The Trump Administration Is Giving Family Planning Funds to a Network of Anti-Abortion Clinics

[babylonsister]

The Trump Administration Is Giving Family Planning Funds to a Network of Anti-Abortion Clinics
The Obria clinics refuse to provide contraception and are determined to make America chaste again.
Stephanie MencimerJanuary/February 2020 Issue


When I walked into the Obria clinic in Whittier, California, one evening in July, a woman in a modest floral-­print dress organizing bundles of diapers in a back room greeted me hopefully. She thought I’d come for a class. Instead, I asked if I had come to the right place for birth control. Furrowing her brow, she walked around a couch and through a cozy waiting room full of baby toys to the front desk. “What sort of services were you looking for?” she inquired. I asked if they dispensed the morning-after pill, the emergency contraception often called “Plan B.” She told me curtly, “We don’t provide that or refer for any birth control here.”

I wasn’t surprised. For most of its existence, this clinic has been known as the Whittier Pregnancy Care Clinic, a religious ministry that offers free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds in the hopes of dissuading women facing an unplanned pregnancy from having an abortion. The clinic provides lots of things: free diapers and baby supplies, and post-abortion Bible-based counseling. What the clinic has never provided is birth control.

When the Whittier clinic was strictly saving babies for the Lord, its refusal to dispense even a single condom was a private religious matter in the eyes of its funders. But today, the clinic is part of Obria, a Southern California–based chain of Christian pregnancy centers that in March won a $5.1 million Title X grant to provide contraception and family planning services to low-income women over three years. Created in 1970, Title X is the only federal program solely devoted to providing family planning services across the country. Congress created the program to fulfill President Richard Nixon’s promise that “no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.” It serves 4 million low-income people nationwide annually on a budget of about $286 million and is estimated to prevent more than 800,000 unintended pregnancies every year.

Historically, federal regulations required that any organization receiving Title X funding “provide a broad range of acceptable and effective medically approved family planning methods.” But as I discovered during my visit to Whittier and other Obria clinics last summer, the organization’s clinics refuse to provide contraception. Nor do they refer patients to other providers for birth control.

Obria’s founder is opposed to all FDA-­approved forms of birth control and has privately reassured anti-abortion donors that Obria will never dispense contraception, even as she has aggressively sought federal funding that requires exactly those services. “We’re an abstinence-only organ­ization. It always works,” Kathleen Eaton Bravo told the Catholic World Report in 2011. “And for those single women who have had sex before marriage, we encourage them to embrace a second virginity.”

more...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/the-trump-administration-is-giving-family-planning-funds-to-a-network-of-anti-abortion-clinics-obria/

[Newest Reality]

1. Going for the evangelical vote, huh?

Theocracy ala Fascism, anyone.

That lie about "it works" has no foundation in study after study. Sometimes I wonder if the projected demographics about the decline of evangelicals and Republicans in general is an incentive here, at least by the more pragmatic manipulators who support this kind of misinformation. Perhaps breeding more of them is an aspect of this lame, nonsensical approach. Of course, I include the invasive control of woman's bodies and lives in that mix as another major factor.

Of course, most of us have known these facts for decades now, oh, but let's fund lies and dis-empower women, huh? Oh, and WE are paying for this now? May I say, fuck that?:

Abstinence-Only Education Is Ineffective And Unethical, Report Argues

Abstaining from sexual activity is a surefire way to prevent pregnancy and avoid sexually transmitted diseases. But programs advocating abstinence often fail to prevent young people from having sex, researchers write in the September issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Such programs, sometimes referred to as "abstinence only until marriage" programs, typically advocate monogamous, heterosexual marriage as the only appropriate context for sexual intercourse and as the only certain way to avoid unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

That's "not just unrealistic, but it leaves our young people without the information and skills that they need," said Laura Lindberg, a coauthor of the report and a research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights. "We fail our young people when we don't provide them with complete and medically accurate information."

The analysis confirms previous public health findings that abstinence-only education programs don't succeed in reducing rates of teen pregnancies or STDs. Moreover, public health data indicate that such programs "have little demonstrated efficacy in helping adolescents to delay intercourse," the authors write.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/23/545289168/abstinence-education-is-ineffective-and-unethical-report-argues