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A digital collection of community research and photo archives celebrating the Central Coast's most pro-choice allies, including Women's March, Planned Parenthood, Generation Action, and Diversity Collective.
Your Pro-Choice Toolkits (updated Q3 2024)
Welcome to the most powerful suite of pro-choice tools available to activists in the Central Coast. These tools were developed through the crowdsourced contributions of countless community members across the region.
The result is the best clearinghouse of local pro-choice knowledge available to the community, driven by contributions from community members with professional experience ranging from UC Santa Barbara to Planned Parenthood Central Coast. Here are Toolkit components available to local activists so far...
Our community maintains the most accurate, localized whitelist of vetted abortion providers ever developed for the Central Coast. This whitelist enables side-by-side comparisons of both clinic services and geographic accessibility, based on proximity to major colleges and universities.
The Central Coast is home to almost 2.5 million residents – yet only eight abortion providers serve the entire region, or one provider for every 312,500 residents. Finding a provider is even tougher when "fake clinics" outnumber legitimate providers by an almost two-to-one margin.
In our region of California, fake clinics outnumber abortion providers two-to-one. That means training our community to recognize and report these fake clinics is essential to not only countering the sources of local anti-choice disinformation, but to saving people's lives.
This Toolkit component provides insights and analytics into the Central Coast's "crisis pregnancy centers", or CPCs. It also offers a localized checklist of red flags you can use to evaluate if you've discovered a CPC operating covertly in your own community.
"Secrecy is important for [CPCs] to function," says Director Shakouri of ReproAction.org. "They don't want their name or their fake clinics to be associated with them." That's why our community created this Watchlist: to expose CPC influence across the Central Coast.
The Watchlist provides the most accurate, localized and authoritative data on CPC proliferation in our region. It offers insights ranging from which youth populations these CPCs target, to which legitimate clinics these CPCs impersonate. The goal of the Watchlist: to save lives.
By operating from the shadows, CPCs serve as proliferators of "pro-life" disinformation in the community. Not only do they lie about abortion, birth control and even how women's bodies work, but 42% of CPCs in the Central Coast are linked with far-right groups that originated these lies.
This component explores the research methods we use to expose far-right groups, and the fake clinics they deploy to spread anti-choice falsehoods to those who accidentally visit fake clinics. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" when it comes to exposing anti-choice fraud.
Women aren’t alone in facing threats to their bodily autonomy in a post-Dobbs world. The LGBT community has long been a target of the anti-choice movement’s attempts to strip the community of access to lifesaving healthcare and services – including gender-affirming mental healthcare.
This Toolkit component not only highlights LGBT-friendly therapists who are local to the Central Coast, but also the community research strategies we developed to identify these therapists. Whether you’re a patient seeking services or an activist seeking resources, this Toolkit has what you need.
Disinformation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The hostile attacks that anti-choice and antigay organizations wage on communities throughout the Central Coast are made possible through local donors and businesses, which use covert political donations to fund hostile candidates and their policies.
That’s why we’re exposing the companies in the Central Coast that secretly fund anti-choice and anti-LGBT activity in our region. From chocolate shops to environmental consultancies, these are the businesses that fund disinformation about abortion, birth control and queer communities.
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