When my friend dialed the MyARnurse hotline, she expected scripted talking points against abortion. What she didn’t expect was the relentless interrogation.
“I think I might be pregnant,” she told the volunteer nurse. “And I don’t want to be.”
Rather than offering real medical information or resources, the nurse pressed her for deeply personal details: Where do you live? Who is the father? What do you do for work? She even laughed at my friend when my friend said she lived with her mother.
Every response was met with the same insistence: before my friend did anything else, she needed to visit one of their pregnancy centers for a “free, medical-grade pregnancy test.”
It didn’t matter that my friend had already taken a test at home. The nurse kept ignoring her autonomy, steering her away from any licensed medical provider and toward their clinics instead. She ended the call by praying for my friend to have wisdom to do what’s best.
The volunteer nurse’s point was clear: before you make any decisions about your pregnancy, we want to get to you first.
This is not healthcare. This is a state-funded psychological trap. The entire experience is designed to delay, confuse, and ultimately coerce women into one reproductive option while vilifying the other.
And Arkansas taxpayers are footing the bill for this fake healthcare.
The Arkansas Pregnancy Network’s deceptive “telehealth” program
The Arkansas Pregnancy Network (APN) presents itself as a telehealth service, but its real goal is to intercept women seeking abortion care and divert them to crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs).
The network operates MyARnurse, a hotline that disguises itself as a medical resource but provides no actual medical care. The nurses on the line are not doctors, and they cannot prescribe medications or offer legitimate medical advice. They even admit that when someone visits one of their centers that they will not see a physician. Instead, MyARnurse’s purpose is to funnel people toward anti-abortion pregnancy centers. These centers receive millions in state funding while providing no real healthcare, no transparency, and no privacy protection for clients.
The Google Ad trap
So how do you catch a woman seeking abortion before she sees an actual physician? Enter a state-funded, robust search engine optimization effort.
Arkansas Pregnancy Network and other CPCs cast a wide net with key search words. APN pays for Google ads that appear when someone searches for “abortion in Arkansas” or related terms. For example, when someone searches “how to get an abortion in Arkansas,” MyARnurse is the first site Google generates, listed as a sponsored search result. Their grant application states their intention explicitly:
“We want to be the first name she sees when searching online for ways to get an abortion… We have realized that we have not slowed down the number of women in our state that are seeking an abortion by means of travel or ordering pills online, and we know that by reaching her first, babies will be saved.”
In other words: they use taxpayer dollars to deceive people into believing they are an abortion provider or, at the very least, a neutral health service, which they are most certainly not.
The women behind the curtain
Arkansas Pregnancy Network is led by Christie Robertson, a longtime anti-abortion activist who previously directed the 1st Choice CPC in Fort Smith before launching MyARnurse.
Robertson is deeply connected to Arkansas’ Republican establishment, working alongside powerful anti-abortion legislators to funnel money into these operations. In 2022, Robertson threw her hat into a state legislative race in which she ran in the primary against incumbent Republican representative Charlene Fite.
Robertson was badly defeated, with Fite carrying 63% of the primary vote. But this has not stopped Robertson from pushing her way into the state’s inner circle of anti-choice lawmakers and government officials.
The group’s leadership includes directors of multiple crisis pregnancy centers across Arkansas, meaning the same people lobbying for abortion bans are also receiving state money to enforce them at the marketing level. APN deceives women seeking honest, professional medical advice from licensed healthcare professionals, and many lawmakers are happy to support this effort via legislation that extends their funding and quashes future choice efforts at the grassroots level.
Suppressing direct democracy
Beyond the deceptive hotline, Arkansas Pregnancy Network members were key players in the effort to defeat the Arkansas Abortion Amendment and are currently part of lawmakers’ efforts to suppress future pro-choice ballot initiatives in the state.
Here’s what we learned during one APN member’s legislative testimony:
- APN fought against the Arkansas Abortion Amendment, coordinating church groups to monitor canvassers and deter voters from signing the petition.
- They heartily support the slate of anti-direct democracy bills that would crush the ballot initiative process.
- They coordinated with Sen. Kim Hammer to provide testimony at committee like the false claim that canvassers lied about what the Arkansas Abortion Amendment would do.
- They championed the “Baby Olivia” bill, and coordinated with Rep. Mary Bentley provided testimony similar to the direct democracy bills.
- Members of the public who opposed Baby Olivia did not know when Bentley would run the bill in committee, but APN was privy to when the bill would be heard.
They are not just lobbying against abortion; they are actively eroding the right of Arkansans to vote on their own reproductive choices. We’ll say it again, this group is state funded.
Real-world harm
APN and its network of pregnancy centers don’t just waste a woman’s time. APN actively interferes with legitimate medical care.
According to one OBGYN that I spoke with, many of his pregnant patients say they visited a crisis pregnancy center before ever seeing a licensed doctor. “These centers pose as medical clinics by offering free ultrasounds. But often they cannot give complete medical advice — they can’t even provide an accurate due date,” he said. By the time they see a physician, these women have already had their options manipulated.
Crisis pregnancy centers are not medical facilities. They rarely have licensed medical professionals on staff. Many do not offer prenatal care or STI treatment. They do not provide contraceptives. They do not have to protect client information as outlined by HIPPA. They do not give informed consent. They are not qualified to give pregnancy advice. They are not required to place the patient first. They are not required to do no harm.
What they actually do: stall, mislead, and pressure pregnant people into forced birth.
CPCs delay access to real healthcare, pushing unnecessary ultrasounds and “pregnancy confirmation” appointments. They spread medical misinformation, including falsities like the debunked myth that the abortion pill can be reversed and that abortion causes psychological damage to women. They manipulate vulnerable individuals, using fear, shame, and deceptive marketing to trap them in their state funded, anti-choice system.
What we can do
Arkansans who believe politicians need to stay out of medicine should be outraged that their tax dollars are funding this forced-birth pipeline. Here’s what must happen:
End taxpayer funding for crisis pregnancy centers
We have to demand transparency on where state grant money is going and how it’s being used. This is especially important for groups like APN who admit to casting a wide net in order to catch as many pregnant women as they can. As voters, we must push lawmakers to stop funneling public money into reproductive misinformation campaigns.
Expose APN and its legislative allies
We also need to hold Governor Sanders and anti-choice legislators accountable for bankrolling deception with our money. As voters, we must demand an investigation into how state funds are being used to interfere with private medical decisions. One way you can take action is to submit an FOI request to the Office of Transportation Services and ask for digital copies of reports APN has submitted to the state.
Protect direct democracy in Arkansas
We are at a critical junction with safeguarding the direct democracy process. Arkansans must fight back against laws designed to block citizen-led ballot initiatives, regardless of party affiliation or partisan loyalty. An attack on the ballot initiative process is an attack on the people’s power. Some lawmakers are willing to destroy the entire process just to keep an issue they disagree with off the ballot. This is incredibly concerning — it means that those in power will go to any length to stop what they don’t like and support/fund/pass what they do. They will weaponize the bureaucratic process and use taxpayer funds to accomplish this. No future ballot initiative is safe.
The Arkansas Pregnancy Network is a taxpayer-funded political operation designed to strip Arkansans of their reproductive rights.
It’s time to defund deception.
It’s time to call out the lawmakers enabling this abuse.
And it’s time to stand up for direct democracy before they crush it for good.
Call to action:
- Call your representatives and demand an end to state funding for crisis pregnancy centers.
- Share this story and expose the APN network for what it truly is.
- Support organizations fighting for reproductive rights in Arkansas.
- Support efforts to defend direct democracy and the people’s power.
