Cars pass the Women’s Care Center of Omaha on 38th and Dodge streets. The Women’s Care Center of Omaha, a crisis pregnancy center, opened its prominent midtown Omaha location in 2023.
Chris Bowling, Flatwater Free Press
The State of Nebraska has spent nearly $5 million in the past three years, money earmarked for people in poverty, on a program partly meant to deter people from getting abortions.
The Nebraska Crisis Pregnancy Program, established in 2021, funds a statewide network of centers to help people care for babies by “promoting childbirth, parenting and alternatives to termination of pregnancy.”
The state supports the program even as its spending on welfare cases — a primary use of the federal anti-poverty grant — dropped 24% in the past decade, data shows.
State officials said the program has helped 9,000 people in need, providing pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, counseling and food.
“These centers provide important cost-free services for pregnant women, many with limited financial means,” said Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Jeff Powell.
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The Nebraska Parent Care Network, an organization picked by the state to disperse money to the crisis pregnancy centers, has said it sees the program’s goal as encouraging “childbirth instead of abortion as the natural outcome of a pregnancy.”
The crisis pregnancy program has a longstanding champion: State Auditor Mike Foley. As lieutenant governor, Foley helped create the program. Emails from a public records request show that Foley, while state auditor, scheduled meetings, rewrote grant requests, advised spending and closely monitored progress.
A Nebraska watchdog group and state lawmaker questioned Foley’s deep involvement. Foley said this is one of the hundreds of state programs he monitors daily, albeit one he supports.
“I want every woman in a difficult pregnancy situation to be aware that they are not alone and that crisis pregnancy centers can provide real assistance in their time of need,” he wrote in an email to Flatwater Free Press.
‘No agenda’
The Women’s Care Center of Omaha’s pink facade sticks out from the aging apartments and strip malls in midtown. Inside, its silent waiting room is a refuge from five lanes of traffic speeding by the corner of 38th and Dodge streets outside.
A counselor recently ushered a reporter into a side room and explained how they assist expecting mothers. When women don’t want to continue pregnancies, employees talk through the situation, the counselor said.
A woman in red scrubs pulled the counselor from the room. The counselor returned with a business card for the center’s outreach coordinator, who didn’t return phone calls.
The Flatwater Free Press attempted to contact all 15 funding recipients — 12 crisis pregnancy centers, a food pantry with two locations and a homeless shelter. One crisis pregnancy center and the shelter responded.
“We just don’t comment to the press,” said Dennis Waggoner, the director of finance and operations at Essential Pregnancy Services in northwest Omaha.
State Auditor Mike Foley
Courtesy photo
In 2006, Foley, then a state senator, was the first to propose funding crisis pregnancy centers with federal poverty funds, he said. The program ran successfully until it was “quietly halted” in 2015, he said.
While lieutenant governor, Foley relaunched an “expanded and more comprehensive version” of the program at the direction of then-Gov. Pete Ricketts, Foley said.
The funding has been a “blessing” for Open Door Mission, said CEO Candace Gregory, allowing the Omaha homeless shelter to buy diapers, formula and educational materials. The topic of abortion has never been part of the funding, she said.
Crisis pregnancy centers
The State of Nebraska has pumped money into crisis pregnancy centers after cutting state funding for non-abortion services at Planned Parenthood and similar organizations.
In 2019, then-Gov. Ricketts announced Nebraska’s Planned Parenthoods would no longer receive federal money to help poor Nebraskans access resources like birth control or testing for sexually transmitted diseases.
Soon after that announcement, the state lost control of that funding when the federal government awarded it to a nonprofit, Nebraska Family Planning. That group now distributes the $2 million grant to 33 clinics around the state, including Planned Parenthood. Per federal law, the money can’t provide abortions. But Nebraskans can discuss all pregnancy options with a medical professional, said Mariel Harding, the group’s reproductive and sexual health care clinical educator.
“It’s about making sure that people who access services are getting the care that they need and deserve and that they can trust it,” she said.
Anne Rohling, executive director of Bethlehem House, also said abortion was not discussed with the grant, which has been “instrumental” in helping the shelter house vulnerable women.
“We’re obviously pro life,” she said. “We’re really blessed that these women, even though they have had struggles, that they’ve chosen to give birth.”
But opponents of the program say crisis pregnancy centers’ opposition to abortion overshadows the support they provide.
An Associated Press investigation found that, nationally, 13 states have funded crisis pregnancy centers with $495 million of taxpayer money. A recent ProPublica and CBS investigation found a $140 million program in Texas has “few safeguards and is riddled with waste.” The Nebraska Parent Care Network has close ties to the Texas program, it said in its application.
Funding crisis pregnancy centers seems an ill-advised way to combat poverty, said Diane Amdor, an attorney in Nebraska Appleseed’s economic justice program.
“They have a very targeted, and in my mind, manipulative operating value of trying to convince people not to seek out one particular type of health care that may be an option to them,” she said. “And I think that they do that in a coercive way.”
‘Love and support’
In its application, the Nebraska Parent Care Network hypothesized about a woman driving to an abortion clinic but then seeing a “brightly decorated” crisis pregnancy center nearby — one much like the pink Omaha Women’s Center building at 38th and Dodge.
“If she followed her instinct she would enter a wonderfully warm and inviting environment where she would immediately be welcomed and showered with love and support,” the application reads.
A colorful advertisement for Essential Pregnancy Services, a crisis pregnancy center, stands in front of the cracking signage for Planned Parenthood in northwest Omaha. Crisis pregnancy centers often open near clinics that provide abortions to deter or confuse women seeking the procedure, experts say.
Chris Bowling, Flatwater Free Press
Christopher Jay, Nebraska Parent Care Network’s executive director, declined to answer questions.
Currently only two Nebraska clinics provide elective abortions — Planned Parenthood in Omaha and Clinics for Abortion & Reproductive Excellence in Bellevue. Next door to each sits a crisis pregnancy center.
Centers also pay to appear above the clinics in online searches for “Omaha pregnancy services.” More than $300,000 of crisis pregnancy program funds went to marketing, including Google and social media ads.
The centers’ websites can be misleading, according to an ACLU of Nebraska analysis, which showed many contained inaccurate abortion information, said researcher Scout Richters.
The clothes, car seats and diapers that crisis pregnancy centers provide are “incredible,” said Dr. Mary Kinyoun, an OBGYN at Nebraska Medicine.
Dr. Mary Kinyoun, an OBGYN at Nebraska Medicine.
COURTESY PHOTO
But she worries that women who go there may not get proper medical care. About 2% of pregnancies become ectopic. Catching potentially deadly complications is tough, even for hospitals’ highly trained staff, she said.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says such centers delay access to legitimate care, spread misinformation and target vulnerable people.
“I see harm coming out of these places,” Kinyoun said of Nebraska funding crisis pregnancy centers, “and so I have concerns.”
Recently the state added $1.5 million in state funding to the program. A new tax credit for donations to these centers could also cost the state $1.5 million by 2027.
‘Raises serious questions’
Foley has spent ample time focused on the Nebraska Crisis Pregnancy Program’s success, even after being elected as Nebraska’s top watchdog of public spending.
In emails, he weighed in on the federal government questioning whether Nebraska’s program met spending requirements for the anti-poverty grant.
“If the (federal government) threatens a ‘claw-back’, such funds would presumably come from unspent TANF dollars of which we have plenty,” he wrote in a March 2023 email.
Gavin Geis, Common Cause
Dave Bundy
In July 2023, Foley grew concerned one contractor was trying to “hog more than its fair share.” He recommended a review and adjustment.
Foley’s involvement doesn’t break state conflict of interest laws, said Gavin Geis, executive director of watchdog group Common Cause Nebraska. But the level of his commitment to a single program “raises serious questions about whether he is using taxpayer funds, which pay his salary, appropriately,” Geis said.
Foley said his role with the Nebraska Crisis Pregnancy Program doesn’t differ from help his office provides hundreds of state programs. The program is a small fraction of the $5 billion in annual federal funding the state receives, he said.
“I simply want the taxpayer’s hard-earned money to be respected and spent properly and efficiently,” he wrote.
Sen. Danielle Conrad, a Democrat from Lincoln, said Foley is one of the state’s best-ever auditors, but the emails raise questions.
Conrad
“To have the watchdog of state government taking a pet project under his wing, that is a bit strange,” she said, maybe limiting “his ability to be impartial in addressing any potential waste, fraud and abuse in those programs.”
The crisis pregnancy program hasn’t gotten enough attention, said Joanna Murray, executive director of Nebraska Family Planning, which funds a network of medical clinics providing all-options pregnancy counseling.
After Nebraska passed a 12-week abortion ban, the window became tighter to get information to people with unplanned pregnancies. Funding crisis pregnancy centers makes it harder to ensure accurate information, she said.
“I wonder,” she said, “how many people recognize what their tax dollars are supporting.”
The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.
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