Florida blatantly mixes church and state in ‘pregnancy crisis centers’

In response to everything the Right hates –Democrats, the LGBTQ community, diversity, gun control advocates, feminists and reproductive rights –an anti-woke beer company kicked off 2024 with “The Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America” calendar.

It’s a MAGA version of Playboy’s Girls of the Southeastern Conference crossed with a bevy of Bond Girls.

There’s a woman in a short skirt and apron posing in a kitchen decorated with a crucifix; there’s a tough-looking tight-trousered broad holding two rifles; and, on the cover, a string bikini-clad Riley Gaines, the former University of Kentucky swimmer who in the 2022 NCAA championships tied for 5^th place in the 200 meter freestyle with trans athlete Lia Thomas and hasn’t stopped whining about it since.

Another “real woman,” Sara Gonzales, pictured setting alight a copy of The New York Times, evangelizes against abortion.

If any of these affluent, well-connected women actually wanted or needed an abortion, they’d have no trouble getting one.

They’ll never end up at one of those “Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” dubious organizations which, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “represent themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics providing care for pregnant people but actually aim to dissuade people from accessing certain types of reproductive health care, including abortion care and even contraceptive options.”

Planned Parenthood says CPCs are “run by anti-abortion activists who have a shady, harmful agenda: to scare, shame, or pressure you out of getting an abortion, and to tell lies about abortion, birth control, and sexual health.”

CPCs which attract vulnerable, often poor, women, “don’t provide abortion or offer a full range of health care, and they won’t give you honest facts about sexual health and your pregnancy options — their goal is to spread misinformation and propaganda,” Planned Parenthood states.

Nevertheless, your Florida tax dollars support them.

$25 million 

An investigation by the Florida Center for Government Accountability (full disclosure: I sit on the board of FLCGA but am not currently involved in its journalism) revealed how CPCs use ultrasounds to guilt women into continuing a pregnancy, promising support, and using religion to pressure them into rejecting abortion, no matter what the health or economic consequences might be.

Last year, the Legislature appropriated $25 million for the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, a nonprofit that administers “support services” for the state Department of Health, including “testing,” “counseling,” “education,” “training” and other alleged help for pregnant women.

FLCGA’s inquiries show that what Florida women get from state-supported CPCs is a double dose of right-wing Jesus.

Take the Pregnancy Help and Information Center in Tallahassee: it’s run by a former missionary named Patti Tidwell who says she won’t hire anyone who doesn’t “have a relationship with the Lord and love the Lord.”

PHIC’s website is slick and soothing, promising a “caring environment and a professional staff that respects you and your body.”

It even has as abortion page, though the information provided is not exactly even-handed. There’s a picture of a sad-looking young woman and descriptions of both medical and surgical abortions, mentioning “heavy bleeding” multiple times.

The list of references include a link to “abortion reversal,” a controversial procedure most doctors call “medically unsound,” citations from the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and warnings about how sad, guilty, depressed, and anxious you might feel after getting an abortion.

Many CPCs are far less subtle. The Trident, FLCGA’s news site, reports the Q-Anon types running South Lake Pregnancy and Care Center in Clermont claim COVID vaccines cause birth defects, part of some unexplained “new Genocide,” and flatly state that abortion is “murder.”

Women can get free diapers, but only if they attend religious classes and get “Biblical counseling.”

FLCGA reporters spoke to a college student who said she was pregnant, with no insurance, and scared to death. She’d found her way to CPC Grace House in Deland where staff bullied her to give birth to the baby, prayed over her, and told her she could have baby products for free if she came back for more “counseling.”

The visit left her traumatized.

Digging through state records, The Trident discovered the state will reimburse CPCs up to $150 for the so-called counseling.

An ungodly grift

That’s your money.

Your money was also went to what was the most lavishly funded CPC in Florida–until it abruptly closed down.

Mary’s Pregnancy Resource Center in Fort Lauderdale received close to a million dollars from the state in 2021 and 2022.

MPRC was founded in 2014 by Yohanka Reyes and her husband, dedicated to promoting religion and convincing pregnant women to have the baby, even if they were raped.

Reyes said she was raped by her stepfather and gave birth to a boy at the age of 15.

She said she was building “God’s Kingdom.”

Turns out, she and her husband had also been building what looks like an ungodly grift.

FLCGA discovered MPRC operated illicitly for six years, not bothering to renew the nonprofit license required by the state, failing to file tax forms, and refusing to pay its employees.

Despite multiple liens and major IRS issues, Reyes is now living large in New York, breeding and showing pedigree St. Bernards.

The Florida Pregnancy Care Network Board, charged with overseeing CPCs, is packed with zealots who are on the same religious page as the people running them.

According to a Trident story, one board member named Amber Butler has said, “abortion and homosexuality are some of the many ways people fail to meet God’s standard.”

Others embrace Birtherism, election denial, and fetal personhood.

Jim Kallinger, a political consultant whose clients have included Roy Moore, the former Alabama chief justice with a penchant for teenaged girls, is a former chair of FPCN and now lobbies for them.

He doesn’t pretend to separate church and state. He told The Trident everyone at FPCN is pro-life.

Asked about state money supporting religious activity, Kallinger insisted FPCN does not pay for religious activities at the CPCs: “They have medical offices where they see the women and they conduct medical procedures. Those are the areas where they get reimbursement with funds from the state. The spiritual discussions are taking place in completely different rooms. They keep it very separate.”

If this sounds like nonsense to you, well, it probably is —and possibly unconstitutional.

Florida Democratic Chair Nikki Fried told The Trident “to be pushing religious ideology to have it intertwined with government policy in a country that is diverse in its religious freedom is a slap in the face.”

Misogyny is at the heart of these attempts to regulate women’s bodies: the right wing is determined to control female sexuality and, at the same time, punish women for it.

It’s disguised as faith and dressed up in Biblical language, but the result is an attack on our rights.

Maybe these self-proclaimed Christians genuinely believe women should suffer eternally for Eve’s transgression.

The MAGA Right doesn’t like women breaking out of the good old strictures of wife-and-motherhood. Refusing to continue an unwanted pregnancy is an affront to what the anti-choice movement sees as divine will.

The so-called “Real Women of America” pictured on the “Conservative Dads” calendar, the hot chicks who populate male MAGA fantasies, have nothing in common with the terrified pregnant 16-year-old who knows having a baby will destroy her dreams of college.

They will never be the pregnant hotel maid who just can’t afford another kid or the woman with no medical insurance who learns that carrying her fetus to term could kill her.

Doesn’t matter if the fetus isn’t viable; doesn’t matter if the woman was raped; doesn’t matter if her health might be wrecked.

God wants you to have that baby: Shut up, push, and pray.