An Anti-Choice Group Pledged It Would ‘Never’ Provide Contraception as It Pursued Title X Funds
By: Dennis Carter, Rewire.News, May 14, 2019
An organization operating anti-choice clinics chased family planning funds from the Trump administration by pledging to provide a “broad range” of contraceptive services—while telling its supporters a different story.
The California-based Obria Group recently received $1.7 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in Title X money that is supposed to support family planning services. The group said in a separate 2019 funding application for Texas that the group’s partner clinics would provide a “’broad range of family planning methods’ including several contraception options,” according to a report released Monday by the Campaign for Accountability, a watchdog group. While Obria’s application for the Texas grant was rejected, the group was awarded Title X funding for California—a grant of $1.7 million in fiscal year 2019, with the possibility to be renewed for two more years for a total of $5.1 million.
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“Obria appears to be talking out of both sides of its mouth,” Alice Huling, counsel for the Campaign for Accountability, said in a statement. “We know that Obria committed to HHS, in at least one Title X application, that it would provide access to several forms of birth control. Yet Obria has also assured its anti-contraception supporters and religious allies that it will never provide or refer for birth control. Both of these assertions cannot be true.”
The Campaign for Accountability’s report, “Trolling For Title X Funds,” details Obria Group’s rise as an anti-choice clinic network, applying for and receiving state and federal funds along the way. Obria’s network of anti-choice health clinics, or crisis pregnancy centers, has been helped by donations from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, at least one congressional earmark, and now the Trump administration’s war against family planning programs that follow medical science instead of anti-abortion and anti-contraception propaganda.