If you had the means to provide diapers to a struggling new parent, what would you demand from them in return?
Would you require that they listen to your parenting advice for an hour before they could take their Huggies home? Would you subject them to a proselytizing lecture on your preferred interpretation of Christianity, or force them to sign up for a group counseling session with strangers? All so they could prove themselves worthy of receiving a few days’ worth of the most essential baby care products?
This is the service model favored by thousands of the anti-abortion pregnancy centers across the country that operate as the public-facing front of the movement to ban abortion both at the state and federal levels. These centers, which bill themselves as judgment-free resources for “vulnerable women and youth,” often present a warm, fuzzy facade that belies a darker mission: using fear, spiritual coercion, and shame tactics to spread lies and disinformation about abortion care. Few of these centers offer medical services beyond non-diagnostic ultrasounds, though they often strive to imitate full-service women’s health clinics in the hopes of being mistaken for providers of pap smears, contraception, and abortion care or referrals. To be clear: Even those anti-abortion pregnancy centers that do provide some medical services have one primary purpose—to mislead and shame people seeking abortion care.
In the years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, these outfits have increasingly used public funds awarded to them by anti-abortion politicians to target people looking for medical care and safety net support, only to subject their clients to religious screeds, fearmongering, and false information about their pregnancies. Especially here in Texas.
May 2022 abortion rights protest at Texas Capitol in Austin (Gus Bova/Texas Observer)
That’s just one reason why, with our partners at Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, Reproaction has launched a nimble, searchable database that tracks financial data on these anti-abortion pregnancy centers, which enjoy the privilege of spending millions in taxpayer dollars with little to no accountability around the limited, often religiously motivated, services they purport to offer. Among the organizations in our database is the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, which reported a whopping $217 million in revenue for 2021 and operates the anti-abortion pregnancy center Blessed Beginnings. The nonprofit reported spending about $8 million that year on “nurturing and caring for children,” including the Blessed Beginnings program.
What might I do with this kind of money to support pregnant people and their families hustling to get by? Well, handing out diapers to anyone who needed them would be a pretty good start. But when I dug into Blessed Beginnings’ advertised offerings, I found their “pregnancy and parenting services” site using an oversized font to warn visitors: “**We are NOT a diaper distribution center – must schedule appointments with case managers for assistance**.” It’s not clear from their intake form what an appointment with a Blessed Beginnings “case manager” entails. But diapers on demand, at least, don’t appear to be on the menu.
In a statement to the Texas Observer, a Catholic Charities spokesperson said Blessed Beginnings provides free diapers to parents enrolled in parenting education classes and to parents enrolled in case management, but not generally to parents outside those programs. Separate from Blessed Beginnings, the spokesperson said, the nonprofit does sometimes offer free diapers through its food pantries.
This isn’t surprising—anti-abortion centers usually attach strings to supposedly “free” services and material support, rooted as they are in outdated, patriarchal, and patronizing beliefs about which kinds of people, and which kinds of families, are deserving of support. But it is appalling considering the incredible financial resources at their disposal.
Other highly resourced Texas nonprofits in our database include Catholic Charities Fort Worth, which operates its own Blessed Beginnings center, and The Source, an anti-abortion pregnancy center based in Austin.
Blessed Beginnings is part of the taxpayer-funded Thriving Texas Families (formerly “Alternatives to Abortion”) program under the Texas Pregnancy Care Network, which as ProPublica reported this summer, “receives the most funding” of the program’s contractors and has been tasked with “most program oversight.”
But to the extent that oversight exists at all, it is disturbingly inadequate. Not only are anti-abortion pregnancy centers medically unregulated, but past recipients of Texas’ state funds have misused taxpayer money: One anti-abortion pregnancy center used funds to open a smoke shop, and another anti-abortion center group was booted from a separate state program when it promised to replace Planned Parenthood but, after years of mismanagement, failed to deliver on its promise to serve tens of thousands of low-income Texans. We have been promised better supervision of the Thriving Texas Families program’s contractors to come, but it’s hard to imagine how rigorous these forthcoming accountability measures might be considering the entity tasked with the job receives most of the program’s annual funding.
Federal, state, and local governments have a duty to protect their constituents from the disinformation, spiritual abuse, deceptive business practices, and inadequate medical care provided at anti-abortion pregnancy centers, instead of subsidizing these harms with taxpayer dollars. It was bad enough when, pre-Roe, anti-abortion pregnancy centers were simply corralling low-income people into Bible classes in the hope that they might squeeze a religious conversion out of a mom who couldn’t afford diapers.
But today, anti-abortion pregnancy centers coerce and deceive Texans because, in the post-Roe world, there’s big money to be made in the business of using unpaid, often church-sourced, volunteers to provide minimal services. Since the fall of Roe, anti-abortion pregnancy centers are supposed to be the grand solution to the actual pregnancy crisis unfolding across the country, and state politicians have handed out nearly $500 million in public funds to these groups. There are more of them than ever, but they’re doing even more harm, and as little good, as they ever did—with a bigger chunk of our money.
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