BY SUSAN TEBBEN
A new Ohio bill would take aim at facilities not regulated by the state but receive millions in state funding to promote “pregnancy and parenting.”
Democratic state Reps. Anita Somani, D-Dublin, and Michele Grim, D-Toledo, brought House Bill 565 to the chamber’s Finance Committee on Tuesday, in hopes “guaranteed standards and a certain quality of care is met for every person who enters a pregnancy and parenting center in our state,” according to Grim.
“The goal of this bill is to ensure that crisis pregnancy centers are using state funds to provide medical care, proper assistance to expectant and new mothers, and medically accurate information,” Somani told the committee.
Crisis pregnancy centers, also called “pregnancy resource centers” by supporters, are typically religiously affiliated, and have been criticized for misrepresenting services provided or the level of medical professionals available.
Somani cited a 2023 study of central Ohio centers that found “gross inadequacies of the services provided by these centers and how wrong the priorities of these centers are when it comes to using the public funds they receive,” according to the study.
At the time when the Columbus City Council approved a 2022 ordinance authorizing the study, in partnership with Pro-Choice Ohio (now called Abortion Forward), Ohio Right to Life’s executive director, Peter Range said individuals who work at the centers are “some of the most kind, caring, competent and loving individuals that you could encounter.”
ORL’s director of communications, Elizabeth Whitmarsh, said at the time that the study would “put vulnerable women at risk and strip them of the resources they need on a day-to-day basis.”
Somani cited the study’s finding that one pregnancy center in central Ohio had spent as low as 3.1% of their budget on “participant education and support,” compared with 67% on staff salaries and benefits.
The study, a follow-up to a 2013 analysis of the centers, came after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and as the state re-instituted a six-week abortion ban that had been held up in court since 2019.
Since then, the six-week ban has yet again been tied up in litigation, and with the passage of Issue 1 in November 2023, abortion rights are now a part of the Ohio Constitution, along with reproductive medicine like miscarriage treatment and fertility care.
Also since then, Ohio’s Pregnancy and Parenting Program, a part of state law since 2013, has continued to fund services that “promote childbirth, parenting and alternatives to abortion,” entities “whose primary purpose is to promote childbirth, rather than abortion,” and organizations who are “not involved in or associated with any abortion activities, including providing abortion counseling or referrals to abortion clinics, performing abortion-related medical procedures or engaging in pro-abortion advertising.”
The program allocates state monies from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, and Gov. Mike DeWine has utilized his power of executive order several times over the years to put TANF funds into the Pregnancy and Parenting Program.
The last state budget boosted funding to the program to $14 million in total between 2023 and 2025. That was up from a total of $6 million in the two-year term of the previous budget.
“I think it’s really important that they are using the funds more for the services they claim to provide than for the staff overhead,” Grim said.
H.B. 565 would require centers to provide at least four of six service categories provided in in the language of the bill. Categories include resource distribution; counseling “on all options available to individuals, such as counseling and referrals related to abortion, adoption or the parenting of the baby;” postpartum care recovery and parenting classes; health care “through licensed professionals, including contraceptives and reproductive health care;” sexual education; and “any other support services, programs or related outreach.”
Somani said regulating facilities in this way “guarantees that patients at crisis pregnancy centers have access to the medical care and parenting assistance that they are promised by these facilities.”
The bill will have a hard time of it, with a GOP supermajority that approved the increase in Pregnancy and Parenting Program funding in the last budget, and a large contingent of pro-life legislators among them.
One Republican legislator is even attempting to further stifle funding for abortion providers and resources, with a bill that could take local government funds away from municipalities that provide for or support those services.
A spokesperson for DeWine did not respond to a request for comment on the Democrats’ bill.
