State legislatures fund antiabortion CPCs
Questionable expenditures of taxpayer money
(A screenshot from a promotional flyer placed on Real Alternatives Facebook Page)
Crisis Pregnancy Centers now receive nearly 10 times as much money from Republican state legislatures as they did a decade ago, as reported by the Associated Press.
An Associated Press tally based on state budget figures reveals that nearly $89 million has been allocated to such centers across about a dozen states this fiscal year. A decade ago, the annual funding for the programs hovered around $17 million in about eight states.
Crisis Pregnancy Centers masquerade as abortion providers to persuade women to not go through with the procedure. They’re not actual medical practitioners. Those centers are an extension of the antiabortion movement.
Republican state representatives and senators have threatened to remove funding for Planned Parenthood and other women’s health services if Democrats made an effort to ax the spending for the CPCs.
The first effort to fund CPCs with state taxpayer money came with Pennsylvania Gov. Robert P. Casey, a Democrat who ran the state from 1987 to 1995. Casey was known nationally for his crusade against abortion, as reported in a 1993 Scranton Times-Tribune article. Casey at the time signed a $1.9 million contract with an antiabortion movement to provide poor women with alternatives to abortion.
Planned Parenthood officials criticized Casey and the contract. They said Planned Parenthood was a medical provider while the CPCs were propaganda organizations. While that allotment went in tandem with funds for women’s health services, the money that went to PP and other providers paid for breast cancer screenings, pap tests, but not for birth control.
According to the AP, by 2001, Pennsylvania also became the first state to receive approval to use $1 million from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to help fund the pregnancy centers.
The Pennsylvania Health Department then contracted with a nonprofit known as Real Alternatives to oversee the program and distribute money. The Pennsylvania-based group eventually was selected to oversee similar programs in Michigan and Indiana, where it says it has since served more than 408,000 women.
In 2017, the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services disapproved certain payments to Real Alternatives because of its refusal to be audited by the state on how it used three percent of its nearly $30 million allocation. The DHS had studied the matter for five years and issued a performance audit about overseeing the grant given to Real Alternatives.
Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said Real Alternatives, by its own admission, uses the 3 percent fee, funded by Pennsylvania taxpayers, to subsidize its expansion in other states, reducing the funds available for services for Pennsylvania women and families. The 3 percent fee is over and above a more than $3 million administrative services payment Real Alternatives already receives over five years under the state grant agreement.
“The citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania demand and deserve accountability regarding how and where their tax dollars are spent,” DePasquale said in a news release at the time.