Source: News & Observer
Historically, the Republican-controlled NC state legislature has included millions for fake abortion clinics in our state budgets, and after months of delays, the newly passed state budget for 2023-24 is no different. Nearly $26 million in funding is headed to a variety of religious organizations, including direct grants to specific churches as well as even more funding for fake abortion clinics often called “crisis pregnancy centers”.
According to the News & Observer, many of the churches that received funding from the new budget are Christian groups with conservative ideologies. Jennifer Copeland, executive director of the North Carolina Council of Churches questioned why groups like hers that favor progressive ideologies, did not receive funding.
“How did these particular organizations and churches and schools get selected out of all of the potential organizations, churches and schools in North Carolina to receive this funding?” she said. “… Even before that, I have a hard time with taxpayer dollars supporting particular religious agendas.”
The budget includes language saying that “directed grants to nonprofit organizations are for nonsectarian, nonreligious purposes only.” Interestingly, only Christian organizations are set to receive taxpayer dollars from our budget; there were no Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist organizations listed.
The organization receiving the most funding of all the religious organizations included in the budget is the Carolina Pregnancy Care Foundation, which is an umbrella organization that oversees crisis pregnancy centers across the state; they received $12.5 million in the budget. Leaders of this organization claim that they are careful to separate state funds from the centers’ religious purchases, however, they’ve lied in the past.
Another crisis pregnancy center network, Texas-based Human Coalition, got $3 million in this year’s budget, an increase in funding from previous years. The Human Coalition got a lot of attention in 2022 after a New York Times investigation revealed the group deliberately mimicked the logos and websites of real clinics in order to trick women who were considering abortion into going to one of the Human Coalition’s clinics instead, where those women were often lied to or misled about their options regarding ending their pregnancies.
