How ChoiceWatch is built, and how to check every figure.
There is no government registry of crisis pregnancy centers, so we crowd-source online lists and records to identify candidate centers, drawing on indexes compiled by the lay public, by centers themselves, and by advocacy groups. Three sources are primary
- Reproaction's Fake Clinic Database A national database of centers, compiled by systematic internet searches.
- Abortion Access Front's Expose Fake Clinics A state-by-state directory of center locations, also built by systematic internet searches.
- Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch Regularly updated center lists drawn from their policy briefs and litigation support.
No universally agreed definition of a crisis pregnancy center exists in the scientific or policy literature. Such centers have been defined, among other ways, as “nonprofit organizations with a primary aim of keeping women from having an abortion.”
For our purposes, a crisis pregnancy center is an organization that offers pregnancy-related services directly to women who are or may become pregnant and that does not provide or refer for abortion. Centers were identified by these criteria as observed on their websites, not by any assessment of intent.
Most reviewed websites represent a single center, but some centers operate several locations within a city or county. Representative examples included in the archive:
- HELP Pregnancy Center monroehelp.com
- Helping Hands CPC helpinghandscpc.org
- First Coast Women’s Services fcws.org
- SLV Life Center slvlifecenter.org
- ZOE for Life zoeforlife.org
- Cumming Women’s Center cummingwomenscenter.org
Centers often manage two personas for the public: one for the women who would use their services, and one for donors and volunteers. Some keep both on a single site; others maintain separate sites. Some have no client-facing site at all, though their fundraising site still describes their services. We default to the client-facing website, and fall back to the fundraising site where none exists.
Confirmed sites are archived in full. Each archive is named for the year data gathering began, and is a fixed, citable snapshot, which is what makes the analysis verifiable.
- 2023 1,661 sites archived
- 2024 1,938 sites archived
- 2025 1,798 sites archived
Archived center websites per archive year; bar lengths are relative to the largest archive (2024, 1,938 sites).
Because the live web moves on, a center’s site today may not match what was analyzed. The archived snapshot is the version of record. Raw data can be requested for additional offline analysis by contacting the ChoiceWatch team.
The archived corpus is indexed with Solr, built on Lucene, for free-text search. Text is lower-cased, tokenized, and stemmed, and queries are expanded with a curated dictionary of domain synonyms, so search matches meaning-equivalent phrasings, not just identical strings — searching APR also finds abortion pill reversal and abortion pill rescue.
The search supports the operators scientists expect:
abortion pill
pages containing all the words, including synonym and word-variant matches
"abortion pill"
exactly this phrase, literally: no synonyms, no word variants
ultrasound OR sonogram
either term
-donate
excludes pages containing the word
contra*
prefix match: contraception, contraindication, and the like
"abortion reversal"~5
the words within five words of each other: catches phrasings a fixed phrase misses
| You search | You get | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
abortion pill reversal |
all words + synonyms + variants | discovery: find everything related |
"abortion pill reversal" |
exactly that phrase, literally | precision: countable, quotable |
| Filter: Abortion Pill Reversal | the versioned coded definition, evidence highlighted | official statistics |
On top of the index sit the filters defined by ChoiceWatch investigators: employer identification number, services offered, state of operation, network affiliation, and archive year. Affiliation is not exclusive — a center can be affiliated with more than one network at once, so affiliation counts can sum to more than the number of centers. Service filters execute the study’s published coding definitions verbatim — selecting Abortion Pill Reversal runs the exact phrase dictionary from the coding manual and highlights the qualifying passages on each site, so every count is reproducible and every classification shows its evidence.
A site is labeled for a service if any of that service’s keywords appears anywhere on it. Terms are searched exactly. A label records a mention, not a claim that the service is offered — a center that names a service on a page is counted, whether or not it provides it. The three groups are listed below in the order they appear throughout the site: medical, privacy, then social. The full vocabulary is published here so any result can be reproduced:
Medical services
| Service | Keywords and phrases |
|---|---|
| Abortion Education | abortion educationeducating/educate yourselfpeer counselingabortion counselingoptions consultation |
| Abortion Pill Reversal | pill reversalabortion pill rescueabortion pill reversalreversing abortion |
| Pregnancy Tests | pregnancy testing/testshome pregnancy test / HPTpregnancy test kitpregnancy test stickhuman chorionic gonadotropin (hCG)pee-on-a-stickpregnancy consultationearly pregnancy detection |
| STI Testing | STI testingSTD testingSTI/STD screeningchlamydiagonorrheatrichomoniasissyphilisSTI/STD panelsexual health screeningHIV/AIDSSTI/STD education |
| Ultrasound | limited obstetrical ultrasoundsobstetric ultrasoundprenatal ultrasoundfetal ultrasoundultrasound scanpregnancy ultrasoundultrasound |
Privacy claims
| Service | Keywords and phrases |
|---|---|
| HIPAA | HIPAA-compliantHIPAA compliantHIPAA privacyHIPAA Notice of Privacy Practices |
| Privacy policy | privacy and confidentiality policyprivacy policyconfidentiality policy |
Social services
| Service | Keywords and phrases |
|---|---|
| Adoption | adoption supportadoption[open, semi-open, closed] adoptionsadoption planadoption informationadoption agencyfoster care |
| Men’s Social Support | paternity testingmen’s supportsupport for menman-to-man mentoringmen’s healthman to man / man-to-man |
| Parenting | parenting classesparenting educationparenting programparenting workshopparenting coursesprenatal classesrelationship counselingeducational classes |
| Post-Abortion Social Support | post-abortion supportpost-abortion syndrome (PAS)post-abortion support groupabortion recovery supportafter abortion supportpost-abortion counseling |
ChoiceWatch tells you what centers say to the public: nationally, verifiably, and over time. Analyses produced on this platform have been published in top medical journals, cited in attorneys general’s reports, and used by legislators — and you can produce your own, here, for free.
Because no government registry of centers exists, coverage of every center in operation cannot be guaranteed; if you know of a center we should monitor, please contact the ChoiceWatch team.
ChoiceWatch is a gateway to public data. It records what centers published on their own websites, on the dates we captured them, and it shows the passage behind every count so anyone can check it. It does not evaluate the centers, verify what they offer, or take a position on what any center or reader should do.
What the archive supports is a narrow, checkable claim: this text was on this page on this date. Whether a service named on a page is actually available, whether a claim is accurate, and what any of it means are questions the archive does not answer. Anyone drawing a broader conclusion is responsible for the evidence behind it.
We publish the data, the queries, and the keyword vocabulary so that work built on ChoiceWatch can be reproduced and, where it is wrong, corrected. We are not responsible for how others use, summarize, or characterize it. ChoiceWatch is free to use and free to cite; please cite the archive year alongside any figure, because the answer changes with the capture.
Corrections are welcome. If a figure looks wrong, or a center is misidentified, contact the ChoiceWatch team.