Today, Campaign for Accountability (CfA), a nonprofit watchdog group focused on public accountability, released 289 internal documents obtained through records requests that illustrate a pattern of public program maladministration by the anti-abortion group Real Alternatives.
The letter details the ways RA has failed to fulfill its duty to Pennsylvania families to provide adequate pregnancy and parenting services, while simultaneously inappropriately skimming money intended for service providers, and misappropriating public funding earmarked for certain operational expenses.
“Today the Supreme Court appropriately applied its prior precedent guaranteeing the right to access abortion care,” said Alice Huling, Counsel at Campaign for Accountability.
A top healthcare official, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs Dr. Diane Foley, repeatedly communicated with abortion opponents to promote so-called natural family planning methods over hormonal or contraceptive birth control.
CfA has identified three anti-choice groups: Abortion Pill Rescue, American Pregnancy Association, and Obria Medical Clinics among those currently marketing these treatments on their websites.
"Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, seems to be blocked from relief funds thanks to measures snuck in by Republicans."
“Anti-abortion ideologues are fighting the development of a vaccine created by scientists using donated fetal tissue, even if it could save hundreds of thousands of lives,” said Alice Huling, Counsel at Campaign for Accountability.
On February 27, 2020, CfA filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, seeking documents responsive to two FOIA requests regarding the anti-choice Obria Group and its affiliate Obria Medical Clinics (collectively “Obria”) concerning their administration of funds they received through the Title X family planning program.
"Alice Huling, a lawyer for the Campaign for Accountability, a public interest watchdog based in the US, said the rule change which the US Department of Health and Human Services initially introduced in March last year was 'staggering'."
On February 24, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling upholding the Trump Administration’s policy barring federally funded family planning centers from referring women for abortions.