Free pregnancy ultrasounds offer help in barren Arkansas reproductive health landscape

The offer of free ultrasounds has long been a ploy to lure unsuspecting women into staunchly anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers. Now, the service is being offered in Little Rock with no ideological strings attached. 

Thanks to the help of a grant, the Y.O.U. Center (Your Options, Understood) is now offering free, walk-in pregnancy ultrasounds for anyone who needs it two Saturdays a month.

Ultrasound days and times are tomorrow (Saturday, Nov. 8) and Saturday, Nov. 22, both from 10 a.m. through 4 p.m. at The Y.O.U. Center. A licensed sonographer will do elective ultrasounds on a first-come, first-served basis. The Y.O.U. Center will be able to date gestation and confirm that a pregnancy is not ectopic or multiple. 

The Y.O.U. Center, a project of the Arkansas Abortion Support Network, has been doing free ultrasounds for a while, but Executive Director Karen Musick said she felt uncomfortable using money earmarked for abortion assistance to pay for ultrasounds unless there was a medical reason. In October, the reproductive justice group received a grant to specifically do ultrasounds. 

The service is open to anyone, including people who simply want to see what their pregnancy looks like and don’t want an abortion. That might be confusing for people unaware of the Arkansas Abortion Support Network’s multifaceted mission. While the group helps pregnant people in Arkansas seek abortion in states where abortion remains legal, it also provides emergency contraceptives and offers other pregnancy-related resources. 

The organization continues to muscle forward despite Arkansas’s near-total abortion ban that kicked in with a 2019 trigger law that went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Roe v. Wade was the 1973 Supreme Court case that established abortion as a constitutional right.

The Arkansas Abortion Support Network’s Y.O.U. Center calls itself a pregnancy resource center in part to counter the often Christian-based, sometimes state-funded crisis pregnancy centers, also known as pregnancy resource centers, that represent carrying a pregnancy to term as the only option. The Y.O.U. Center bills itself as “Arkansas’ first and only abortion and pregnancy resource center,” according to its website. Unlike other pregnancy resource centers, however, the Y.O.U. Center receives no state funding.

In March 2022, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed Act 187, which required the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration to establish a $1 million program to give grants to crisis pregnancy centers, adoption centers and maternity homes. Arkansas is home to nearly 50 of these crisis pregnancy centers.

Musick said crisis pregnancy centers can be dangerous, as they are unregulated and have unlicensed people working there.

“They advertise saying, ‘If you’re thinking about an abortion, we can help you.’ They do all of that without actually helping people,” Musick said. “If you go in, if you call them, if you tell them, ‘I need an abortion,’ they will not tell you how to get one … because their goal is for you to carry that baby to term and that’s their sole goal and they’re basing that on a religious belief that not all of us share.”

The Y.O.U. Center operates out of the former Little Rock Family Planning Services building, the abortion clinic and primary abortion provider in the state that closed with the fall of Roe v. Wade. Musick, who used to work escorting women into the clinic past anti-choice hecklers, helped usher the facility into its new and still useful phase. 

The Y.O.U. Center does not collect any personal information about visitors because Musick said it isn’t necessary.

“If you’re going to help someone, you don’t need to have their address,” Musick said. The only information requested is demographic information, used for grant purposes.

“The state wants you to be pregnant no matter what,” she said. “We want you to know your options. If you want to be pregnant, we’ll connect you with resources, and we can help you with what we have here. If you don’t want to be pregnant, the state will give you zero help, and we will help you get that information and know how to go about doing it in a safe way.”

The free ultrasounds at the Y.O.U. Center are not for people with high-risk pregnancies or anyone having emergency symptoms; they are advised to go to a medical facility. 

If someone needs an emergency ultrasound, they can call the hotline at 501-487-5244.