As the New York Times first reported, the anti-poverty Catholic Campaign (CCHD) in February told Compañeros Executive Director Nicole Mosher that her group’s annual $30,000 grant was in jeopardy. Mosher told the Colorado Independent that a Catholic Campaign liaison in Pueblo explained the problem was that both Compañeros and gay-rights group One Colorado were affiliated with the wider Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. The coalition, which includes well more than 50 member organizations, has openly supported the rights of gay immigrants and has joined with One Colorado in championing the same-sex civil unions bill making its way through the Colorado legislature.

As the Colorado Independent recently reported, no one from the Catholic Campaign ever asked Compañeros about its stand on gay rights or about its ties to One Colorado. Mosher said the Campaign’s concerns seemed based on sources far removed from the reality of the work being done on the ground by her organization, which mostly concerns education on U.S. laws and shepherding immigrants and their families through courts, hospitals, schools and tax filings.

For Church watchers, the events in Colorado seemed to spotlight the way power is being wielded within the Church by non-clerical Catholic groups armed with internet connections and formed to champion hard-line positions on social issues such as abortion and gay rights.

An evangelical Catholicism

James Salt, executive director of liberal Catholic group Catholics United, told the Independent that the hunt for “100 percent orthodoxy,” as he put it, is altering the Church in the United States.

“There was once the feeling that our faith could move mountains and especially on behalf of the most-marginalized members of society,” he said. “But [Church leaders] have been pushed farther and farther rightward by these well-organized groups with narrow agendas.”

Salt said that the battle over the Catholic Campaign is an outgrowth of the rise of the Christian right in U.S. politics in the 1980s.

“The [Catholic] bishops were once seen as a prophetic voice on behalf of the poor. Now they’re known primarily as a voice on wedge issues. That all seems counter cultural to Catholics, more evangelical, more partisan, more politically motivated than spiritually motivated.”

The Catholic Campaign, founded in the 1960s with a progressive Vatican II-era mission to fight for social justice by attacking root causes of poverty, has been a ripe target for pressure. Conservative critics have accused its leaders of “working in direct contradiction to Church teaching” by awarding grants to organizations that “directly or through coalition membership have promoted abortion, birth control, homosexuality and/or Marxism,” according to a watchdog report brought out last fall by a coalition called Reform CCHD Now.

The Reform CCHD Now coalition was formed in 2009 and is led by Virginia-based anti-abortion groups American Life League and Human Life International, which registered the coalition’s internet domain name.

The coalition also includes smaller groups, such as Colorado Catholics for Personhood, a local chapter of the national movement to challenge Roe v Wade by passing laws around the country that would grant fertilized human eggs full legal rights.

The group is run by Gualberto Garcia Jones, who is also spokesman for the Personhood Colorado ballot initiative campaigns run this year and in 2010.

It’s unclear what role a group like Colorado Catholics for Personhood plays in the mission of Reform CCHD Now. Jones was traveling last week and unavailable to comment for this story.

Affiliation transgressions

Human Life International, founded in 1981, reports a presence in 100 countries around the world. Its activities include lobbying to outlaw abortion in the U.S. and abroad, organizing conferences and trainings and holding sidewalk counseling sessions outside abortion centers.

The main work of the coalition, however, seems to be carried out by the American Life League. The League was founded in 1979 and calls itself the “largest grassroots Catholic pro-life education organization” in the country. In the fall of 2010 and 2011, just before annual fundraising efforts launched for the Catholic Campaign, the League released watchdog reports on the Campaign’s grants. The 2011 report recommended the Campaign pull funding for roughly 54 of its 218 grantees. Compañeros was not included on that list.

Michael Hichborn, spokesman for both the American Life League and the Reform CCHD Now coalition, told the Independent that his groups had “nothing to do with the charges against Compañeros” and that it was “the local [Pueblo] diocese which made its own discoveries and drew its own conclusions” in the matter.

Yet, the American Life League’s watchdogging is clearly having an effect. As is the case with Compañeros, more than 40 of the organizations listed for defunding in the League’s 2011 report were targeted based on associations they maintain with larger coalitions.

Many of the groups made the list, for example, due to ties to the Center for Community Change, which the report authors explain “signed an open letter to President Obama and some members of Congress urging them to continue funding Planned Parenthood, is actively involved in the promotion of homosexuality and equates abortion rights with criminal justice.”

Critics told the Independent that the American Life League research lacks vital perspective and that it trades on guilt by association.

In the eyes of anti-abortion groups, for example, Planned Parenthood is recognized first and foremost as the largest abortion provider in the nation, but for anti-poverty groups, Planned Parenthood is seen primarily as the largest provider of vital health care to poor women coast to coast.

And, in the case of groups tied to the Center for Community Change, it’s unclear what’s more objectionable, a grantee’s association with the Center, or the Center’s association with Planned Parenthood, which in all of the cases listed in the American Life League report, is an association two steps removed from any grantee and one based on a single letter of support.

Salt characterized the American Life League’s research on the Catholic Campaign a lamentable product of the digital age.

“These far right groups can find any minuscule hint of a supposed transgression and use it as a point of attack,” he said.

Mosher said that, in the case of Compañeros, there would be no way to know from an internet search how thin are its ties to One Colorado, how remote are the workings of the organizations in day-to-day operations and how impractical it would be for Compañeros to try to control the membership of either the state’s immigrant rights coalition or of any other such coalition to which it might belong.

Hichborn, however, said that, in the matter of Compañeros, any talk about One Colorado and the role of Reform CCHD Now is a distraction.

In an email he wrote that, based on research he has conducted since the story broke, the problem likely was never One Colorado, it was that Companeros is a “founding member of the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, which is itself actively promoting same-sex marriage, attending gay-pride parades, and promoting homosexuality in general; all of which is in direct conflict with immutable Catholic moral teaching.

“Companeros is so intimately linked with [the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition] that official actions taken by [the coalition] reflect extended actions by Companeros as well. By joining [the coalition] as a “member,” Companeros is participating in its actions.”

‘Open source analysis’

The likelihood that it was the Catholic Campaign which found fault with the Compañeros membership in the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition must be seen as progress for the reform movement.

Hounded by criticism, the Campaign underwent an intense “review and renewal” process in 2010 that ended in its adopting the language of its critics. The Ten Commitments reform program (pdf) that came out of the process aimed at developing “more specific ethical guidance to help the Bishops carry out [the Campaign’s] policy of prohibiting funding to groups which are part of coalitions that act in conflict with fundamental Catholic moral and social teaching.”

What’s more, Hichborn and the Reform coalition members make no apologies for their research methods. Indeed, defending them has been a large part of the coalition’s activities almost from its inception.

Two years ago the coalition launched attacks on John Carr, who oversees the Catholic Campaign as executive director of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development. Citing Carr’s work over the course of years for the Center for Community Change, the coalition alleged that the Conference of Catholic Bishops was engaged in a “systematic pattern of cooperation with evil.”

Carr told the sympathetic Catholic News Service that he stood by the work of the Center to address poverty and that he had no knowledge of any of its alleged “work to promote abortion and homosexuality.” He said that no one from the Reform coalition had contacted him before making the allegations.

Bishops rallied around Carr and denounced the accusations as internet smears.

“You can have one person with a website call you a left-wing radical, and [your] family is asking… ‘What’s going on?’” said Bishop Roger Morrin from Mississippi.

The coalition responded by explaining that it uses an “open source analysis” methodology “promulgated by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” In effect, that means the coalition researchers lean on internet searches but that they look for primary source documents authored by the organizations in question– public relations releases and letters, for example, like the one sent by the Center for Community Change to Washington lawmakers in support of Planned Parenthood.

At the American Life League website, Hichborn defended the criticism of Carr and the Catholic Campaign. He argued that the associations unearthed by coalition researchers, however loose, demonstrate the way the Campaign is compromising the integrity of the Church and its mission.

“As I have repeated since we began our investigation, [Campaign] staff and leadership are either incompetent or they are complicit. Whatever the case may be, there can be no doubt that the [Catholic Campaign] has completely failed its mission by sleeping with the enemy.”

That’s exactly the kind of harsh rhetoric Salt called “tone deaf” within a Catholic culture that reveres the mission taken on by men like Carr and the bishops guiding the Catholic Campaign.

Salt cited recent Pew Research Center data that suggests one third of Americans who were raised Catholic have left the Church. In fact, he believes the rising power of groups like Reform CCHD Now is both a cause and a result of the fact that Catholics raised with the Vatican II ideals are leaving the Church in droves.

“In the 1980s, you had these conservative commentators like George Weigel saying they wanted to turn the Church 180 degrees away from social justice. Well, they’re succeeding by using these divisive tactics, and it just drives people from the Church.”

[ Image: Reconstruction of the nave of the Domkerk in Utrecht via Paulus 2 at Wiki Commons. ]

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The meeting came on the Wednesday of midterm week just days before spring break, so officials said they were encouraged but not surprised by the fact that roughly 150 students turned out. They told the Colorado Independent that young people seemed at least as energized in their support for Obama this year as they were in 2008, when members of the 18-to-29-year-old demographic voted for Obama over Republican rival John McCain by a record-setting two-thirds majority.

“Young voters. They’re the X-factor,” said a Colorado campaign official, shaking his head, raising his eyebrows and leaving his mouth open in a way that meant obviously!

A national staffer told the Independent that the reelection campaign, free from the need to wage a Democratic Party primary fight this year, is seizing on the advantage of time to ramp up outreach to young people and to enlist them early and in greater numbers to take on the kind of vital voter-contact and registration efforts young Obama supporters excelled at in 2008.

Indeed, the Obama event in Boulder was already the ninth of the “Greater Together Student Summits” the campaign has hosted at swing-state campuses since February, part of a campaign initiative launched last October. The summits lean heavily on promotion through online networks and usually feature celebrities in addition to senior campaign staffers and local Obama campaign volunteers.

Although pitched as an interactive discussion of key policy issues, the meeting in Boulder had the feel of a traditional campaign rally mashed up with a corporate motivational seminar.

Staffers, dressed in neat casual attire, sat on high stools and passed a microphone back and forth before an enormous screen bearing Power Point-style slides, tweeted questions from the audience and, to wrap the event, the 17-minute campaign video called “The Road We’ve Traveled” made by Davis Guggenheim, the producer and director behind blockbuster documentaries such as “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for Superman” and “It Might Get Loud.”

The narrative arc of the film appears to have set the pattern for the campaign’s summit presentations.

It begins by listing the crises that met the Obama administration on inauguration day in 2009 and then underlines the series of decisions made by the president to address them. A somber soundtrack thrums as references to disasters from 2009 roll across the screen: the mortgage debacle, the frozen financial markets, the failing Wall Street firms, the skyrocketing national debt, the impending auto-industry collapse and the avalanche of job loss.

Obama Adviser David Axelrod stares into the camera with weary eyes and drooping mustache and describes his state of mind during a post-election briefing on the economy.

“All I was thinking at that moment was Can we get a recount?”

Students at the summit responded to the film’s opening catalog of horrors with a mix of groans and ironic or exasperated laughs.

Obama for America Policy Director James Kvaal argued that young people should not view the 2012 election as a mere retread of 2008. It’s no less pressing, he said, even if it may seem less historic. He highlighted initiatives taken by the administration over the last four years of particular interest to young people: health care reform, middle class tax breaks and expansions in gay rights, tuition assistance and the renewable energy sector.

“This reelection is different from other reelections,” he said. “We’ve done a lot… but the important thing to remember is that we’re not done. If you compare it to the Bush reelection campaign of 2004, for example, at that point, President Bush had essentially carried out what he had set out to do. We were already engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan and he had cut taxes for the wealthy twice. He didn’t do that much in his second term.

“All of the Republican candidates for president have vowed to roll back the progress we’ve made. There truly is a tremendous amount at stake… There is much left to do.”

Several speakers touched on a theme sure to be repeated often before November when they argued that all of the Republican candidates for president were vowing to repeal or defund laws and programs they disliked but that they offered no alternative plans to take the place of those laws and programs.

“Mitt Romney wants to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act,” said OFA National Operation Vote Director Buffy Wicks. “There are 2.5 million Americans in their twenties who now have access to health insurance through their parents’ plans. That includes 44,000 young Coloradans. Romney is running to take away health insurance from 44,000 Coloradans. What is he offering in exchange?”

“Think of the time and energy Republicans have dedicated to getting rid of Planned Parenthood,” she said later in response to a question on where the candidates stand on women’s issues. “This is something that provides the sharpest contrast– the low-cost preventive care, STD screening, well-women visits [provided by Planned Parenthood]… Again, what are the Republicans offering in exchange?”

Summit attendees interviewed by the Colorado Independent after the event rated it mostly successful.

“It could have been more interactive, less of a lecture format and more focused on action. Practical stuff. What do we do now? What are the next steps?” said Rhiannon Riccillo, a CU senior from Pueblo, who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008.

“The message was motivating, though… I guess it’s time to get started again. Since 2010, you can really see the Republican agenda. I mean, close Planned Parenthood? End contraception?”

As the Colorado Independent has recently reported, youth-vote analysts have been parsing statistics from the last two presidential elections and watching turnout so far for this year’s Republican primary, and they are concluding that the GOP seems effectively to be writing off the youth vote.

“Are the [Republican] candidates making an effort to get young people to participate? Are they speaking to youth? I see very little of it,” Abby Kiesa, youth coordinator and researcher at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, told the Colorado Independent.

The Obama campaign is clearly keyed in to the ground game mechanics that researchers at the Pew Foundation and scholars like University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket have explored in depth since 2008. Young people didn’t just vote for Obama, according to the researchers, they were also unusually active in his campaign. Nearly 30 percent of young Obama voters said they attended at least one campaign event that year. Those mobilized supporters mobilized more supporters.

In Colorado and the other battleground states, Pew found that young people were contacted in much greater numbers by the Obama campaign than were contacted by the McCain campaign. Battleground youth voters were also more likely to be contacted than were older battleground voters, which Pew reported was a “significant reversal from past patterns.”

In a few key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, Florida and Indiana, the percentage of young voters contacted by the Obama campaign reached up to 50 percent and 60 percent, doubling and tripling McCain campaign efforts and notching some of Obama’s biggest and/or most significant point spreads on Election Night.

The Obama campaign’s “Greater Together” effort is being launched with the guidance of top staffers and it has been underway for months. It has also carved out a major presence at the reelection website.

The campaign for GOP frontrunner Romney by contrast seems to have no staffers dedicated to the youth vote. There is no youth-voter section listed at the campaign website. And the campaign message for young people, according to Kiesa, is centered almost entirely on paying down the national debt.

Messages left with the Romney campaign were not immediately returned.

[ Image: Screen shot from "The Road We've Traveled" ]

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“Mitt Romney’s declaration that he would ‘get rid of’ Planned Parenthood is yet another dangerous and reckless attempt to score points with the far right at the expense of the health of millions of women,” DeGette said in a release.

“Planned Parenthood provides critical and necessary health services like annual exams, cancer screenings, and family planning for three million women across this country, and in some places their clinics provide the only care for hundreds of miles…. So today it’s clear once again that Mr. Romney’s ideas are too extreme for our nation and the women of America will not stand idly by while he threatens their health care.”

Democrats seized on remarks Romney made during an interview with St. Louis TV station KDSK, mostly reacting to the idea that Romney was seeking to eliminate Planned Parenthood altogether. Yet, it seems clear from context, the candidate was talking about “getting rid of” federal funding for the organization. His language is ambiguous, however, and KDSK teased the story with a suggestive headline: “Mitt Romney: Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.”

Romney was answering a question about which programs he would cut to reduce government spending.

“Of course you get rid of Obamacare, that’s the easy one, but there are others. Planned Parenthood, we’re gonna get rid of that. The subsidy for Amtrak, I would eliminate that. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, both excellent programs, but we can’t afford to borrow money to pay for these things.”

In a call with Colorado reporters today, Obama for America Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter made reference to Romney’s remarks, characterizing them as part of a pattern that exposes Romney as a pandering candidate who is driving moderate voters farther away each day the GOP primary continues.

“He is trailing Obama by 18 percent among women and today he says he wants to get rid of Planned Parenthood,” she said. “Women in Colorado don’t share Romney’s vision of America.”

Last month, Colorado affiliates of the national breast cancer group Komen for the Cure made news for successfully pushing back against efforts by anti-abortion members of the national management team to end Komen funding for Planned Parenthood clinics here.

DeGette lauded the Colorado Komen leaders at the time and referred to those events in her release today.

“In recent weeks women have come together to stand up for Planned Parenthood and the important role it plays in their health and their community,” she said.

[Image: Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, C-Span screenshot ]

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Screenshot of NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan (left) debating Americans United for Life President Charmaine Yoest on PBS NewsHour Feb. 23, 2012.

The national anti-abortion-rights group behind Virginia’s controversial ultrasound bill last week released seven new bills it plans to push through state legislatures this year.

For the seventh year in a row, Americans United for Life, a national law and policy group based in Washington, D.C., will publish a collection of what it calls “trend-setting” state-based legislation aimed at adding as many restrictions as possible to abortion. In the last year, governors across the country have signed 28 of these model bills into law, according to AUL.

The Defending Life book of model laws is due to come out in March, but in the midst of last week’s frenzy over the Virginia legislature’s attempt to mandate invasive ultrasounds for women seeking an abortion, AUL released a preview (PDF) of the new book, which includes legislative proposals that could lend themselves to similar controversy if states choose to adopt them.

“[T]he time is right for building on a foundation of success,” Yoest said in a statement on the new proposals. “Many of these initiatives simultaneously lay the groundwork necessary for the ultimate reversal of Roe v. Wade, while also eliminating taxpayer funding of abortion providers.”

Of the seven proposed laws, two are particularly strategic in their goals. One is designed to read like a women’s health protection bill, but its legislative intent is to ban abortion after 20 weeks’ gestation. The other is a model to eliminate public funding to organizations that provide abortions — additionally it would prohibit public funding to groups that have any ties to organizations like Planned Parenthood.

Some medical and legal experts have expressed concern that laws like those being crafted by AUL’s attorneys allow state governments to overreach in restricting abortion. Further concern is that the reasoning behind such laws is based more on politics and ideology than on medical fact.

‘Women’s Health Defense Act’

A new study published this month in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ medical journal found that childbirth is 14 times more fatal than an induced abortion. The study, authored by two physicians who perform abortions, was a reaction to increasing laws that use the risks of abortion to legislate restrictions. AUL’s new model law — “Women’s Health Defense Act” — is an example of this strategy.

This bill bans abortion after 20 weeks’ gestation. Physicians charged with violating this law would face criminal penalties, including a fine between $10,000 and $100,000 and/or one to 10 years in prison.

The first legislative finding in the bill is a list of 28 different potential risks of abortion, which according to the group, become increasingly dangerous as pregnancy progresses.

From the model law:

Abortion can cause serious physical and psychological (both short- and long-term) complications for women, including but not limited to: uterine perforation, uterine scarring, cervical perforation or other injury, infection, bleeding, hemorrhage, blood clots, failure to actually terminate the pregnancy, incomplete abortion (retained tissue), pelvic inflammatory disease, endometritis, missed ectopic pregnancy, cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest, renal failure, metabolic disorder, shock, embolism, coma, placenta previa in subsequent pregnancies, preterm delivery in subsequent pregnancies, free fluid in the abdomen, organ damage, adverse reactions to anesthesia and other drugs, psychological or emotional complications such as depression, anxiety, sleeping disorders, and death.

AUL also cites a 1987 study by Dr. K.J.S. Anand to support the claim that “substantial and well-documented medical evidence that an unborn child by at least 20 weeks gestation has the capacity to feel pain during an abortion.”

This is the reason most often cited in bills banning abortion after 20 weeks. But this claim is disputed by most of the nation’s large medical communities and is mostly supported by Anand’s study. In the study, which was published by the New England Journal of Medicine, Anand described how “neural pathways for pain” spread to “all cutaneous and mucous surfaces” of an unborn baby by the 20th week of gestation. But he also noted that science did not yet know how a fetus perceives pain at that stage.

In another February Obstetrics & Gynecology article reacting to Elizabeth G. Raymond and David A. Grimes’ pregnancy-abortion study, Dr. Mitchell D. Creinin, a professor and chair in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California–Davis, argues that using the risks of abortion as a reason to restrict or ban abortion implies that the risks of any given procedure should be a reason to restrict or ban the procedure. In short, he accuses legislators of misrepresenting the realities of medicine and science for a political purpose.

“Is the court going to outlaw pregnancy altogether?” Creinin writes, referring to the fact that severe depression is a risk of pregnancy that is often cited as a possible consequence of abortion and thus a reason to ban it. ”A lack of understanding or misrepresentation of medical data are at the root of what allows many laws that limit abortion to come into existence; the time has come for this to stop.”

In the article, Creinin compares abortion to cigarette smoking and argues that if legislation restricting abortion were really only about safety, the government would most assuredly ban the act of smoking a cigarette.

“Raymond and Grimes report 2,856 deaths over 7 years from pregnancy and 64 deaths over 7 years from abortion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 443,000 deaths annually from cigarette smoking,” he writes. “Whereas access to abortion is being restricted more and more by legislation that has nothing to do with the existing safety of the procedure, a greater health risk – smoking – is not being restricted in a similar manner. Community laws that prohibit where someone can smoke are not the same type of restriction that limits provision and access to abortion services.”

In 2010, Nebraska started the trend of banning abortion at 20 weeks based on the notion of fetal pain. In 2011, Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, and Oklahoma followed suit. Though none of these laws has been challenged in court, abortion-rights advocates have frequently argued that these bans at 20 weeks are unconstitutional because they conflict with previous Supreme Court rulings that prohibit states from imposing an undue burden on women seeking an abortion before the fetus is considered viable. Last year when Idaho was considering the law, the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Chuck Winder (R-Boise), received an opinion (PDF) from the Idaho attorney general’s office, which said the ban could be unconstitutional, as reported IdahoReporter.com.

Part of the opinion reads:

The Supreme Court has never squarely addressed the constitutionality of legislation that proposes to ban some non-therapeutic abortions prior to viability on the basis of fetal pain. Nevertheless, there is strong reason to believe that Section 5 is unconstitutional under existing precedent, as set forth below. … It follows that Section 5 may well be deemed to evince a legislative intent not only to erect a substantial obstacle to the right to choose a non-therapeutic abortion of a non-viable fetus upon twenty weeks, but to eliminate the right altogether.

‘Defunding the Abortion Industry’

Unlike AUL’s bill banning abortion after 20 weeks, its model for defunding Planned Parenthood is more overt. But its strategy of trying to sever Planned Parenthood’s ties to other organizations that receive public money, such as the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is less obvious.

The model is called “Defunding the Abortion Industry and Advancing Women’s Health Act of 2012.” This proposed bill would deny state-based family planning grants to organizations that also provide or refer for abortions. In addition, the law would prohibit federal family planning grants from being used to pay the “direct or indirect costs” of abortion procedures, referrals, or counseling.

AUL acknowledges that under federal law, taxpayer money already cannot be used to fund abortion services, but the group argues:

Left unrestricted or unregulated, federal and state funds for family planning services can, in some cases, effectively and indirectly subsidize contractors, individuals, organizations, or entities performing or inducing abortions, referring for abortions, or counseling in favor of abortions through shared administrative costs, overhead, employee salaries, rent, utilities, and various other expenses.

The model law appears to be an attempt to eliminate funding to state affiliates of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the county’s largest network of abortion providers, which each year receives more than $300 million in federal funding to provide low-cost family and planning and sexual health services to underserved communities around the nation.

However, this bill goes beyond defunding abortion providers. Buried in the model law is a provision that attempts to prevent any group that’s in any way “associated” with an organization like Planned Parenthood from receiving public money: “No organization that receives funds authorized or appropriated by the state may use those funds to perform or promote abortions, provide counseling in favor of abortion, or to make referrals for abortions, or may associate with entities that perform, promote, and/or provide counseling or referrals for abortion.”

This is how AUL defines “associate”:

To enter into any written or oral contract or agreement with another contractor, individual, organization, or entity that provides, induces, refers for, or counsels on behalf of abortions; exert any degree of ownership or control over another contractor, individual, organization, or entity that provides, induces, refers for, or counsels on behalf of abortions; or own, direct, or control shares in another contractor, individual, organization, or entity that provides, induces, refers for, or counsels on behalf of abortions.

Ruthann Robson, a professor of law at City University of New York, who is also a blog editor for the Constitutional Law Prof Blog, said that on its face, the law as a whole appears to be constitutionally sound, but that the reference to “written or oral contract or agreement” is a little vague. “Does that mean you can’t say the word [abortion]?” she said.

Robson explained that the 1991 court decision Rust, et al., v. W. Sullivan, Secretary of Health and Human Services, cited extensively throughout AUL’s model legislation, established the principle that it is constitutional for the federal government to prohibit recipients of government funds from advocating, counseling or referring for abortion.

“If the government is giving money, then they can put whatever strings they want on it,” Robson said. “[Organizations] are free not to take the money.”

But another court decision (based on federal cases DKT v. USAID and AOSI v. USAID) established the precedent that states cannot dictate what federally funded organizations can and cannot say. The 2005 policy that sparked the lawsuits dictated that U.S.-based HIV/AIDS-prevention service organizations to denounce prostitution in order to keep receiving federal grants. But federal judges declared that this rule was a violation of free speech.

Americans United for Life did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Overreach’

David J. Garrow, a professor of history and law at the University of Pittsburgh and an oft-quoted abortion scholar said AUL’s model laws are “impressively crafted” but an overreach of government power.

“These laws are, in a technical sense, well written, but whether someone in their right mind should vote for this is another question,” said Garrow, who supports abortion rights. “As we’ve seen so dramatically [last] week in Virginia, it’s a question of overreach.

Both Robson and Garrow told TAI that state lawmakers considering these laws should carefully consider their effects. Garrow said he hopes lawmakers do their own research when reviewing these models.

“Simply the fact that it’s professionally drafted and appropriately decorated doesn’t mean it’s full, fair, and complete,” he said, noting that citations used to support AUL’s legislative findings are selective. As an example, he said that in its bill banning abortions after 20 weeks, AUL referenced the one study that supports the idea of fetal pain without addressing many more studies that don’t.

“Overreach” was also the word of choice for Nancy Keenan, president of the national abortion-rights advocacy group NARAL Pro-Choice America, which led efforts last week to oppose the Virginia ultrasound bill.

“They’ve overreached in Virginia,” Keenan said during a televised debate with AUL’s Charmaine Yoest on PBS NewsHour. “And I think this is a place where a state law is requiring a woman to undergo a procedure she didn’t ask for, nor that her doctor recommended, and that these are politicians that are practicing medicine without a license. … This is not about information, nor is it about consent.”

The debate (similar to another one Keenan and Yoest had last month over Texas’s controversial ultrasound law) was essentially about the necessity of anti-abortion laws that AUL crafts and supports versus the politics of these laws.

Yoest argued that ultrasounds are the “gold standard of medical care prior to an abortion.”

“Look, the chairman of the Americans United For Life’s board is an OB-GYN,” she said. “Our attorneys have been working on this bill, and so I can tell you exactly what it’s all about. Ultrasounds are the gold standard for protecting women’s health. You need to have an ultrasound prior to an abortion in order to determine the gestational age of the baby. You need to know where the baby is located.”

When challenging mandatory ultrasound laws, Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers have often argued that ultrasounds are standard protocol, used before or during the abortion when recommended by the physician, and available if the patient requests it. Where abortion providers and abortion-rights advocates objected to the Virginia bill was that the legislative language mandated a trans-vaginal ultrasound in instances where they might not be required based on medical necessity.

During the NewsHour discussion, Yoest contradicted her own argument that using legislation to require an ultrasound before an abortion was necessary to ensure that a woman receives an ultrasound before an abortion. Responding to host Judy Woodruff’s comment that Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell himself believed the law mandated an invasive procedure, Yoest argued that abortion providers at Planned Parenthood already perform ultrasound scans before abortions.

“So then why do you need the state law?” Keenan asked?

Watch the full exchange:

Watch Va. Proposal Mandating Ultrasound Before Abortion Debated on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

But beyond Virginia’s law, Woodruff wanted to know if AUL’s model legislation generally is part of a coordinated effort to restrict abortion access across America.

“What is the goal of these state-by-state efforts, Charmaine Yoest?” she asked. “Is it to get as close as possible to practically overturn Roe vs. Wade? What would you say is the goal?”

“I think it’s responding to the fact that the majority of the American people say that they’re pro-life,” Yoest said. “And there’s a huge consensus in this country on commonsense regulations on abortion like sonograms. Sonogram laws are – in 22 states have passed because the American people think this is commonsense things that we can all agree on no matter what your opinion on abortion is. Informed consent, parental consent, these are things that the American people do agree on.”

Garrow told TAI that AUL’s legislative strategy is effective because of its subtlety. Together, all of these model laws make abortion increasingly more and more restrictive, leading up to, as AUL’s Charmaine Yoest has admitted, “the ultimate reversal of Roe v. Wade.” But unlike proposed “personhood” laws — which would define life at conception, effectively criminalizing abortion and potentially some forms of birth control and fertility treatments — laws banning late-term abortion and regulating abortion clinics are less controversial and thus more likely to win support by the public and by lawmakers.

Referring to AUL senior counsel Clarke Forsythe and James Bopp, Jr., another prominent anti-abortion attorney, Garrow said, “They are very politically astute and adept at focusing on margins and keeping the super-ultra crazies boxed out.”

“But I’m a little surprised that they would show their hand quite so publicly,” he added, referring to AUL’s public release of its model laws. “I would think they would want to make them seem homegrown rather than farmed out from D.C.”

Banner photo: Flickr Getty Images/Dave Delay

These centers use various methods to attract women facing unplanned pregnancies, such as offering free pregnancy tests, locating next to abortion clinics, advertising for abortion services, and intercepting online searches for abortion on the Web.

But an emerging trend is for states to push women through these centers’ doors as part of new legislation that increases waiting times and mandates pre-abortion ultrasounds, something CPCs increasingly offer.

Last year, South Dakota passed a controversial anti-abortion law requiring women to visit anti-abortion pregnancy centers for counseling before they can receive an abortion. A federal judge blocked the law — which also mandated a 72-hour waiting period –after Planned Parenthood sued the state on the grounds that the law created an unconstitutional burden on a woman’s right to an abortion. On Wednesday, a state Senate committee is scheduled to hear a revised version of the bill, which still requires women to seek counseling at anti-abortion pregnancy centers but demands that the counselors be licensed.

Another anti-abortion law in Texas, which recently went into effect after surviving the majority of legal challenges lodged against it, provides women wanting to have an abortion with a list of state-sanctioned places to obtain a sonogram, a list that includes crisis pregnancy centers.

South Dakota and Texas are just two states where CPCs are slowly gaining more political power, taxpayer funding, and legitimacy from lawmakers. And with the growing movement of state legislatures adopting abortion laws that require women to first undergo an ultrasound, it is likely that these centers will begin to play an even bigger role in a woman’s unplanned pregnancy.

‘Pregnancy Resource Center Month’

In the U.S., there are approximately 4,000 crisis pregnancy centers, the bulk of which are affiliated with one of three CPC networks: Heartbeat International, Care Net, and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates. Each has ties to political organizations that have lobbied for anti-abortion legislation.

A legislative trend sweeping the country is the enactment of resolutions that “honor” crisis pregnancy centers. Last month, the Florida Legislature passed a bill that declared January “Pregnancy Resource Center Month” and commended “the compassionate work of the volunteers and staff at Florida’s pregnancy resource centers.” Ohio’s legislature passed similar legislation last month.

Several states passed pro-CPC resolutions last year, including Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Missouri, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Oklahoma passed a pro-CPC resolution in 2010.

In these resolutions, much of the language was lifted straight from model legislation (PDF) developed by Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion policy group based in Washington, D.C. AUL’s resolution calls for recognizing services these centers have provided to citizens for free – services like baby supplies, referrals for public services and anti-abortion counseling. But a key provision, which has generally made it into the states’ version of these resolutions, is:

That the [Legislature] disapproves of the actions of any national, state, or local groups attempting to prevent pregnancy care centers from effectively serving women and men facing unplanned pregnancies.

This provision subtly refers to efforts at national, state and local levels to regulate crisis pregnancy centers, in response to allegations that these centers sometimes mislead women about what services they offer and provide them with misinformation about abortion, pregnancy, and contraception.

For instance, in Washington state, legislation was introduced last year that would require CPCs to be explicit about what services they do and don’t offer. It would also prohibit these centers from withholding medical records, such as pregnancy test results, from clients. The bill text was partially influenced by a report (PDF) co-authored by women’s rights group Legal Voice and the policy arm of the Northwest Planned Parenthood affiliate. Undercover investigators documented evidence of CPCs withholding medical records. According to the report: “Care Net in Gig Harbor and Tacoma provided volunteers with paperwork stating that it had the right under RCW 70.02.090 to withhold a person’s medical records if the center reasonably believes the information will be used to obtain an abortion. Care Net in Puyallup provided paperwork stating that it would be ‘illegal’ for a patient to use medical records generated by Care Net for the purpose of ‘abortion or abortion-related services.’”

These measures have generally been unsuccessful. Ordinances requiring CPCs to post signage stating that they do not offer abortion services were overturned in Baltimore and New York. And a federal bill that would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to fine organizations that falsely advertise as resources for abortion services has been reintroduced into Congress every year since 2007 with little movement. A similar bill passed in San Francisco last year but is being challenged in federal court.

Another provision in AUL’s pro-CPC resolution model, which is featured in Ohio’s bill, could serve as a portal for crisis pregnancy centers to obtain public money:

That we encourage the Congress of the United States and other federal and state government agencies to grant pregnancy resource centers assistance for medical equipment and abstinence education in a manner that does not compromise the mission or religious integrity of these organizations.

It is a state version of a federal bill regularly reintroduced by U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), which would authorize the Department of Health and Human Services to allocate money for ultrasound equipment to tax-exempt organizations that provide free medical services to pregnant women – a classification that applies to most CPCs.

An (ultra)sound strategy

With more states mandating that women obtain sonograms sometimes 24 hours before a scheduled abortion, going to a crisis pregnancy center that will do the ultrasound for free is an attractive option, especially for women on a tight budget.

Speaking at a pro-life conference hosted by the D.C.-based Family Research Council last month, Karen Snuffer, the executive director of a group of Virginia-based pregnancy resource centers affiliated with Care Net, said her centers serve more than 17,000 women and their families annually and “provide $1.1 million in free goods and services, including 2,900 ultrasounds, free of charge, by medical professionals.”

“Like centers all around the country, Care Net PRCs represent hope to these women and their families, and we do that because we have access to many resources within the community,” Snuffer said.

An FRC study (PDF) of 1,969 crisis pregnancy centers in the U.S., found that in 2010, about 230,000 ultrasounds were performed – at no or very little charge to the client – at 1,000 centers, for an estimated total cost savings of $57.5 million. (To get this statistic, FRC estimated each ultrasound at $250.)

Founded in 1993, the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates was the first CPC network to promote ultrasounds in crisis pregnancy centers; ultrasounds were seen as a new, persuasive tool to talk women out of abortions. Additionally, centers that offered ultrasound services could now be considered medical centers, giving CPCs more legitimacy. Then, in 2004, Focus on the Family started the Option Ultrasound Program, which – in tandem with a medical consultant from NIFLA – provides funding grants to pregnancy centers to obtain ultrasound machines and convert their centers to medical-style clinics.

Based in Colorado Springs and founded by James C. Dobson in 1977, Focus on the Family has grown into a $100 million tax-exempt nonprofit. In its fiscal year ending September 2010 (PDF), the group reported giving about $900,000 to about 50 CPCs for either ultrasound machines or ultrasound training. Option Ultrasound’s purpose is to convert “pregnancy resource centers” into “pregnancy medical clinics.” Medical services at these centers are usually confined to “limited obstetrical ultrasound services” and over-the-counter pregnancy tests.

Focus defines a pregnancy medical clinic as:

a medical clinic that operates under the supervision of a licensed physician and nurse manager. A PMC [pregnancy medical clinic] offers pregnancy tests, limited obstetrical ultrasound services and peer counseling to women facing an unintended pregnancy. As well, some may offer STI testing/treatment and/or prenatal care. A PMC may also offer additional support services or refer women to helpful community programs, but the focus is on providing medical services for abortion-risk women.

By contrast, a regular pregnancy resource center, according to Focus:

offers pregnancy tests, peer counseling and other supportive services to women who are facing an unintended pregnancy, which may include childbirth education and parenting classes, adoption counseling and support, post-abortion support, and practical support such as maternity/baby clothing, diapers, and furniture.

Focus on the Family demands that grant recipients undergo ultrasound training, operate the ultrasounds only under the direction of a licensed physician, and comply with the national standards defined by the American Institute of Ultrasound Medicine. Focus puts up 80 percent of the costs of the ultrasound machine (between $21,000 and $33,000) and sonography training (between $13,000 and $17,000).

As of Jan. 31, 2012, Focus reports funding 396 grants for ultrasound machines and 140 for sonography training. The group asserts that since the program began in 2004, “the estimated number of babies saved is more than 120,000 precious lives!”

“These mothers will likely never forget the day they first saw the image of their baby, kicking her feet and waving her arms on the ultrasound monitor,” reads an article on the Option Ultrasound website titled, “How Option Ultrasound Helps At-Risk Women.” “They will recall the day that their hearts were changed, with gratitude they can hardly put into words, and they will be forever thankful that they had the opportunity to choose life, all because someone cared enough to give them the option of seeing their baby on an ultrasound.”

The efficacy of sonograms as abortion-deterrents has been challenged by new research.

Political connections

Heartbeat International, previously named Alternatives to Abortion, was the first of the crisis pregnancy center networks to arrive on the scene, in 1971. It was followed by Care Net, which was founded in 1975 as the Christian Action Council, a Washington, D.C.-based evangelical organization that at the time functioned as a lobbying organization, according to a 2009 report (PDF) on pregnancy resource centers produced by the Family Resource Council.

On its website, Care Net refers to its approach to abortion as “a refreshingly apolitical and practical approach to reducing abortions in North America.” But the organization’s affiliations and its founding as a lobbying group suggest a more political identity. Care Net’s “board of references,” for example, includes Beverly LaHaye, who chairs the national lobby group Concerned Women for America and is now part of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s “Faith Leader Dream Team.”

Heartbeat International’s board of directors includes Charles A. Donovan, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which is one of the most active anti-abortion lobbying groups in the country. Donovan, who previously worked for Ronald Reagan’s administration and the Family Research Council, now works the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Another political player on Heartbeat’s board is Derek A. McCoy, president of the Maryland Family Council, a Focus on the Family affiliate that lobbies for anti-abortion legislation in Maryland. McCoy is also on the board of directors for the anti-abortion media group Life Always, which provoked a firestorm last year for erecting racially charged billboards in overwhelmingly black communities, with messages like, “The most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb” and, next to image of Barack Obama’s face, “Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted.”

NIFLA was initially founded, according to FRC, as a legal support system for pregnancy centers to defend against the types of laws that seek to regulate CPCs. On NIFLA’s National Advisory Council sit James D. Bopp, Jr., attorney at Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom, and Liberty Counsel Chairman Mathew Staver, both of whom defend anti-abortion laws that are challenged in court. NIFLA’s advisory council also includes representatives from Americans United for Life and Concerned Women for America and Virginia state Rep. Robert Marshall (R-Manassas), who sponsored Virginia’s controversial personhood bill that passed the state House last week.

Taxpayer subsidies

Back in January, Karen Snuffer boasted that the Virginia CPCs she oversees take in “no government funding whatsoever.” But many CPCs – which are generally tax-exempt 501(c)3 groups – do receive state taxpayer money.

Several state health departments allocate money for CPCs as part of programs that promote alternatives to abortion. For instance, Texas’ seven-year-old “Alternatives to Abortion” program got a $300,000 bump last year, for a total of $8.3 million, after the state legislature cut family-planning funding from about $112 million to $38 million and reduced funding for the social-service programs. Florida’s legislature recently voted to maintain $2 million in funding for the state’s CPC network, for the seventh year in a row, after making deep cuts to community health services.

During the George W. Bush administration, CPCs benefited handsomely from federal grant funding for abstinence-only education programs. The Obama administration cut most of those abstinence-only programs, but CPCs can still receive federal funding through the National Fatherhood Initiative, which each year gives $25,000 “capacity building” grants to 25 community groups, as Sarah Poster has reported. Award recipients in 2011 included Care Net Pregnancy Resource Center in Rapid City, S.D., which is one of the CPCs approved by the state to disuade women under South Dakota’s new law. This Care Net affiliate is also one of the CPCs defending the South Dakota law in court. Other subsidized CPCs include Sav-A-Life, Inc., in Birmingham, Ala., and Women’s Hope Medical Clinic in Auburn, Ala.

In the past few years, a series of investigative reports by journalists, congressional committees (PDF), and abortion-rights groups like NARAL Pro-Choice America and the National Abortion Federation (PDF) have raised serious questions about crisis pregnancy centers.

The directors of most of the major CPC networks would not respond to repeated requests for comment from The American Independent about their organizations. A spokesperson for Heartbeat International told TAI that all the information we needed to know was on its website.

At FRC’s pro-life conference last month, Rebecca Lewis, who worked for a Care Net-affiliated crisis pregnancy center in Alexandria, Va., for nine years (as a volunteer for five years and a director for four), told TAI that she appreciates that people are digging into CPCs — to keep them honest. But she said she didn’t see the sort of unethical tactics at her center that CPCs are often accused of.

“I didn’t see that where I was,” Lewis said, when asked whether her center engaged in misinformation or misrepresentation.

Lewis said her center stood for the idea that if a woman has a choice to have an abortion, she should also have a choice not to have one. She said her volunteers were taught not be judgmental of the women coming in. And the women who chose not to have an abortion were given services and material support and tracked for at least a year, Lewis said.

“We do not condemn a person who has an abortion,” she said. “I never made them feel small.”

“I was stunned to find out that Komen announced it had decided to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, which is the largest provider of women’s health care in the country,” DeGette said. “I was pleased when they reversed that decision. But I am concerned about how Komen is making its decisions.”

DeGette explained that she has had concerns about Komen decision-making for a while and that its perilous up-and-down journey through some of the murkier reaches of the abortion-politics swamp this week demonstrated confusion at the heart of the organization.

“As the attacks on Planned Parenthood [in Congress] revved up last year, Komen was touting the fact that it didn’t support stem cell research, even though they know stem cell research shows great potential to treat breast cancer.”

DeGette elaborated that thought in a release sent out minutes ago.

I have grave concerns that last fall, seemingly during the same time they decided to change [the funding policy to cut off Planned Parenthood], Komen also enacted a new policy of refusing to fund the pursuit of lifesaving ethical embryonic stem cell research (ESC), despite a history of recognizing its great potential. Given the massive resources of their organization and the great potential of ESC [to bolster] breast cancer treatment and [the search for] cures, it is deeply disturbing that Komen has turned its back on this research because of the same political pressures that led them to the original Planned Parenthood decision.

A politically-motivated grant process has no place in the pursuit of life-saving screenings, treatments, and research.

DeGette has long been an advocate for stem cell research and re-introduced her Stem Cell Research Advancement Act last year. The act passed the House and Senate years ago but fell victim to a George W. Bush veto. The legislation would establish a more permanent legal framework in which scientists could conduct stem cell research without being subject to the start-and-stop political pressures that shape life on Capitol Hill.

DeGette said she was “very glad” that Colorado’s Komen affiliates “stood up for science-based care” when they asked to be excluded from — and when Aspen Komen rejected altogether– the ban on funding Planned Parenthood and did so based on the statistically proven vital work Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains has done over the years to detect and head-off breast cancer among thousands of Coloradans with severely limited health care options.

DeGette said the Komen story this week was a wake-up call.

“I can’t tell you, we had such an outcry. My website and Facebook accounts were just full of messages,” she said.

“My daughter is 22 and she said this was the first time in her life she donated to Planned Parenthood. People need to be assured this major organization [Komen] is making science-based decisions.

DeGette said it was clear this week’s funding flap was part of a larger messaging battle.

“You know I sit on the Stearns committee doing the investigation into Planned Parenthood,” DeGette said, referring to the Planned Parenthood audit called by Florida anti-abortion Rep. Cliff Stearns and based on a mostly debunked Americans United for Life report on alleged Planned Parenthood misdeeds and corruption. The Stearns investigation was the reason Komen initially gave for throwing Planned Parenthood off its funding rolls.

“Listen, some Republicans in Congress have had a vendetta against Planned Parenthood for years, but 97 percent of what that organization does is well-women visits. For many of those women all over the country these are the only type of annual checkups they receive. There is no public tax money being spent on abortion and abortion is a small part of Planned Parenthood’s mission.

“I have been saying for years that these lawmakers don’t just oppose abortion. They oppose birth control and disease prevention for women. It’s the 21st century and we’re arguing about birth control?

“A lot of Americans woke up this week and said, ‘wow, the GOP agenda really is extreme. It’s about opposing contraception and mammography.’

“We want Komen to get back to science-based funding decisions”

DeGette is the head of the congressional Pro-Choice Caucus and has been a lead critic of the attacks on Planned Parenthood launched on Capitol Hill this year. Together with California Rep. Henry Waxman, she denounced the Stearns investigation as “unwarranted” and as a legalistic cover to “harass and shut down an organization simply because Republicans disagree with the work that it does.”

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“Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) does important work to educate women about breast cancer and provide screening exams that are critical to early detection,” he wrote in a release. “I applaud Komen’s Denver affiliate for pushing back on their national organization and insisting that they be allowed to continue providing grants to PPRM, which help ensure access to affordable, life-saving services for Colorado women on the Front Range.

“Women’s health should never be used as a political football, and I hope the national organization of Susan G. Komen reverses its decision to end its partnership with Planned Parenthood elsewhere in our state and across the country.”

Staffers earlier said Udall was crafting a response to the Komen news with Colorado Senator Michael Bennet. It’s unclear if Udall and Bennet at this point still plan to pen a letter to Komen together. Colorado’s senators’ staffers told the Colorado Independent the two wanted to directly address news coming out of Colorado, where the two major women’s health organizations, Komen and Planned Parenthood, seemed to be coming to their own agreement.

A group of roughly two dozen U.S. Senators signed onto a letter to the national Komen foundation decrying the decision to pull back crucial support in the battle against breast cancer for what seemed to be clearly partisan political reasons.

Komen’s rationale for the move has shifted in the hours since it made its decision public.

Known for its marketing savvy– this is the group that hosts enormously popular “races for the cure” around the country and that launched the omnipresent pink-ribbon campaign– Komen first said the decision was not tied to this year’s turbo-charged anti-Planned Parenthood abortion politics but was simply the results of new rules governing grantee eligibility, specifically new rules that precluded organizations under investigation from receiving Komen cash.

The congressional investigation that moved Planned Parenthood off Komen funding lists, however, was very much a product of the anti-Planned Parenthood politics that shaped this year’s House Republican agenda. It was launched by anti-abortion Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns and based on a specious and mostly debunked report by anti-abortion group Americans United for Life.

The Komen policy changes seemed transparently motivated by the House investigation, especially in light of the fact that leadership at Komen has recently included strong anti-abortion, anti-Planned Parenthood figures such as Senior Vice President Karen Handel and Komen Advocacy Alliance board member Jane Abraham.

As the Washington Post reported, however, Komen CEO Nancy Brinker just hours ago walked back reference to the Stearns investigation, saying the new funding rules “had very little to do with the ongoing congressional probe” and were based on the fact that not all Planned Parenthood clinics provide mammograms.

“We have decided not to fund, wherever possible, pass-through grants. We were giving them money, they were sending women out for mammograms. What we would like to have are clinics where we can directly fund mammograms.”

Northern Colorado Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains clinics will continue to draw funds, as will clinics in Texas and Southern California, she said, because “they are the only provider” of breast health services in the areas they serve.

Denver Komen gave Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains $125,000 last year, or 4.3 percent of the nearly $3 million Denver Komen spent fighting breast cancer here, but Komen got big bang for those bucks. Planned Parenthood detected nearly 20 percent of all of the cases of breast cancer discovered through Denver Komen spending.

Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains serves patients whose health-care options are severely limited. Roughly 84 percent of PPRM patients have no health insurance and 62 percent live at or below the federal poverty line.

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The letter comes on the heels of news that roughly two dozen of Udall and Bennet’s colleagues in the Senate have signed on to a letter strongly urging Komen, the high-profile marketing firm behind the breast-cancer pink-ribbon campaign, to reverse the decision it announced this week to cease funding Planned Parenthood breast cancer screening and education efforts.

The Senate letter has reportedly drawn support from a wide spectrum of Democrats, including moderates like Montana’s John Tester. It decried the Komen decision as the latest front in the partisan political battle launched against Planned Parenthood this year that has driven moves inside and outside of government to strip funds from the reproductive healthcare and abortion provider.

“It would be tragic if any woman– let alone thousands of women– lost access to these potentially life-saving screenings because of a politically motivated attack,” the letter reads.

The support the letter has garnered reflects the increasingly high-level pushback Komen has received this week. News outlets have reported the intense back-and-forth that erupted in the wake of the announcement as it unfolded and as it played out on the internet, where supporters and detractors have waged furious social media messaging battles.

Denver Komen is one of select foundation affiliates across the nation that have asked for a waiver from the controversial decision to cut Planned Parenthood funds and has made the case in its public statements for its continuing to fund Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM), pointing to the vital role the embattled organization plays in fighting breast cancer here.

PPRM provides distinctly cost-effective service for Komen. Its Front Range clinics were responsible for 19 percent of all the breast cancer detected through Denver Komen funding last year and it received only $125,000 or 4.3 percent of the $3 million Denver Komen awarded to nonprofits spread across the region, from Douglas County just south of Denver north to the Wyoming border.

Komen also notes that the state budget this year was slashed for the Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening Program provided by the Women’s Wellness Connection Program, leaving nearly 5,500 women in Colorado without access to services and opening the door to nearly 90 cases of cancer. In such an environment, Komen suggested, cutting off Planned Parenthood funding would be irresponsible.

There is no word yet on whether members of the U.S. House will weigh in formally on the Komen funding question. Calls to members of Colorado’s delegation were not immediately returned.

Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette is the head of the Pro-Choice Caucus and has been a lead critic of the often specious attacks on Planned Parenthood launched on Capitol Hill this year.

Indeed, although Komen has said its decision to pull funding from Planned Parenthood was not motivated by abortion politics, it cited as the cause a controversial congressional investigation launched by Florida Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns into twenty years of Planned Parenthood finances. Komen said that its new grantee criteria preclude funding any organizations under investigation.

Yet the Stearns audit of Planned Parenthood was spurred mainly by anti-abortion activists working off of a largely discredited Americans United for Life report brimming with lurid accusations that, for example, Planned Parenthood abetted human trafficking and child prostitution operations.

DeGette, together with California Rep. Henry Waxman, denounced the congressional investigation as “unwarranted” and as a legalistic cover to “harass and shut down an organization simply because Republicans disagree with the work that it does.”

“We are aware of no predicate that would justify this sweeping and invasive request to Planned Parenthood,” Waxman and DeGette wrote in a letter to Stearns last September as the investigation was being proposed. “It would be an abuse of the oversight process if you are now using the Committee’s investigative powers to harass Planned Parenthood again. Your fervent ideological opposition to Planned Parenthood does not justify launching this intrusive investigation.”

In a Thursday call with reporters, Komen CEO Nancy Brinker walked back reference to the Stearns investigation. The Washington Post reports Brinker said the decision not to continue funding Planned Parenthood “had very little to do with the ongoing congressional probe” but was based primarily on the fact that some Planned Parenthood clinics do not provide mammograms.

“We have decided not to fund, wherever possible, pass-through grants. We were giving them money, they were sending women out for mammograms. What we would like to have are clinics where we can directly fund mammograms.”

Northern Colorado Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains clinics will continue to draw funds, as will clinics in Texas and Southern California, Binker said, because “they are the only provider” of breast health services in the areas they serve.

News outlets and blogs have pointed to the fact that national Komen leadership has been tilted recently by a growing number of hardcore pro-life executives and board members, such as Senior Vice President Karen Handel, who came on last April after running as an anti-Planned Parenthood candidate for governor in Georgia’s Republican primary, and prominent Komen Advocacy Alliance board member Jane Abraham, who is also general chairman of the anti-abortion lobbying organization Susan B. Anthony List.

Leadership at Susan B. Anthony includes former arch-social conservative Colorado Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave. The group has played a key role in the effort to “defund” Planned Parenthood nationwide. This year it kept a running state-by-state scorecard tracking the roughly $60,399,000 in federal and state funding stripped from Planned Parenthood affiliates in eight states.

“Our efforts during the federal budget fight gave Planned Parenthood a black eye,” the organization boasted.

The Atlantic reported today that sources inside Komen are beginning to confirm that the new policy cited to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood– whether ultimately tied to on-site mammogram services, congressional investigations or something else– was adopted specifically to cut off Planned Parenthood and that that effort was spearheaded by anti-abortion personnel led by Handel.

Ties among Komen executives and Congressional Republicans are sure to be scrutinized in the coming days.

Komen board member Jane Abraham’s husband, Spencer Abraham, for example, may draw looks. He was Energy Secretary under George W. Bush and last year joined Republicans in the House, including House Energy Committee member and Planned Parenthood investigator Cliff Stearns, in denouncing the government program that guaranteed loans to Solyndra solar panel company. Abraham’s law firm recently teamed with Florida law firm Roetzel & Andress to form DC-based lobby shop Abraham & Roetzel, which has offices in Columbus, Ohio and Tallahassee, Florida.

Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains told the Colorado Independent this week that the Denver Komen affiliate has been a “strong advocate” for the work Planned Parenthood does in Colorado.

More than 80 percent of PPRM patients have no health insurance and 62 percent live at or below the federal poverty line.

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The measure would have conferred personhood on fertilized eggs and would have outlawed abortion in all cases. The measure was widely seen as likely to pass right up until the end.

Planned Parenthood spokesperson Tait Sye released this statement:

“The defeat of the so-called ‘personhood’ amendment in Mississippi is a major victory for women’s health.

“Mississippi voters rejected the so-called ‘personhood’ amendment because they understood it is government gone too far, and would have allowed government to have control over personal decisions that should be left up to a woman, her family, her doctor and her faith, including keeping a woman with a life-threatening pregnancy from getting the care she needs, and criminalizing everything from abortion to common forms of birth control such as the pill and the IUD.

“We congratulate the Mississippians for Healthy Families Coalition, which ran an amazing campaign to educate voters about the dangerous impact of the amendment.

“Mississippians from all walks of life, medical professionals, clergy, parents, and young women and men, spoke out in opposition to the amendment.

“The more voters learned about the many dangerous and extreme consequences of the initiative, the more they opposed it. Polling showed that in the final days leading up to the vote, when voters were given information about the so-called “personhood” amendment, support for it dropped below 50 percent.

“In what Gallup ranks as the most conservative state in the nation, voters of all political persuasions rejected the measure.

“Mississippi is now the second state to reject ‘personhood.’ Colorado defeated the so-called ‘personhood’ amendment by wide margins in 2008 and 2010.”

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The Planned Parenthood logo (Pic via advanceusa.org)

On Wednesday, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards sent out an email imploring supporters to pay careful attention to the so-called “Personhood” movement, which has gained considerable support in Mississippi. “This ballot initiative is about more than just one state,” writes Richards. “Anti-choice activists hope that a win in Mississippi will lead to a national movement.”

Mississippians will decide whether or not to include “every human being from the moment of fertilization” in its definition of “person” in just three short weeks. Though “Personhood” proponents argue that the state’s Amendment 26 is simply an effort to ban abortions, critics say it would also ban birth control, and create hurdles to in vitro fertilization.

In her email to Planned Parenthood supporters, Richards includes a copy of a letter from Felicia Brown-Williams, outreach director at Mississippians for Healthy Families, who wrote that initiative 26 would “cause terrible suffering across the state.”

From the letter:

If we lose, even in cases of incest and rape, even if a woman’s life is in danger, she will be forced to carry a pregnancy because all abortions will be banned.

If we lose, women may be banned from using the birth control pill, IUDS, and other contraception.

If we lose, life-saving treatments for pregnant women facing conditions like cancer may be blocked.

Personhood USA has made similar efforts across the country. In Ohio, the group’s affiliate recently collected enough signatures to begin an official petition drive. The group now must gain 380,000 valid voter signatures to gain placement on a future ballot.

The “Personhood” movement didn’t gain much steam in Florida last year, due to lack of signatures. But Personhood Florida head Bryan Longworth has vowed to ramp up efforts to collect signatures for placement on Florida’s 2012 ballot.