Why are anti-abortion facilities and programs which are objectionable to my beliefs still able to get federal grants?

[bigtree]

...now that the Supreme Court has said that states can refuse to provide Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood because of religious or political objections to abortion, why are pregnancy centers and organizations which are political opposite of those now SC-protected religious beliefs still allowed to receive funding?

Why are anti-abortion facilities and programs still able to get federal grants? The 'Christian' religious beliefs which they promote to patients isn't universal or tolerating of other religions or other beliefs.


...from 07/11/24

House Democrats call for investigation into crisis pregnancy center funding

CPCs have been allowed to receive federal funding since 1996, though Democratic Senators Raskin and Frost said there has been limited oversight and transparency into how that money is allocated and used.

“Given the concerns from medical professionals and reproductive health experts that CPCs are not bound by medical and ethical practice standards and often do not provide medically accurate information or health care, and the resources they do provide are tied to undermining maternal health and access to abortion, we have serious concerns that CPCs continue to receive millions in federal aid with little transparency and accountability to the public,” they wrote.

Recently, a study found that more than 650 CPCs in 49 states and Washington, D.C., received $400 million in federal funding, including block grants, between 2017 and 2023. More than half of the money came from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, which distributed more than $280 million to CPCs.

Funding also came from programs including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Teen Pregnancy Prevention, Title X Federal Family Planning grants and the Federal Emergency Management Agency Emergency Food and Shelter Program.

While most crisis pregnancy centers offer counseling and basic medical assistance to pregnant women, including ultrasounds, others give misleading information in an effort to discourage abortion, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

report: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4766637-oversight-committee-democrats-crisis-pregnancy-center-funding/

Though members of the CPC movement may describe their motivations as more spiritual than political (Hussey Citation2020), CPCs have become increasingly intertwined with the state through their clients’ needs, politicians' interest in CPCs, and the commensurate funding following this interest. CPCs report that funding is largely the result of individual donations and fundraising (Hussey Citation2020). At the same time, thirteen US states provide funding streams for CPCs thought TANF and Title X. In 1996, the Ohio legislature implemented welfare reform with the introduction of TANF, which had time limits and work requirements (Hallett Citation2009). In the wake of declining cash assistance, CPCs stepped into the social safety net by attracting new clients who needed aid (Hussey Citation2020). More recently, Ohio lawmakers have directed TANF and Title X funds toward a grant programme for CPCs to ‘increase community awareness’ of relevant services for parents with infants, specifically promoting ‘childbirth, parenting, and alternatives to abortion’ (Ohio Legislature Citation2013; ODAS [Ohio Department of Administrative Services] Citation2019). Solidifying connections between CPCs and the state via such funding mechanisms raises questions about how each organisations’ goals align and how workers negotiate not only the tension between helping people experiencing poverty while promoting individual solutions to poverty, but also how these tensions are shaped by an anti-abortion agenda.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691058.2022.2116489#d1e474


___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.


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 of 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.

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.

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, 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.


https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-taxpayers-anti-abortion-pregnancy-centers/

[Silent Type]

1. Would think states could deny funding to those too. How many will choose to do so, is another question.