Originally published by The 19th.

Savannah McNally was 24 years old, and in the middle of a divorce, trying to sell her house, wrapping up her service in the Navy and figuring out a way to finish college. She was also pregnant.

“It was pretty much instantly a feeling of dread. I didn’t want to be pregnant. I don’t want kids,” McNally recalled. “I was crying and screaming, ‘This is not going to happen.’”

It was July 2022, and she was living in Texas, which had only just begun to enforce a near-total ban on abortion.

She ordered medication to induce an abortion but wanted first to make sure the home tests she’d taken were accurate. She found a center online that advertised its free ultrasounds, and she hoped it would give her information about how far along she was. McNally went twice to the center, where she was careful never to mention that she planned to terminate her pregnancy. At her second visit, she was told she was just shy of seven weeks — early enough, she thought to herself, that she could safely terminate her pregnancy at home. Then, a woman wearing a white coat and a physician’s assistant badge told her an abortion could send her to the hospital.

“She told me I would be able to see all of its fingers and toes and its little body would be completely formed if I had an abortion,” McNally said. “I’ve been through miscarriage with my mom and had a couple of myself. That’s not accurate.”

McNally left the center furious. The decision to have an abortion was one she had thought about carefully. And yet it felt like nobody at the center had listened to her or considered her perspective — instead, she felt judged, misinformed and unheard.

Her boyfriend, terrified by what he had heard, was no longer supportive of her decision to end the pregnancy. McNally was shaken, too. It took her a week and a half to recover from the visit before she felt comfortable finally taking the medication to induce her abortion.

McNally didn’t realize until later what had happened. Instead of visiting a medical clinic, she’d found herself at an anti-abortion center, a type of facility gaining increasing prominence as abortion bans shutter health clinics across the country.

In states like Texas, pregnant people have turned in larger numbers to these anti-abortion centers — also known as crisis pregnancy centers — that have come under fire from medical professionals for presenting inaccurate information about pregnancy and that deliberately aim to dissuade people from getting abortions. Since the Supreme Court reversed federal abortion protections in the case........

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