News
How anti-abortion pregnancy centers can claim to be medical clinics and get away with it
|
Patricia Henderson stood in the parking lot next to the Florida Women’s Center in Jacksonville, wearing a white lab coat and greeting patients as they emerged from their cars. Their abortion appointments, she told them, were in the flat-roofed building across the road. Once inside, Henderson handed them three pages of paperwork to fill out – questions about everything from their highest level of education to the date of their last period. State investigative documents lay out what clients say happened next: She led them to a pink-walled ultrasound room, where she would reveal their pregnancies in grainy images that, according to leading medical groups, only a licensed physician or a specially trained advanced practice nurse should interpret. Henderson told one woman that abortion causes breast cancer – a claim widely disputed by medical research.
She informed another that she was not pregnant and just had a stomach virus.