A crisis pregnancy center in Massachusetts failed to diagnose an ectopic pregnancy, leading to a life-threatening emergency for the patient, a lawsuit filed last week alleges.
The complaint, filed Thursday, says the anti-abortion Clearway Clinic in Worcester, about 50 miles southwest of Boston, engages in false advertising, aimed at persuading women to forgo abortions instead of ” provide them with the range of medically appropriate options.
The plaintiff, a Worcester resident who remains anonymous in the lawsuit, alleges that the nurse who performed the ultrasound at the center “did not take sufficient medical measures” to ensure that the pregnancy was viable.
An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside of the uterus, most often in the fallopian tube. Such pregnancies are generally not viable and can be life-threatening.
The lawsuit alleges that the woman’s fallopian tube ruptured approximately a month after the ultrasound, “resulting in massive internal bleeding and requiring emergency surgery.”
Shannon Liss-Riordan, the patient’s attorney, said there is no evidence the nurse intentionally misled her. Instead, Liss-Riordan said, the staff member “missed” the ectopic pregnancy because she “wasn’t qualified to do this.”
Representatives for the Clearway Clinic, which has a second clinic in Springfield, did not respond to requests for comment.
The clinic’s executive director, Jill Jorgensen, told local news outlet MassLive that patient privacy laws prevented clinic officials from discussing a patient’s case. He said the clinic “has served more than 10,000 women and their families in the Worcester area over the past 22 years at no cost and I’ve never had a complaint like this before.”
Crisis pregnancy centers are facilities that seek to discourage women from having an abortion and often offer resources, including diapers, baby clothes, and STI testing, according to the Crisis Pregnancy Center Mapa database created by researchers at the University of Georgia. More than 2,500 centers of this type operate in the US. In Massachusetts, where abortion is legal up to 24 weeks, there are 29claughter centersoutnumbering those of the state 19 abortion clinics.
‘You don’t know who is doing the ultrasound’
The lawsuit alleges that the Clearway Clinic’s website fails to make it clear that “its true goal is to discourage women from terminating their pregnancies.”
Liss-Riordan said her client came across the clinic when she searched online for a nearby ultrasound.
Documentation the woman received after the scan, Liss-Riordan said, told her she had a “viable pregnancy in utero, which she did not.”
The lawsuit also alleges that the paperwork was signed by a doctor, who is listed as the clinic’s “medical director,” although the patient said she did not see the director in person.
After the woman left Clearway, Liss-Riordan said, staff “followed up with her urging her to continue the pregnancy.”
Dr. Amy Addante, an Illinois-based OB/GYN and a member of the advocacy group Physicians for Reproductive Health, said ectopic pregnancies generally should be terminated “as soon as possible.”
The alleged incident in Clearway, she said, “speaks to the dangers that crisis pregnancy centers can really present to pregnant people, because you don’t know who’s doing your ultrasound.”
Most staff members at crisis pregnancy centers are volunteers, according to Charlotte Lozier Institute, an arm of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. As of 2019, the institute found that less than 40% of the combined staff and volunteer workers at such centers were licensed medical professionals.
Crisis pregnancy centers served 1.85 million people in 2019, according to the Lozier Institute. The number has likely increased since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision struck down Roe v. Wade last year, because abortion access is now prohibited, severely restricted or unavailable in nearly two dozen states.
Liss-Riordan said she and her client hope the case “serves as a warning to other crisis pregnancy centers that have engaged in deceptive acts.”
The lawsuit was filed as a class action to allow other potential plaintiffs to join in the future.
Complaints of misinformation against pregnancy centers in crisis
The Clearway Clinic website says so provides “pre-abortion consultations” for discuss “Emotional complications associated with the abortion procedure”. He also says he provides free ultrasounds and “abortion pill reversal.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says Claims about abortion pill reversal “are not based on science and do not meet clinical standards.” The practice usually involves a dose of the hormone progesterone.
The Clearway website also says that the clinic employs “a team of board-certified doctors and nurses.”
But Addante said that “his best guess is that whoever did the initial ultrasound on this patient was not someone qualified to do it.”
A review of the research literature on crisis pregnancy centers, published in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics in 2018documented several cases in which OB/GYN researchers have accused the facility of spreading medical misinformation.
Two undercover NBC News producers visited state-funded crisis pregnancy centers in Texas after Roe v. Wade, and their investigation found that counselors falsely Affirmed abortions cause mental illness and falsely implicit They could cause cancer and infertility.
Liss-Riordan said her client sued because she “wanted to prevent other women from experiencing the kind of cheating that she experienced.”
Many women, she said, go to such centers “and have no idea that they walked into anything other than a regular medical clinic.”
