By: Stephanie Kirchgaessner, The Guardian, December 11, 2019

The chief executive of Obria, an anti-choice and anti-contraception organisation that has been awarded millions of dollars in grants by the Trump administration, once said that Christianity was dying out thanks to contraception and abortion, leading Europeans to be “replaced” by immigrant Muslims.

The reported remarks by Kathleen Eaton Bravo, the founder and chief executive officer of the Obria Group, raise new questions about the Trump administration’s controversial decision to award millions of dollars in health and human services grants to the group, which runs a national network of health centers opposed to abortion and contraception.

Click here to read more about CfA’s investigation of Obria.

Bravo’s remarks, which were published in a 2015 interview with the Catholic World Report, shows how xenophobic fears about immigrants from African and Middle Eastern countries “replacing” white Christian populations have influenced anti-choice campaigners in the US.

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An investigation by the Campaign for Accountability, a not-for-profit watchdog group, found that Obria’s quest to win grant money from HHS was supported by political appointees at the department, including Diane Foley, who is in charge of title X funding. Foley congratulated Bravo in an email after Obria won its 2019 grant, and invited Bravo to have a private call with her to discuss the funding.

HHS did not return a request for comment about Bravo’s remarks.

Alice Huling, CFA’s counsel, told the Guardian that HHS has said that changes to its title X program were designed to diversify its grant applications. But Huling said that in reality, the change has given groups like Obria, which do not provide contraception or abortion-related services, access to federal funds for the first time, possibly opening the “floodgates” for similar organizations to win grants that would otherwise have gone to organizations that do provide such services.

Read the rest of the article here.