(VitalNews.org) – States within the country that have banned or restricted abortions have been pouring millions of dollars into anti-abortion counseling. States have spent almost five hundred million dollars in taxpayer funding on counseling following the overturn of Roe v Wade.
Equity Forward, a nonprofit that focuses on issues like reproductive rights has looked at the budget for twenty three states. Within these states the study found that they have spent more than one billion dollars on counseling and support since the nineties. However, a little bit less than half of that money was spent in just the last two years.
Florida passed the six-week abortion ban and sent twenty five million dollars to crisis pregnancy centers. Tennessee put twenty million dollars into theirs, which is up from the two-hundred and eighty thousand dollars they spent the year before.
Texas has spent the most out of all these states as it accounts for almost half of the spending over the last three decades. Equity Forward Executive Director Ashley Underwood has criticized Texas for spending so much funding on these centers over evidence based programs.
Said Underwood, “At least a billion dollars that could have gone to improve maternal health and provide direct support to parents and families was instead poured into the coffers of organizations that face little to no oversight and fail to show a positive impact.”
A separate report showed that anti-abortion counseling centers are receiving hundreds of millions of federal dollars There has been a lot of controversy as many wonder if using federal dollars for these centers is wise.
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