Abortion-rights activists rallied on a busy corner of Michigan Avenue Saturday afternoon to raise awareness about “crisis pregnancy centers,” which they accuse of deceiving patients seeking abortion care.

Dozens of protesters from abortion-rights groups stood just a couple of feet away from Aid For Women, a center that offers free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and medical consultations. On its website, the center says it does not offer abortion services or abortion referrals, although it claims to help patients make “fully informed” decisions about their pregnancy.

Supporters of abortion rights say centers like Aid For Women discourage patients seeking to end their pregnancies from going through with it.

There are roughly 100 crisis pregnancy centers in Illinois, and activists allege some spread misinformation, such as a link between abortion and cancer, or conceal their religious affiliations and anti-abortion rights ideologies.

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“We’ve had some of our clients be forcibly restrained [in centers], told they were going to hell, shown ultrasounds against their will,” said Alicia Hurtado of the Chicago Abortion Fund, who attended the protest.

The rally comes just over a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and many states have approved bans or heavy restrictions on abortion. That has led to a surge in patients from other states coming to Illinois, where abortion is legal.

There are more crisis pregnancy centers than abortion clinics in Illinois, said Lisa Battisfore, the founder of Reproductive Transparency Now. And she says some women seeking abortion care unwittingly end up going to a center where the service isn’t provided and may be actively discouraged.

“You have people taking time off, having to get childcare, paying a lot of money, having to determine all of these logistics,” Battisfore said. “Then you have all these places which are specifically trying to create more barriers to [abortion] access.”

“There are cases where people have an appointment, but they only have one shot to get there. And if that is interrupted, that means they may be forced into a different future.”

Aid for Women was not open during Saturday’s protest, and a spokesperson was not available for comment.

Crisis pregnancy centers deny they use deceptive practices to dissuade patients from abortion. In a WBEZ story earlier this year, a nurse practitioner at a center in Peoria said she tells patients considering abortion to think about their lives “four or five years down the road and looking back on this.”

During their spring session in Springfield, Illinois lawmakers passed a bill that would allow people to sue crisis pregnancy centers if they believe they were given deceptive information about abortion care. The bill would also allow the state attorney general’s office to investigate. Abortion-rights supporters are urging Gov. JB Pritzker to sign the bill into law.

Abortion-rights opponents have blasted the bill, saying it targets the centers’ right to freedom of religious speech.

Anna Savchenko is a reporter for WBEZ. You can reach her at @annasavchenkoo.