(NRL News Today) It’s not hard — in fact it’s self-evident — why the Abortion Industry should loathe Pregnancy Help Centers. Every woman or girl who turns right — toward a PHC — instead of left — into the tender arms of an industry that makes a living off the blood of unborn children and the desperation of their clientele — is money out of the pockets of Planned Parenthood.
Monopolies and would-be monopolies hate competition and the Abortion Industry is no different. Already there are many more PHCs than abortion clinics. Imagine how different the landscape would be if there were no Pregnancy Help Centers. The Abortion Industry salivates at the very thought.
The Rewire News Group produced two hits pieces this past week: “The Grift of So-Called Crisis Pregnancy Centers” by Jessica Mason Pieklo and “Anti-Abortion Centers Spent Over $600M in One Year. That’s the Tip of the Iceberg” by Garnet Henderson. The former is a self-promotional piece which trumpet Henderson ‘s “deep dive into the hundreds of millions of dollars funneling through so-called crisis pregnancy centers and what, if anything, those fake clinics are doing with that money.”
Henderson begins with the usual litany of attacks which are as redundant as they are repetitious:
“Crisis pregnancy centers,” or anti-abortion centers, are known for deceiving and manipulating people seeking information about abortion. They often pose as legitimate abortion clinics, intentionally obscuring their real purpose. They promote dangerous medical misinformation such as abortion pill “reversal.” They also discourage safer sex practices, and because few of them are actual medical facilities, they don’t adhere to medical standards for confidentiality and safety.
But this gross distortion of what PHCs actually do is not really what she’s after. “Documents reviewed by Rewire News Group suggest the total may have been closer [to] $1 billion. Where is all that ‘crisis pregnancy center’ money going?”
After reading her article — twice in fact — I still don’t know where she thinks the money is going. (How the “over $600M in one year” bec[a]me “closer to $1 billion” is a puzzler as well.) I think Henderson thinks it’s backdoor lobbying.
Many CPCs [Crisis Pregnancy Centers] report that they don’t engage in lobbying at all. However, given their large expenditures on advertising and promotional expenses, that seems doubtful.
For instance, if there’s an abortion ban being debated in the state legislature, is a “Choose Life” sign lobbying? Or just an ad for a CPC?
She is kidding, right? “Hold a Choose Life sign” and suddenly you’re a lobbyist? That’s a “deep dive” into absurdity.
Then there [are] all those troubling “assets.”
Another standout data point is the sky-high value of CPCs’ assets — well over $800 million total among this small group. The average organization in this dataset has $515,454 in assets, but dozens have assets greater than $1 million. A few hold more than $2 million or $3 million. For most, this stems from owning the building in which they’re housed — but many have significant amounts of money sitting in the bank, too. [Underlining is mine.]
A Pregnancy Help Center which I know a lot about took years and years to scrape together enough money to take the leap of faith and purchases their own building rather than renting. They saved a ton of money and now had a nefarious “asset.”
There’s lot of suggestions that PHCs are loaded and pay their upper tier people a king’s ransom in compensation which “flies in the face of how they present themselves: as small, scrappy, volunteer-run organizations.”
This statement immediately follows “This is not an inherently bad thing — far from it, in fact. High staff compensation is often seen as a sign that a nonprofit is ‘inefficient’ or ‘overspending.’
And so the attacks go.
It is a source of amusement that a caption over the top graphic should read “While taxpayer money has been a boon for crisis pregnancy centers’ across the country, many of them still get the majority of their funds from private donors.” Isn’t that a good thing?
Henderson writes, “And if there really are closer to 4,000 CPCs nationwide, based on the average expenditure per facility, they could collectively be spending north of $1 billion every year.”
She does realize, doesn’t she, that in its latest report Planned Parenthood took in “nearly $2 billion in revenues this past year“ and that “revenues exceeded expenses at Planned Parenthood by a whopping $204.7 million.” Do take a moment to read Rewire News Group’s hit job.
Editor’s Note: This article was published at NRL News Today and is reprinted here with permission.
