Abortion Foes Are Scoring More Wins. Here's Who is Funding a Powerful Movement
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Abortion opponents march in washington last year. Jeffrey Bruno/shutterstock
As the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the country, one of its many secondary victims appears to be reproductive rights. Some states are banning nonessential medical procedures, and several (including Ohio, Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma) have applied these bans to abortion. Abortion advocates say the procedure is essential and time-sensitive, and have taken the states to court. Federal judges have now blocked the bans in Alabama and Ohio.
This chaos comes in the wake of a March Supreme Court case about a Louisiana abortion restriction and adds even more fuel to this incendiary issue. Jethro Miller, CDO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and its Action Fund, previously told us the ruling for that case, which will likely occur in the summer of 2020, “could have dire consequences for abortion access across the country.” A growing wave of state abortion bans and restrictions have already been introduced and passed in recent years, though some have been blocked. Other states responded by enacting abortion protections. Across the country, people who want abortions and other reproductive health services are increasingly denied access—even though a 2018 NPR poll showed a strong majority of Americans do not want Roe v. Wade overturned.
Who is funding the anti-abortion movement? Following up on our recent story on abortion-rights philanthropies that spend hundreds of millions annually, we dive here into some of the conservative funders that bankroll anti-abortion organizations.
As we’ve reported, there are fewer heavyweight grantmakers publicly fighting abortion rights than there are defending them—these folks tend to keep a fairly low profile. However, there are still big bucks in play. Consider the tens of millions the National Christian Foundation (NCF) has given to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a legal group that has been influential in several state-level bans. Or the Knights of Columbus (KoC), which spent close to $50 million in the last 10 years putting ultrasound machines in crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). The Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List) and its PAC have more than $50 million budgeted for the 2020 campaign cycle. (SBA List supports anti-abortion candidates and formed in response to the abortion-rights PAC Emily’s List in the 1990s.)
As with abortion-rights funders, DAFs are a popular, opaque giving method for anti-abortion funders, and these giving vehicles exist nationally as well as in local community foundations (where they originated). Much of the money behind anti-abortion initiatives is given on the state level, where conservatives have been building power for years. Many states have multiple influential grantmakers and advocacy groups, which can make funding hard to track. For example, National Right to Life, the largest and oldest national anti-abortion organization, has affiliates in all 50 states and more than 3,000 local chapters.
And as we’ve also noted with abortion-rights funders, anti-abortion giving sometimes gets mixed in with other social issues and ideological causes and groups. Take Focus on the Family, a popular grantee in this area—it promotes numerous fundamentalist Christian causes, including crisis pregnancy centers. “Anti-abortion” or “pro-life” aren’t established funding categories. But tax forms, Candid data and foundation websites still have many a tale to tell. We explore general giving trends and then the grantmaking of several top anti-abortion funders in an era when their movement appears to be rapidly building momentum.
How Anti-Abortion Funders Deploy Their Money
One priority of anti-abortion funders is investing in a national network of crisis pregnancy centers to steer pregnant women away from considering an abortion in the first place. The first CPC was established in 1967, and there are now nearly 2,600 such centers, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), the research arm of SBA List. Many of these centers belong to networks like Care Net in the U.S., or Birthright International and Heartbeat International, which work domestically and internationally. Care Net reported grants and contributions of more than $4 million in a recent year, while Heartbeat International had similar revenue in 2017. Care Net’s biggest grant between 2003 and 2017 ($650,000) came from the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program (a DAF).
Some of the biggest gifts for CPCs equip these centers with ultrasound machines, which they use to discourage women from seeking abortion. KoC, the self-described “world’s largest Catholic lay organization,” is a major player here through the Ultrasound Initiative of its Culture for Life Fund. KoC’s central “Supreme Council” and local branches share the costs of the expensive machines, and in 2019, it donated its 1,000th. KoC has spent more than $49 million setting up these devices across the U.S. and in other countries in the last decade, and it sometimes pays for staff training, as well. “I feel, as the director of this center, that I have a great relationship with our Knights; that I can reach out to them and tell them what our needs are, and they will do its darnedest to help me,” said Katherine Adams, director of Warrenton Pregnancy Center in Virginia.
CPCs have been criticized for misleading advertisements and inaccurate medical information. Gretchen Ely, Ph.D., who studies access to reproductive healthcare at the University at Buffalo, says the main goal of the centers is to “draw in vulnerable people who may be on the fence about continuing a pregnancy in order to dissuade anyone who is considering abortion from choosing one.” According to CLI, some 2 million people visited CPCs in 2017.
But the biggest money for anti-abortion activities goes to support advocates, legal experts and researchers in efforts to influence abortion-related regulations at the state level and all the way up to the Supreme Court. A few of the powerful organizations powering the anti-abortion movement are Americans United for Life (AUL); Concerned Women for America; and ADF, an umbrella organization for right-wing legal groups designated an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), among others, including many state-level groups. The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) hosts annual conferences that cover topics in research and law. Along with policy work and research, the Family Research Council, which is also considered an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by SPLC, has held ProLifeCon Digital Action Summits for activists for 15 years.
The grantees of anti-abortion funders have played a central role in recent legal battles, such as the push to restrict abortion rights in Louisiana that led to the case currently before the Supreme Court. The Louisiana branch of Right to Life states it was the architect of the Unsafe Abortion Protection Act at the heart of the case, and it advocated for its successful passage in 2014. While several anti-abortion funders and grantees did not reply to or declined our request for comments, we were able to connect with Louisiana Right to Life.
Director of Education Alexandra Seghers tells us the Bioethics Defense Fund (BDF) provided her group with legal consultation while interacting with legislators. BDF is a “pro-life, public-interest legal and educational organization,” which has received funding from ADF. Donations through Fidelity Charitable have also supported BDF, and the Salutare Deum Foundation has given it about $50,000 annually in recent years.
Seghers says that along with “state legislation [like the Louisiana law] and abortion complication reporting requirements,” her organization “is doing much more” on the grassroots level like “educating the public on abortion and the abortion industry, supporting the numerous [CPCs] that offer compassion and care to women who are abortion-minded and post-abortive, [and] spreading awareness about the adoption process as an alternative to abortion.”
On the abortion rights side, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed the lawsuit against the Louisiana law on behalf of Louisiana clinics, providers and patients. Ely says, “If the court rules in favor of the law, two of Louisiana’s three clinics will be closed… it will make abortion in Louisiana virtually inaccessible for vulnerable abortion seekers—those who are poor, people of color, and those living in rural areas.” Other groups on both sides of this fight filed briefs to the high court, including SBA List and the CLI. (SBA List directed us to their website’s pressroom but declined to contribute to this story). In early 2020, more than 200 members of Congress sent the Supreme Court a brief asking it to uphold the Louisiana law and to consider overturning Roe v. Wade.
We compared funding for two of the main groups involved in this case. In 2017, the National Right to Life Committee received about $2.8 million in grants and contributions, and the National Right to Life Committee Educational Trust Fund took in about $1.7 million. The National Right to Life Victory Fund Super PAC raised about $1 million in the 2017-18 cycle. Its other PAC, the National Right to Life PAC, raised $327,000 during this time.
Meanwhile, the Center for Reproductive Rights received more than $20 million in foundation funding in 2017, including $5 million from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation (STBF). As we’ve covered, STBF is the leader in U.S.-centered reproductive health funding. It and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation and others give substantial and consistent support to legal, research, advocacy and healthcare groups that support abortion rights, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, PPFA, Guttmacher Institute, NARAL and the Groundswell Fund. The Center for Reproductive Rights also recently joined Planned Parenthood and several abortion service providers to challenge new COVID-19-related bans.
Research tends to be a stronger suit for the abortion-rights movement. “The pro-choice research seems to have almost unlimited funds,” said Bowling Green State University’s Priscilla Coleman at an AAPLOG conference a few years ago. One reason abortion-rights groups pull ahead in the research realm is that many people and families who access reproductive healthcare report experiencing measurable positive life outcomes, and those who experience restrictions in this realm experience documented negative ones.
And, as with abortion-rights-oriented philanthropists, we see some anti-abortion funders and nonprofits focusing on youth engagement. The Christian 360 Institute for young people, an anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ group, is one example. It was formed by the Chick-fil-A founder’s family—while the company pledged its philanthropic arm would pause donations to anti-LGBTQ+ groups in 2019, it’s clear its founders have not changed course. And there are active anti-abortion student groups in higher ed, such as Students for Life and CRU (previously the Campus Crusade for Christ). CRU also runs ministries within cities, military installations and athletic teams.
Here’s a closer look at the giving of several committed anti-abortion funders.
The National Christian Foundation: a Top Conservative DAF
A lot of the big anti-abortion funders cite religious inspiration. Giving to religious groups remains the largest sector of U.S. philanthropy, but as a share of total giving, it has been in a downward trend for several decades. It declined in 2018 by 1.5%.
Billing itself as the largest Christian grantmaker in the world, the National Christian Foundation is a leading funder of conservative and Christian causes, including the anti-abortion movement. Having achieved commercial success in the financial planning and publishing industries, three like-minded Christian finance gurus established NCF in 1982. It’s now among the largest DAFs in the country, and we named it the most influential DAF in 2019 after it gave away $1.7 billion in 2018. It works with about 25,000 families and has given out about $11 billion so far to 63,000 groups.
NCF states the Bible contains “the inerrant Word of God.” Its anonymously funded largesse is widely dispersed and supports nearly every group in the right-wing Christian universe. Other major DAFs with political leanings that are often scrutinized for their dark money contributions include Tides on the left and Donors Trust on the right.
Some of NCF’s tax forms are tens of thousands of pages long. Along with DAF giving, it offers non-cash giving, impact investing and other services, including administrative and investment help for supporting organizations. Its grants range from the hundreds to the hundreds of millions. NCF backs churches, Christian-based learning (including in higher education), right-wing legal groups, and more. The causes highlighted on its site include human trafficking, the refugee crisis and poverty. But, as we’ve noted, it is also probably the single biggest source of money fueling the anti-abortion and anti-LGBT movements. In 2017, its donations to anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate groups reached more than $19 million, according to investigative news outlet Sludge. (We recently analyzed new research on funding moving through DAFs to hate groups produced by a campaign supported by Amalgamated Foundation and the Southern Poverty Law Center.)
Between 2003 and 2017, NCF gave the most money through its largest two grants to the Museum of the Bible, for a total of about $343 million. Lifeshape, a proselytizing Christian charity founded by John and Trudy Cathy White, daughter of Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy, received the second-largest amount from NCF during this time, of $45 million. Lifeshape, in turn, funds the Whites’ 360 Institute, which aims to equip “young adults to become Christ-centered servant leaders.” The 360 Institute takes an anti-abortion approach and includes the procedure among the bioethics topics, along with cloning and physician-assisted suicide, which are covered in its teen fellowship.
A long list of national and state anti-abortion groups have received funds from NCF, including National Right to Life, the CLI Legal Defense Fund (LDF), Concerned Women for America, Citizens for Community Values in Ohio, and the Georgia Life Alliance. ADF is an important NCF grantee. We reported in 2016 that ADF had received over $50 million from NCF since 2001. In 2017, it received another $16.8 million. ADF has worked in support of anti-abortion legislation in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arizona and Oklahoma.
In recent years, NCF gave hundreds of thousands to the Alabama Policy Institute, a member of the conservative State Policy Network, which supported the state’s six-week abortion ban that lacks rape or incest exceptions. Other legally minded NCF grantees include the Jerry Falwell-affiliated Liberty Counsel, the Pacific Justice Institute and AUL, an anti-abortion advocacy group with a legal focus. AUL lists multiple “signs of progress” on its website, including 30 states with fetal homicide laws. And NCF funds the Care Net CPU network and hundreds of individual centers, with gifts like $96,000 to Crisis Pregnancy Centers of Greater Phoenix and about $94,000 to Texas’ Arlington Pregnancy Center.
Other recipients who’ve received tens of millions from NCF include CRU, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. Add to that the many millions it channels toward secular right-wing and libertarian groups like the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Federalist Society, Judicial Watch and others. Several big religious foundations channel some of their giving through NCF, including the Maclellan Family Foundation and the Bolthouse Foundation. Bolthouse also directly contributes to ADF, Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. NCF declined to participate in this article.
Chiaroscuro Joins Knights of Columbus
Sean Fieler made his fortune in hedge funds and, as we've reported, has lately emerged as a leading conservative Catholic philanthropist. He founded the Chiaroscuro Foundation in 2006—chiaroscuro is an artistic style that involves a strong contrast between light and dark, and Fieler’s Catholic faith and conservative views drive much of his giving.
Along with “religious liberty,” anti-LGBTQ+ causes and other issues, Chiaroscuro has funded multiple anti-abortion groups. Past grantees include SBA List, the National Abstinence Education Foundation (now Ascend), and Fertility Education and Medical Management (FEMM), which promotes the rhythm cycle and discourages abortion. Fieler served on the board of the latter two. FEMM received the most money from the foundation between 2003 and 2017—about $2.8 million. Chiaroscuro also backed Clergy for Better Choices and Sisters of Life, which engage members of the cloth to guide women in various directions, including away from abortion.
The foundation site now states that in the fall of 2019, the Chiaroscuro Foundation became the Chiaroscuro Fund, a DAF administered by the Knights of Columbus Charitable Fund, or KCCF, which manages Catholic-oriented DAFs (shrouding more individual giving in this realm from scrutiny). As mentioned earlier, Knights of Columbus carries out philanthropic activities against abortion by funding ultrasound machines.
A link directs visitors to the KCCF, where Fieler now serves as board chair. KCCF is managed by the Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors (KoCAA). KoCAA states that KoC recognized a need for faith-based investment strategies for Catholic institutions and so launched KoCAA, which manages over $24 billion in assets.
In 2018, a one-year-old DAF that KoCAA was advising, CCFGiving, joined KoCAA and became known as KCCF, which formally launched in 2019. Neither CCFGiving nor KCCF is listed by the Foundation Center. The KCCF 2017 990 provided in Guidestar is for CCFGiving, and only reported one grant of $15,000 to a Catholic high school in New York. But according to KCCF, it has provided 113 grants to nonprofits since its inception as CCFGiving. KCCF now consists of 24 fund accounts totaling $2.4 million.
We contacted KCCF to ask about Chiaroscuro, DAFs and abortion funding, and the KCCF team declined to answer any specific questions for this story.
From Pizza to Proselytization
When Domino’s Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan sold most of his company shares in 1999, he committed to devote the majority of his wealth, about $900 million, to Catholic causes and “die broke.” Monaghan, who is now in his early 80s, is a Giving Pledge signatory. After leaving the pizza biz, he went on to establish and fund several organizations including his Ave Maria Foundation, the Ave Maria School of Law, Legatus, the Thomas More Law Center, the Ave Maria List PAC, and several additional Catholic educational institutions and media outlets. Legatus, which supports Catholic business leaders, is made up of more than “5,000 business leaders and spouses” with 89 chapters across the U.S. and internationally, and it runs its own DAF through the KoC.
Monaghan spent some of his childhood in a Catholic orphanage, briefly explored priesthood and is a member of the Knights of Malta. For a 2007 story with the New Yorker aptly titled “The Deliverer,” Monaghan said abortion was the most important issue for him. “All the others—whether we’re going to have a minimum wage, high taxes or low taxes—don’t matter. We’ve got to stop killing babies.” His funding to stop an abortion-rights referendum in the late 1980s in Michigan led the National Organization for Women to call for a nationwide boycott of Domino’s.
The institutions he supports through the Ave Maria Foundation all aim to “bring Catholic life and culture to the world,” according to its current one-page website, which also states it is not “accepting any financial requests at this time.” It has given away hundreds of millions, and had about $4 million in assets in 2018. Between 2003 and 2017, Ave Maria University was its biggest grantee, receiving close to $230 million. The Ave Maria School of Law received the next biggest amount, around $37 million.
The Thomas More Law Center has several stated priority issues including family values, the sanctity of human life, and “confronting the threat of radical Islam.” It is known for defending anti-abortion activists’ right to protest, including a group convicted of threatening the lives of abortion doctors by distributing Old West-style “wanted” posters with their names and addresses in the late 1990s. Other funders of this center include the Edwin J. and Ruth M. Shoemaker Foundation, Mercy Works Foundation, Skowronski Family Foundation, Deramus Foundation, and Scaife Family Foundation. The Thomas More Law Center and other anti-abortion groups have also received funding through DAFs, including Schwab and Fidelity Charitable, and the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program. As we’ve reported, these same DAFs have also funneled tens of millions to Planned Parenthood.
The Thirteen Foundation
The Thirteen Foundation was formed by Farris Wilkes, one of two religious fracking billionaire brothers in the Wilkes family (the other being Dan). Wilkes is also a pastor in the Assembly of Yahweh 7th Day Church, a fundamentalist Christian congregation in Texas. As we reported in 2014, the church published a guide for appropriate women’s behavior, including directives against women working outside of the house or speaking during religious services. A backer of Ted Cruz during the 2016 presidential race, Wilkes and his wife Joann have pumped over $100 million into the Thirteen Foundation.
This foundation has supported the Heritage Foundation; Media Revolution Ministries, a coalition of CPCs with savvy PR operations; Focus on the Family; Life Dynamics, based in Texas, which helps lawyers and anti-abortion groups legally challenge regional health clinics’ abortion services; and the Texas Right to Life Committee Educational Fund, among others.
Additional Players in Anti-Abortion Philanthropy
Community- and state-level anti-abortion funding is an active scene. Many community foundations across the country support these causes, including the Greater New Orleans Foundation, Greater Houston Community Foundation, Tulsa Community Foundation, California Community Foundation and San Diego Foundation. In 2017, the New York Community Trust (NYCT), which has consistently supported Planned Parenthood, gave a grant of $25,000 to AUL through its DAF portfolio. NYCT pioneered the first DAFs in the 1930s.
“Our donors, like America [at large], are divided over abortion, so the trust has given grants on behalf of our [DAFs] on both sides of this issue,” NYCT President Lorie Slutsky says. “When a donor recommends a grant, we vet the organization for fiscal and management soundness, and we ensure grants are not promoting hate. Otherwise, [we are] apolitical in following [donor recommendations].”
Michigan Right to Life has received substantial funding from local givers including the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, and Edwin J. and Ruth M. Shoemaker Foundation. Speaking of the Devos, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos "stands at the intersection of two family fortunes that helped to build the Christian right," as journalist Katherine Stewart put it in the New York Times. Devos’ father, Edgar Prince, contributed to the creation of the Family Research Council, and Prince family money still goes to groups on the Christian Right. Focus on the Family, ADF, and the Heritage Foundation have benefited from various veins of Devos money.
An example of a big pro-life funder with a national focus is the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation, out of South Palm Beach, Florida, which gave more than $10 million to AUL between 2003 and 2017. It has also backed the Human Life Alliance of Minnesota and CRU. A few other foundations committed to anti-abortion causes are the Van Curler Foundation, Psalms Foundation, Family Foundation of Kentucky, M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, John H. Watson Community Foundation, and Gary and Diane Heavin Community Fund (Gary Heavin is the founder and chairman of fitness chain Curves).
Corporate Funding and Political Sway
Between 2003 and 2017, in a prime example of an individual exerting both private and public influence, the family foundation of Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte of Montana gave hundreds of thousands each to the CLI LDF and ADF. Since he joined Congress in 2017, Gianforte has co-sponsored multiple federal anti-abortion bills. He made headlines in 2017 for assaulting a reporter.
In June 2019, Sludge worked with Candid to explore who funded the groups driving state abortion bans between 2013 and 2017. It focused on 182 funders of 20 organizations (many addressed herein) that were directly involved in the bans through advocacy, bill writing, lobbying and legislative testimony. It found that during this time, donor-advised funds, family foundations and corporate charities gave more than $9.1 million to these groups. NCF was at the top of the list, having given about $2.7 million to groups that directly engaged with recent bans.
“What’s happening here is part of a decades-long strategy by anti-abortion politicians, lobbyists and national organizations that have left increasingly vast areas of our country with few or no abortion providers,” Heather Gatnarek, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, told Sludge. Sludge identified several corporate foundations whose giving programs included donations to anti-abortion groups, though often in the hundreds or thousands. These include Pfizer, which paradoxically manufactures a medical abortion drug, and its parent company PhRMA, which makes contraception. The GE Foundation, Amazon Smile, and the foundations of Motorola and Shell Oil, among others, were also on the list. As we find with abortion-rights philanthropy, we don’t see many corporate philanthropies among the top funders here, likely due to the controversial nature of these issues.
But that doesn’t mean businesses aren’t backing the anti-abortion movement. Earlier in 2019, Judd Legum of Think Progress reported on corporate giving to state legislators involved in supporting abortion bans. He highlighted donations by AT&T, Walmart, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Coca-Cola and Aetna. The gift totals were in the tens of thousands, with the exception of AT&T, which reportedly spent $196,600 across six states.
Then, in August, the research and watchdog group Equity Forward, which focuses on threats to reproductive healthcare, published an extended list of companies that fund lawmakers who oppose abortion, adding Boeing, Comcast, Delta Airlines, General Motors, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Lyft, Mastercard, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Uber and many others to the list. It states they “boast their commitment to gender equality. But each of these companies contributed significant sums of money to support lawmakers who sponsored oppressive anti-abortion legislation.”
Looking at the political spending of some of the big pro- and anti-abortion organizations is another way to gauge their power. Groups backing abortion have outspent anti-abortion ones nearly every year in the last three decades, according to Pacific Standard and FollowTheMoney.org. In 2018, anti-abortion groups put a total of $4.8 million toward independent spending and campaign contributions, while abortion-rights groups spent $50.7 million. Emily’s List and Planned Parenthood drove much of this spending.
However, both Planned Parenthood and SBA List plan to spend more than $40 million on the 2020 campaign cycle, NPR reported in October 2019. SBA List’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, who previously served as chair of President Trump’s Pro-life Coalition, said it will work on the most “ambitious pro-life legislative agenda yet to aggressively challenge, erode, and finally overturn Roe v. Wade.” In January 2020, SBA List announced it has now budgeted $52 million to spend this cycle on canvassing, digital ads and more.
