By now most of us are familiar with crisis pregnancy centers, which masquerade as women's health clinics but do not provide abortions, contraception, or other medical care. Apparently they're also misleading women online. Recently a faux-clinic in Wisconsin purchased a URL that was nearly identical to the URL for the website of Family Planning Health Services, the local women's health clinic -- so women who unwittingly typed in the wrong address were redirected to the anti-choice site.

That's called cybersquatting, and here at Feministing, we're quite familiar with this concept, as some devoted anti-feminists created a parody of our site using a nearly identical URL -- though it now seems to be defunct.

But back to the faux-clinics misleading women online:

Hope Pregnancy Resource Center, which opposes abortion and doesn't offer contraceptives, banked on the fact that some people switch up the ".com"s and ".org"s when typing in Web addresses.

Hope bought the domain name www.fphs.com about one year ago, Board Chairman Rick Orrick confirmed.

That address is very similar to www.fphs.org, which is the site owned by Family Planning Health Services, the reproductive health services clinic.

Last week Hope took down the Web site after a reporter for the local paper, City Pages, began asking questions.

In other words, people who intended to get this site actually got this one.

Want to bet that some women who were misdirected to the faux-clinic's site actually ended up going to the wrong clinic in real life (after copying down the phone number and address from the website)? The women's health clinic is pretty sure this has happened:

Coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago I received an email from a friend in the community. He told me that the daughter of one of their employees had gone to one of our family planning clinics. The staff prayed with her for an hour, convinced her that she was a sinner, gave her a Bible and sent her home. He asked if this was a new requirement for our federal grant. (Witty guy)

We investigated.

My third thought (after the ‘Someone’s had a breakdown’ and ‘We’ve hired a ringer.’) was that the young woman had visited the phony fphs.com website and been misdirected to the Crisis Pregnancy Center.

The crisis-pregnancy center has changed the similar URL so it no longer redirects visitors, but its own website is still up and running, including this awesomely hypocritical quote: "Remember an informed and empowered woman is one who has taken the time to get good, unbiased, factual information." This from a crisis-pregnancy center that provides misleading information but presents itself -- online and in real life -- as a clinic that provides actual health care for women? Real nice.