When I read Garnet Henderson’s investigation into how so-called crisis pregnancy centers spend their money, I knew I had to talk to her about it. Thankfully, this newsletter gives me the perfect excuse. Read her report, “Anti-Abortion Centers Spent Over $600M in One Year. That’s the Tip of the Iceberg,” and then chase it with our conversation below! Side note: she has an incredible abortion rights podcast, too, that you can tune into here.

BA: Hey Garnet! Thanks for talking with me about this story. How did you get into reporting on these centers to begin with?

GH: I’ve done a lot of reporting on CPCs over the years, and one of the most consistent things that I hear from researchers, advocates, from people who have themselves been to CPCs when they were looking for help in some way, is that CPCs really are not providing much in the way of services. Obviously, we all know that a huge part of the goal of a CPC is to dissuade people from having an abortion, oftentimes using outright deception and other delay tactics. But they do also advertise that they provide help for parents and babies, like diapers and baby formula and baby clothes and cribs. That’s supposed to be what you get as an alternative to abortion.

What I hear from so many people who’ve been to CPCs is that those offerings were actually incredibly limited. But I also know that the anti-abortion movement is really well funded, and that CPCs are a major part of the anti-abortion movement’s strategy, especially now in the post-Roe era. That’s what they’re presenting as their alternatives to increased spending on social services, right? And so I was just really curious about how much money CPCs actually have, because I know that a lot of churches, for example, really encourage their members to donate to CPCs. I just really wanted to know: how much money actually are we talking about here?

I was really intrigued by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropies report that came out last year, and I’ve cited it many times, but it found that CPCs have a five-to-one funding advantage over legitimate abortion clinics. Their report looked at income and expenses at CPCs from 2015 through 2019. I decided to just really drill down on one year and find all of the available financial disclosures that I could for all of the CPCs that I could. Now I have a gigantic monster of a spreadsheet that has all of those details pulled out from the year 2019. And the reason for that year in particular is that the Charlotte Lozier Institute put out this report in 2020, using data from 2019, where they estimated the value of CPC services, and I thought that was an interesting point of comparison, more so, honestly, than the budget of actual abortion clinics, just because we know that generally speaking, CPCs aren’t providing medical services.

BA: And to your point, as repro reporters, we know all too well the financial challenges that reproductive health care clinics have faced. To look at this investigation and read about this kind of money is such a wild dissonance.

GH: Yes, exactly. It’s so much money. One thing I’ll be really curious to see are the post-Dobbs disclosures. Because this is 2019, pre-Dobbs, pre-pandemic. It’s not the most recent year for which financial disclosures are available. Basically right now you can access [the] 2021 990s but not 2022 yet, and so we can’t know how much money CPCs are receiving and spending in the post-Dobbs era. We won’t have a great look at that for a little while longer still.

BA: Sounds like you’ve got a follow-up story planned.

GH: Oh, yeah.

BA: It seems like there’s a much larger reckoning happening around CPCs in the post-Dobbs era, at least in states where lawmakers are asserting their commitment to protecting abortion access. Pennsylvania, for example.

GH: Yeah! And Pennsylvania was the very first state that actually began funding CPCs in the 1990s. It’s actually huge that they pulled out of that program in such a big way recently. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan has used line item vetoes to veto funding to CPCs, which is also great. I refuse to actually stan a politician, but I have to say, I love to see her do that sort of boldly, because I do think that’s so rare for a Democrat. I think she’s really showing how Democrats are so afraid to be loud and proud about support for abortion rights, and they don’t have to be. Don’t get me wrong, Michigan has a long way to go still. But I think that’s a great example of how Democratic politicians should be saying,”No, this is not up for discussion, we are not putting money into these places that are dangerous or deceptive, etc.”

But anyway, yes, I think there’s a lot of momentum to work on the state funding level, because the federal funds that go to CPCs come from the federal government to the states and then the states allocate the funds from there. It really is a state-level advocacy issue.

Another reason I was also really interested in doing this type of investigation is because even though CPC teams are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding, that is still only a fraction of their total income, and most of it is still coming from private philanthropy. I think that’s also really important for people to understand, because I think they’re anti-abortion funders who are simply choosing to put their money into causes that are opposed to abortion rights. They want to make it harder for people to get abortions. But there are a lot of people who are not fully cognizant of how that money is being spent—if it’s going to a CPC, or even what the CPC is or does, especially if it’s something they’ve been encouraged to do by their church, for example. I can really see how people may have been sold on that type of thing. It can be framed as giving money to this local place that has diapers and baby formula. But those people could maybe be educated, and they could learn there’s a little local diaper bank that you could give your money to that gives people enough diapers for an entire month with no strings attached, instead of this CPC that gives people five diapers a week.

To Garnet’s point, you can find a local diaper bank through the National Diaper Bank Network, linked here. And she recommends checking out All Options, which offers support for all people, regardless of their decisions around parenting and pregnancy.