(LifeSiteNews) – As Planned Parenthood shutters locations across the United States due to lost federal funding, pro-life pregnancy centers are often prepared to step in with life-affirming alternatives.
The nation’s leading abortion chain says it closed 50 locations in 2025, 20 of them specifically in response to a one-year ban on federal tax dollars going through Medicaid to any that provides abortions for reasons other than rape, incest, or supposed threats to the mother’s life contained in President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” policy package.
On December 22, The New York Times highlighted one such example: the faith-based, fully licensed Obria Medical Clinic. Tamra Call, the group’s executive director, hopes Obria can grow into a “key provider to fill gaps left by Planned Parenthood’s exit.” The article recounts how she stepped in when the abortion giant announced the impending closure of its location in her hometown of Ames, Iowa, by personally visiting to offer Obria literature.
“I’d love to leave some information for your patients,” she told the security guard. “We just want them to know we are here.”
Obria currently has 16 locations in five states that boast licensed nurse practitioners and offers ultrasounds, pap smears, sexually transmitted disease testing, and more – all services Planned Parenthood offers but which have been steadily declining relative to its abortion business since long before the latest round of defunding measures. Obria’s website states upfront that it does not provide abortions or abortion referrals.
Obria also does not offer birth control in keeping with its “sacred view of sex” as a Christian organization. It does not compromise its religious identity but does not go out of its way to advertise it either to avoid the “baggage, for lack of a better word, that can come with an overt message that we are a Christian-based organization,” according to Call.
“We want people to know: Planned Parenthood has closed, but there is still reproductive health care in Ames,” she says. “We are ready to receive these women.”
“This is the moment for pregnancy centers to announce themselves to the world,” John Mize, chief executive of Americans United for Life, told the Times. “There is an increasing awareness that Planned Parenthood is struggling, and we have an opportunity to be what they always promised to be, but really never were — a true social safety net.”
Crisis pregnancy centers and other community health locations have long provided low-income women with a wide variety of services, including ultrasounds, basic medical care, adoption referrals, parenting classes, and children’s supplies that help mitigate the fears and burdens that lead some to choose abortion. For that reason, they have long been a target of left-wing rage, with attacks often focusing on claims that they deceive women, both about abortion and about their own services. But the pro-life contentions most often derided as “misinformation” are in fact true, and accusations of self-misrepresentation typically refer to little more than the fact that ads for them appear in online searches for the term “abortion.”
The abortion movement is notoriously hostile to such alternatives to abortion, from publicity campaigns to malign crisis pregnancy centers to attempts to strip medical licenses from pro-life doctors to violence and threats against pregnancy centers that under the Biden administration were less likely to be prosecuted than purported cases of anti-abortion violence.
