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John Oliver thinks Crisis Pregnancy Centres are 'bulls***' - so he opened one

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HBO

Having expertly tackled Mike Pence's homophobia with an imaginative gay rabbit, John Oliver has now turned his sights to Crisis Pregnancy Centres (CPCs) and accused them of "emotional manipulation" and "bulls***".

CPCs - or the "exact opposite of an abortion clinic", as Oliver said on Sunday's Last Week Tonight - don't provide abortions, but "are only there to talk women out of abortions".

In an eye-opening segment, Oliver talks through how the organisations are actually a tool to actively prevent women from having abortions, even though they marketed as support for women wanting to talk through their options when facing an unplanned pregnancy. Oliver explained:

Way too often, women with unplanned pregnancies are being actively misled when trying to access health care. And CPCs seem happy to have women confuse them for abortion clinics.

Often conservative Christian-run clinics that don't help people in any meaningful way, CPCs lure women in by building offices next door to abortion clinics and parking mobile CPCs nearby. Some even reportedly list themselves under 'abortion services' or 'abortion clinics'.

Staff at CPCs then tell blatant and dangerous fibs: attributing suicidal behaviours, increased risk of breast cancer and infertility to abortion. In one case reported by the The Daily Beast, a staff member claimed that 30 per cent of women who get abortions die within the first year due to complications.

At one CPC, technicians type out “messages” from unborn babies (“hi mommy and daddy”) as they perform ultrasounds, according to The Daily Beast.

This is despite CPCs often having the word 'choice' in the name, said Oliver, while the centres actually promote the exact opposite: a blinkered and ideology-driven version of options available to women.

Oliver's next step? Setting his own mobile CPC - called 'Vanned Parenthood', obviously - in New York state to prove how easy it is to set-up a centre.

His is just another of the 4,000 estimated CPCs in the United States, vastly outnumbering abortion clinics, recently estimated to stand at less than 800.

More: John Oliver is perfectly trolling Mike Pence with a children's book about a gay rabbit

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