USA – Can Anti-Abortion ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ Snag Federal Family-Planning Funds?

Can Anti-Abortion ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’ Snag Federal Family-Planning Funds?

By Ed Kilgore
Nov 8, 2019

Like nature, federal funding streams abhor a vacuum. So when the Trump administration pushed Planned Parenthood out of women’s family-planning programs by stipulating that recipients could not refer patients to (or have an organization connection with) abortion providers, a pot of about $60 million a year suddenly became available to anyone who could supply the stipulated services without running afoul of the new regs.

For the most part, the anti-abortion movement’s favorite alternative to Planned Parenthood clinics, its huge (an estimated 2,750 of them) network of so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” don’t really pretend to offer “family planning” or women’s health services. They mostly exist to talk or coerce pregnant women into carrying pregnancies to term, providing (at most) limited services (ultrasounds, of course, and perhaps neonatal health advice and adoption referrals) to make that choice seem morally or religiously obligatory.

Continued: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/can-crisis-pregnancy-centers-snag-federal-funds.html