven and unsupported by evidence.

“I’m sorry — it doesn’t fit. There’s no science that proves it works,” said Dr. Mitchell Creinin, an OBGYN and family planning researcher at the University of California, Davis. In 2019, he began what other experts said was the only gold-standard study to examine the reversal treatment, research that ended within months because three women involved experienced hemorrhaging. He and others dismissed case reports used by the pregnancy centers as evidence of the treatment’s efficacy as low level, nonrigorous and lacking in follow-up.

Staff at Alternatives Pregnancy Center on January 26, 2023, in Denver, have bags filled with donated baby items to give to their pregnant clients. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)
Staff at Alternatives Pregnancy Center on January 26, 2023, in Denver, have bags filled with donated baby items to give to their pregnant clients. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)


Alternatives Pregnancy Center sits next to a King Soopers grocery store in Denver, tucked in a maze of hallways in a blocky office building. A bowl of candy greets visitors. A row of portraits of mothers and their children cover a wall in a corner office. Other than a room with an ultrasound machine and row of fetus figurines, the office is largely unremarkable.

But the pregnancy center and others like it represents contested outposts in the escalating fight over abortion access in Colorado and the United States. The facilities — known as crisis pregnancy centers — are staunchly anti-abortion and offer limited medical services and family counseling, with the intent of steering women away from terminating their pregnancies. There are dozens of the facilities in Colorado, more than doubling the number of abortion providers.

Critics say the organizations  — which they call anti-abortion centers — use deceptive advertising and promote the use of unproven medical treatments. A coalition of abortion access groups, together with Democrats in the Colorado statehouse, are preparing a landmark bill to regulate how the centers operate and confront those concerns.

The facilities have long been features of the abortion debate. Blue states like California and Connecticut have sought to regulate their advertising practices, while red states like Ohio provide them direct funding or elevate some of their medical claims. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision — which overruled Roe v. Wade — was leaked in May 2022, a number of facilities, including at least one in Colorado, were vandalized.

The Dobbs decision has escalated Colorado’s status as a sanctuary state for abortion and  prompted a renewed focus on the centers, as more women travel here for services unavailable in their home state.

Spray-painted messages are seen at Mother and Child Education Center in Portland, Oregon, on June 26, 2022, after the property was vandalized by demonstrators the night of June 25, 2022. The center, which claims not to be an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center, connects mothers and children to social services. (Photo by John Rudoff/AFP via Getty Images)
Spray-painted messages are seen at Mother and Child Education Center in Portland, Oregon, on June 26, 2022, after the property was vandalized by demonstrators the night of June 25, 2022. The center, which claims not to be an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center, connects mothers and children to social services. (Photo by John Rudoff/AFP via Getty Images)

“(Dobbs) has absolutely turned the volume up on the need (to regulate the facilities),” said Rep. Karen McCormick, a Boulder Democrat who’s part of a group of lawmakers scrutinizing the pregnancy centers. ” … They’re misleading, ads or no ads, and that’s a problem.”

For McCormick and others, the facilities’ position on medication abortion is particularly alarming. The overall rate of abortions has decreased for the past two decades, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, but the use of medication abortion has increased. As a result, anti-abortion groups have escalated efforts to push an unproven claim that the effects of those medications can be reversed while suing to block access to the treatment. Those claims have drawn criticism from Democratic lawmakers, medical experts and abortion access groups who note that there’s no scientific evidence or federal approval to back them up.

Supporters of the facilities say the centers offer newly pregnant women supportive services like counseling, limited ultrasounds, STD testing and donated supplies like diapers, and they defended the claims about abortion pill reversal. The facilities are often faith-based, use religious materials and are directly affiliated with churches. Though the services that they offer vary, the facilities are universally anti-abortion.

“We really try to assess the needs that people who are coming in to be served have,” said Leticia Lopez Higdon, Alternatives Pregnancy Center’s director of client operations. “We kind of look at their whole life picture, we understand what’s going on in their lives and where they have needs. Sometimes it’s around housing, sometimes it’s around employment, sometimes it’s around mental health.” Alternatives does not directly provide aid to address those needs and instead refer patients elsewhere.

Critics, meanwhile, accuse the facilities of using deceptive advertising, like masquerading as abortion clinics or pushing digital ads to jump to the top of Google search results, to coax women through their doors. The ultrasound services they offer, opponents say, are often performed by nonmedical personnel as manipulation tactics, and the centers are typically not licensed medical facilities. Though Alternatives offers diapers for nothing in return, other centers require families take classes to earn them. COLOR Latina, a Colorado reproductive rights and abortion access group, said crisis pregnancy centers often target non-English speakers and college students.

The bill being drafted by Colorado lawmakers, described to the Post by two lawmakers and several advocates involved, would ban the pregnancy centers from using deceptive advertising. It would also make it a deceptive trade practice to advertise for the so-called “abortion pill reversal” treatment, and it would threaten medical providers who facilitated the treatment with licensure penalties.

“It’s not only unprofessional but morally unethical because you’re lying to a patient in need,” said Aurea Bolaños, the strategic communications director for COLOR.

The measure is part of a broader package of abortion access bills being drafted by Democrats in the Capitol. None of the bills has has been introduced, and lawmakers involved said they weren’t sure when the legislation would be formally unveiled. McCormick and Denver Democrat Rep. Elisabeth Epps told the Post they’re the prime sponsors on the crisis pregnancy bill, along with Sen. Julie Gonzales.

Efforts to regulate pregnancy centers have been tried elsewhere. The town of Somerville, Massachusetts, outright banned them in April and described them as deceptive. California attempted to regulate centers’ advertising and require them to provide information about abortion services, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the law in 2018. In June, a group of Democrats in Congress introduced legislation to “crack down on false advertising” they said is used by the centers, according to a release from Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

The coalition and lawmakers drafting Colorado’s bill modeled it somewhat off of a similar measure passed in Connecticut in 2021, Bolaños said. But the proposal her group is pushing would be the first in the country to target abortion-pill reversal and label its use as a deceptive trade practice, she and others said. (Rep. Scott Bottoms, a Colorado Springs Republican, is sponsoring a competing bill that would require health care providers who prescribe medication abortion to also give information about abortion-pill reversal; given Democrats’ firm control over the Capitol, Bottoms said, his chances are “nil.”)

Leticia Lopez Higdon, left, director of client operations, Lori Ann Satriano Arfsten, director of communications and community development, and Laura Johnson, RN, BAN, right, nurse manager, gather in the offices of Alternatives Pregnancy Center on January 26, 2023, in Denver, and together describe their faith-based services as a safe and trusted environment for women facing pregnancy. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)
Leticia Lopez Higdon, left, director of client operations, Lori Ann Satriano Arfsten, director of communications and community development, and Laura Johnson, RN, BAN, right, nurse manager, gather in the offices of Alternatives Pregnancy Center on January 26, 2023, in Denver, and together describe their faith-based services as a safe and trusted environment for women facing pregnancy. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)

Representatives for Alternatives and Heartbeat International, a national anti-abortion group that works with pregnancy centers, told the Post they didn’t use any deceptive advertising and that they, too, thought that facilities should be honest with women and families. But they expressed alarm about the bill’s proposals.

“We definitely are in agreement that everything should be straightforward and women should not feel at all manipulated on any aspect on both sides of this aisle, but I guess I would have to see the bill to speak too much into it,” said Andrea Trudden, the vice president of marketing for Heartbeat. “I agree with that there should be no deceptive advertising but what are you considering deceptive advertising?”

Advocates like Bolaños want the centers to be barred from suggesting that they’re medical facilities or that they’re abortion providers themselves. But what’s perhaps most concerning for medical experts, abortion access groups and their allies in the Colorado Capitol is what Alternatives and other pregnancy centers call “abortion pill reversal,” an unapproved use of existing medication that the facilities claim can stop the effect of medication abortion.

Both the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists have criticized the treatment and said it is unproven and unsupported by evidence.

“I’m sorry — it doesn’t fit. There’s no science that proves it works,” said Dr. Mitchell Creinin, an OBGYN and family planning researcher at the University of California, Davis. In 2019, he began what other experts said was the only gold-standard study to examine the reversal treatment, research that ended within months because three women involved experienced hemorrhaging. He and others dismissed case reports used by the pregnancy centers as evidence of the treatment’s efficacy as low level, nonrigorous and lacking in follow-up.

Staff at Alternatives Pregnancy Center on January 26, 2023, in Denver, have bags filled with donated baby items to give to their pregnant clients. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)
Staff at Alternatives Pregnancy Center on January 26, 2023, in Denver, have bags filled with donated baby items to give to their pregnant clients. (Photo By Kathryn Scott/Special to The Denver Post)

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