Crisis Pregnancy Centers in Canada and Reproductive Justice Organizations’ Responses

The spread of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) has become an alarming issue in the fields of public health and reproductive justice (RJ) as they impede women’s fully-informed decisions and threaten women’s reproductive autonomy. However, most existing scholarship has only focused on CPCs within the United States; hardly any literature has been devoted to anti-CPC activism. This study contributes to addressing these gaps by adopting a mixed method. The paper first reviews the status quo of U.S. and Canadian CPCs through the existing literature to contextualize my investigation. Then it explores the establishment of individual Canadian CPCs to evaluate whether they are gaining more influence. It also analyzes the presence and absence of information on Canadian anti-CPC activism in the social media of RJ organizations. Finally, it examines the interviews I conducted with Canadian RJ activists to identify the ongoing anti-CPC activism and why some groups do not regard it central to their agenda. Results of this research reveal that CPCs have been continuously expanding in Canada during the past 35 years. Despite realizing their threat, most Canadian RJ groups do not focus their activism on CPCs and instead, concern themselves more with such issues as abortion access owing to their political engagement restriction, as well as their viewpoint that variation among Canadian CPCs and the Canadian liberal political context lessen CPCs’ overall threat. The limited ongoing activism includes lobbying for halting funding for CPCs, revoking their charitable statuses, banning their advertisements, and removing their biased sex education from public schools.