About Trillium Women’s Center
When you google "abortion in Kitsap County," the AI summary invariably recommends contacting Trillium Women's Center. This is because Trillium has gamed the search engines. Trillium Women's Center isn't a real clinic; it's a crisis pregnancy center.
Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are religious organizations that masquerade as reproductive health clinics. Their staff are almost never actual clinicians, and they can offer only limited medical services. They pick bland, innocuous names and locate themselves near actual reproductive health clinics in order to lure women and girls seeking medical care. They offer a few services for free, like pregnancy tests, limited ultrasounds, and sometimes HIV and other STD testing.
But what crisis pregnancy centers really offer is judgment, shame, fear, lies, and threats of damnation. The first CPC was founded by Robert Pearson, who said, "A killer, who in this case is the girl who wants to kill her baby, has no right to information that will help her kill her baby," and "Let nothing stop you. The stakes are life or death." The only goal of a crisis pregnancy center is to prevent abortions by any means necessary.
Here are some of the lies told every day by CPCs across the country:
Abortion causes cancer, infertility, PTSD, depression, and suicide. (Abortion isn't correlated with any of those things.)
Abortion is dangerous, and severe complications are common. (Both abortion medication and in-clinic abortion procedures are safe, an order of magnitude safer than pregnancy and childbirth.)
They keep clients' personal information confidential. (They're not bound by HIPAA, and they've been caught sharing private information with national organizations and with law enforcement.)
An abortion won't work for a particular client, or their pregnancy is too far along to get an abortion, or the client will probably miscarry anyway, so they shouldn't bother with an abortion.
A fetus seen on an ultrasound is more (or less) developed than it actually is.
Fetuses in early pregnancy can feel pain. (They can't.)
Medication abortions can be reversed with large doses of progesterone (It doesn't work.)
Their centers are judgment- and pressure-free places to talk about pregnancy options. (They'll do whatever it takes to talk clients out of abortion.)
Let's take a look at Trillium Women's Center's website. (I won't link to it here, so as not to help them with their search engine optimization, but you can find it easily by searching for "Trillium Women's Center".)
Here's their sales pitch: Come to us before anyone else, get a free pregnancy test (side note: you can buy these in bulk for 20 cents each), and a free ultrasound. "Viable" in this context means the fetus has a detectable heartbeat. When you click on "Am I Pregnant?" you see:
Boy, Trillium Women's Center really wants to see you early if they're telling you to come in when you're only 2 days late. Cycles can fluctuate by a few days here or there, even for people with very regular periods. A pregnant person who had missed a period that recently would be approximately 4 weeks along. At 4 weeks, no cardiac activity would be detectable with an ultrasound, which is the main service they provide. But if they encourage you to wait a week to see if your period arrives, they may have missed their opportunity to keep you out of Planned Parenthood.
Back on the homepage, "You still have options in Washington" seems to refer to the fact that abortion is legal here, as it isn't in many parts of the country. This is a reassuring statement to someone seeking an abortion and implies that Trillium Women's Center is on their side. It isn't. "We provide pregnancy services" sounds like they do prenatal care, doesn't it? They don't.
Here's Trillium's disclaimer, which Google requires them to have on their webpage in order to advertise. They reluctantly affirm that they don't offer abortion services but want you to think they'll answer your questions about abortion.
Here, they're promising a pressure-free environment. I doubt they can offer that, and here's why:
This is their donation page. To clients, they say "pressure-free." To their donors, they say, "keep us saving babies." Their donors would be awfully disappointed if Trillium Women's Center wasn't in the business of pressuring clients to stay pregnant at all costs. Remember Robert Pearson's words: "Let nothing stop you. The stakes are life and death."
Like other crisis pregnancy centers, Trillium Women's Center claims to offer "evidence-based medical information" and pulls out all the stops with this last line: "No Shame. No judgment. Just support." In reality, CPCs are known to lie to clients about what an abortion entails, to make them watch frightening, gory videos or look at pictures that purport to be of dead fetuses. Note also their mention of "potential side effects." This is the part of the lecture where they would lie about abortion causing cancer, infertility, and mental illness when, in fact, all types of abortion are very safe.
This is from their page about abortion pills. And here's another lie: They seem to be saying that abortion pills don't work for people whose fetuses do not have a heartbeat. This is nonsense. Abortion pills are used in miscarriage care at any gestation. Trillium Women's Center wants to have something to say to their clients whose fetal heartbeat is detectable ("an abortion will stop this beating heart") and whose fetal heartbeat is not detectable ("an abortion won't work for you"). It's also possible that when a client is very early in their pregnancy, Trillium might lie and say the pregnancy isn't viable, even though it's too early for cardiac activity to be detected by an ultrasound. Abortion pills are effective early in pregnancy. If Trillium wants to tell you abortion pills won't work for you, they're lying.
All of this is not to say that Trillium Women's Center is a bad or evil place. It's okay to not want an abortion and to seek support in that, and it's okay for Trillium to offer such support. However, it's not okay to lie to women and terrorize them with debunked statistics and gory pictures. A place that claims to offer non-judgmental support should be better than that.
If you're currently pregnant and unsure of what to do, we do not recommend contacting crisis pregnancy centers like Trillium Women's Center. Instead, you can call the All-Options Talkline at 888-493-0092 to talk with a tra\ined peer counselor about all your options, including parenting, adoption, and abortion. You deserve the truth, you deserve space to make your decisions, and you deserve support in taking your next steps, whatever those steps may be.