“Crisis Pregnancy Centers” Mislead Patients. They May Also Be Misleading Some Donors

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“Crisis Pregnancy Centers” (CPCs) exist to stop people from receiving abortion care. To that end, their tactics can include masquerading as legitimate abortion providers online, giving false information about the supposed dangers of abortion care, and lying to patients about how far along in the pregnancy they are. 

CPCs may also, according to a July report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, be deceiving at least some foundations and donors, and otherwise obscuring the amount of money pouring into their work and the anti-abortion movement. “The Threat of Crisis Pregnancy Centers to the Future of Abortion Access,” is the result of more than a year of research into the convoluted world of CPCs, the organizations and networks affiliated with them, and the funders that support them. At least some of those backers, according to NCRP, may think they’re giving to organizations that are dogma-free groups promoting maternal health and other positive outcomes.

The core of the problem is that CPCs present themselves as small community clinics or even legitimate healthcare centers, but they are not. Most of them are affiliated with well-funded anti-abortion networks, and are often housed within other much larger charities, with many even sharing the same tax ID numbers. The result is a deep pool of funding that is difficult to parse.

Even Candid’s Foundation Directory Online, the leading source of philanthropic data, has a “Right to Life” category that captures advocacy to criminalize abortion care, but misses far larger sums of anti-abortion funding, including for CPCs, by lumping such groups into misleading categories, according to NCRP’s report. In response, Candid VP of Data Jake Garcia noted that they collect data on millions of organizations, and “the comprehensiveness of the data available for these organizations varies greatly.” The platform is in the process of improving its categorization of anti-abortion funding, Garcia said.

While the level of deception by the web of CPCs is troubling, it’s unlikely that a large portion of their funding is coming from donors who have been misled. The interlocking movements to deny women’s rights, restrict voting, and otherwise undermine democracy have strong support from a core of wealthy individuals and Republican lawmakers. What’s more disturbing is the portrait that the NCRP report paints — one similar to other corners of conservative funding — in which huge amounts of money are sloshing around, with little clarity about where it’s coming from or what, exactly, it’s paying for, and many of its actors flying under the radar.

According to NCRP’s report, foundations alone provided CPCs an estimated $278 million from 2015 to 2019, or an average of $55 million per year. This amount, along with the $53 million ($10.6 million per year) in funding in Candid’s “Right to Life” category, taxpayer dollars funneled to these organizations, and the war chests accumulated by the larger organizations that are affiliated with many of the CPCs, amount to a movement backed by what NCRP estimates is billions of dollars.

In comparison, funders were moving roughly $45.6 million a year to abortion rights and services during the same time frame, with only 3% — or just over $5.4 million a year — going specifically to abortion funds. While giving to front-line abortion services has skyrocketed in the wake of the Dobbs leak and decision, organizations that provide actual care and counseling to pregnant people, including help with accessing abortion care, have historically received far less funding than CPCs.

“CPCs needed to be identified; they needed to be called out”

NCRP conducted its research into CPC funding, said Stephanie Peng, senior manager for movement research, after being approached by several people who asked the organization to find out how much foundation funding the centers receive. They were asked, Peng said, because while organizations including Reproaction and Women’s Law Center have done work to uncover federal and state money being moved to CPCs, little to nothing was known about their sources of private funding. NCRP used Reproaction’s database of more than 2,600 fake abortion clinics as the starting point for its research.

“Folks on the ground had been saying for decades that Roe would be overturned,” said NCRP Movement Engagement Manager Brandi Collins-Calhoun, who, before joining NCRP in 2020, worked as an organizer and birth doula and thus has front-line experience with the damage being done by CPCs. “So we wanted to create content that not only informed philanthropy, but could be used as an organizing tool for the front lines. … We knew that in response to whatever the Dobbs decision was going to be that CPCs needed to be identified — they needed to be called out.” 

Even after more than a year of digging, Peng said, NCRP researchers still aren’t confident that they’ve been able to trace all of the figures. “I think we have pieces,” she told IP. “We have funding for what we could track for crisis pregnancy centers, and we have funding for what Candid describes as ‘Right to Life,’ which broadly covers advocacy around the anti-abortion movement, but there’s probably more, as well.” 

Deception as a business plan

NCRP researchers were able to find tax information for roughly 2,400 of the 2,600-plus CPCs in Reproaction’s database. Almost half of those groups had shared tax identification numbers (EINs), meaning that instead of being small, independent organizations, these CPCs are part of other, larger legal entities. Out of the 2,400 total groups that publicly identify themselves as separate entities, NCRP was able to identify 1,291 unique c3 legal entities that filed at least one tax form between 2015 and 2019. 

Of the more than $4 billion moved to organizations involved in the CPC industry during the years covered by the report, at least $2.2 billion, or more than half, was directed to larger institutions for which pregnancy-related services aren’t the primary purpose. In other words, according to the report, “this means it is reasonable to assume that only some of these dollars went directly to crisis pregnancy centers or counseling.” 

The largest of those institutions by revenue between 2015 and 2019 include Lakeview Center, Inc., which received more than $687 million during the study period. Lakeview bills itself as a full-service mental health provider, and does not disclose its ties to CPCs on its website. Bethany Christian Services, which received over $446 million, is a social service agency that provides foster care and adoption services and only agreed to stop discriminating against LGBT couples in 2021 under threat of losing taxpayer funding. Bethany does openly provide what it calls “help” to pregnant people, claiming the agency empowers them “to make a plan.” Both Lakeview Center and Bethany Christian Services are listed in Reproaction’s database of fake abortion clinics.

As NCRP’s report states, “CPCs are not, as their proponents would have people believe, small-scale, individual church-based operations; instead, they are deeply integrated into the core infrastructure of the biggest organizational players in the anti-abortion movement.”

The deception doesn’t end there. “A lot of CPCs go by multiple names,” Peng said. A CPC might show one name on its Google location, but have a different name on its website. “And then their 990 might have a different name altogether, so that makes it really difficult to even try to find the right tax information for them.” The relationship between individually named CPCs and the larger entities that support them can also be hard to discern. 

“The research really helps validate what we already knew: that CPCs are really deceptive,” she said. 

Given the maze of CPCs’ various names, affiliations, and other misleading information, Peng and Collins-Calhoun said that it would be easy for funders to be misled into thinking that they are actually offering agenda-free services to promote maternal health and children’s well-being. For example, Peng said, a CPC might apply to a community foundation or other more mainstream funder using a reproductive justice or maternal health lens, “not disclosing that they do not offer abortion services or provide that choice to people who come in the door.”

On a positive note, Collins-Calhoun said, “I think the more public CPCs have become, and the closer we got to the Dobbs decision, people began finding out what CPCs were. If they were funding them, they stopped.” During the height of awareness about the Black maternal health crisis, though, “they might have been getting more funding for the childbirth classes, the diaper banks, and the baby closets” than they do today.

Bad data

Candid’s Foundation Directory Online is another source of misinformation about crisis pregnancy centers. According to the NCRP report, “These fake clinics get hidden in other (often counterintuitive) data categories, including women’s rights, individual liberties, and even maternal health and prenatal care,” despite the fact that the vast majority of them aren’t healthcare facilities and don’t provide medical services. 

In response to questions about the accuracy of its data about CPCs, Candid VP of Data Jake Garcia said, “Candid processes data on approximately 4 million grants per year. We have also collected data on more than 2 million organizations in the U.S. and overseas. The comprehensiveness of the data available for these organizations varies greatly.” 

While Candid’s goal is to code grants and organizations accurately using a combination of staff and automation, Garcia said, “achieving this can be limited by the quality of the information available.” And, Garcia said, as NCRP itself has noted, “CPCs have misrepresented their intentions so much that many legitimate healthcare centers and community centers list them alongside real abortion providers.”

Mainstream news coverage of the damage CPCs do has been slow in coming, and while the first CPC opened in 1967, public awareness has been mounting since at least 2017. Even with the large amount of data Candid processes, it’s somewhat disturbing that the organization hasn’t been more proactive in its due diligence in this area, given the threats posed by CPCs and the larger movement of which they’re a part. 

Garcia said that Candid is in the process of recoding CPCs into a new category called “Abortion Restrictions.” 

“Candid has also been proactively improving its data related to abortion restrictions, including removing incorrect codes. This is an ongoing process to provide the most accurate data possible.” Garcia said these changes “will be included in our next round of taxonomy updates, scheduled to take place in the coming months.” 

In the meantime, donors seeking to support services for pregnant people that are not driven by an anti-abortion agenda have other options. The NCRP report lists several steps that funders can take to do due diligence when moving money to those services, including a vetted list of reproductive health care and human rights nonprofits.