Late last month, Donald Trump's administration released a plan to reassess how more than $200 million worth of family planning funds is dispersed, through a federal program known as Title X. The Department of Health and Human Services announced a preference for "just say no" programs, which push women to refrain from sex as the primary way to avoid pregnancy, rather than comprehensive reproductive health programs.
It's unlikely, however, that the president really believes abstinence-centered education is better than clinically proven contraception methods for women's health care. Instead there's good reason to believe that this move, as is typical in the Trump administration, is political corruption and cronyism. It might better be understood as a strategy to take money away from effective health care organizations like Planned Parenthood and give it to conservative Christian organizations that have no ability or interest in providing real health care. In other words, this money is payback to the religious right for supporting a thrice-married, porn star-dallying, pussy-grabbing adulterer.
For evidence of how this works, look to Texas, which has redirected millions of dollars away from proven family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood to a shady anti-abortion organization called the Heidi Group. That outfit is so incompetent, as Salon reported in August, that Texas Health and Human Services was forced to claw back millions of dollars from a previous grant because the Heidi Group failed to fulfill its contract to connect low-income women in the state with clinics or private physicians who could provide reproductive health care services.
But even though the group failed so spectacularly and its head, Carol Everett, admitted that "it's not as easy as it looks because we are not Planned Parenthood," the state of Texas has quietly renewed the Heidi Group's contracts, awarding it a total of $13.4 million — only days after taking back $4 million for failure to meet the terms of the first contract. The Texas Freedom Network and Campaign for Accountability, which discovered the contract renewal through an open records request, is now calling for an investigation into exactly why a group that the state knows cannot or will not provide adequate health care to vulnerable low-income women is still getting grant renewals.
“Women’s health care is clearly not a priority," Dan Quinn, communications director at the Texas Freedom Network, told Salon. "The priority here seems to be paying off political supporters with public tax dollars, even if they’re completely incompetent."
"There is no way [the Heidi Group] could actually offer the services that the program should be offering," said Blake Rocap, a lawyer for NARAL Pro-Choice Texas. Nonetheless, the state "just gave them the same amount of money for year two, knowing that they aren’t providing the services and can’t do the work."
The Heidi Group has received two kinds of grants, both created by the state, in what was supposed to be an effort to replace women's health care services after Texas cut Planned Parenthood off from government funding. First, there were direct grants to cover services directly provided to women; second, there were grants for advertising and outreach, so that women who had lost their health care through known providers like Planned Parenthood could figure out where the alternatives were. The failure to provide direct health care led to the $4 million returned to the state, as the Heidi Group couldn't bill for services not rendered. But, as Katie O'Connor of the Campaign for Accountability, which has filed criminal complaints against the Heidi Group, argued, there are further questions about the money the group kept for the vaguer advertising and outreach purposes.
“From my perspective, it’s just been a black box," she said. "I don’t think we have any real notion of where that money has gone.”
In the Campaign for Accountability's complaint to the district attorney of Travis County (which includes Austin), it argues that the Heidi Group "failed to provide deliverables including a 1-800 number to help women find healthcare, improvements to subcontractors’ websites, and improved access to contraceptives," and that at least six of the 20 health care providers the group was supposed to be able to direct women toward did not meet state standards.
The Texas health commission "blamed the contract renewal on a technical glitch of a new contracting system," Politico Pro reported. Both Rocap and Quinn are skeptical of this excuse. Rocap pointed out that the contracts giving the Heidi Group $13.4 million were signed after the group's grants were canceled the first time around. Quinn noted that more than six months had elapsed, giving the state plenty of time to revise the terms of the contract.
There's ample reason to believe that the Heidi Group's inability to connect women with reproductive health services is about something more than incompetence. Before the group positioned itself as a reproductive health care provider, it primarily ran a series of crisis pregnancy centers, deliberately misleading pseudo-clinics that try to shame women out of having abortions, rather than helping them prevent pregnancy in the first place. Heidi Group head Carol Everett herself has a long public record suggesting that she not only knows nothing about reproductive health care but is actively hostile to women who choose to have non-reproductive sex.
Media Matters has detailed Everett's long history of conspiracy theories and weird beliefs, all revolving around the idea that sexually active women are dirty perverts, and those who provide health care for them are sinister villains. She has falsely claimed that emergency contraception is "destructive to a woman’s reproductive system," that Planned Parenthood "encourages sex with animals" and that abortion clinics sometimes perform the procedure "on women who were not pregnant." She has also argued that abortion clinics dump fetal remains into drinking water supplies, putting the public at risk of HIV infection, both parts of which are wildly untrue.
Everett has also blamed Planned Parenthood and the birth control pill for permitting people to have "sex with multiple partners," which, she argues, is "almost like rape," because it "breaks down all those natural barriers that we’re supposed to have."
Texas Health and Human Services did not respond to Salon's requests for comment. The agency's spokeswoman, Carrie Williams, told Politico, "If a contractor isn't performing well or meeting its targets, we'll adjust the funding, just as we've done before."
Which sounds nice on paper, but when the money is sitting in an account earmarked for the lady who thinks birth control leads to bestiality, that means it's not going to other organizations that might be capable of, or at least interested in, delivering real reproductive health services to real women. Even if Everett is ultimately blocked from receiving the full $13.4 million grant the Heidi Group was awarded, she is still preventing women from accessing services she believes empower unnatural and perverted behavior.
But even if Heidi Group fails yet again to get reimbursements for direct services, as seems likely, it will probably retain access to the funds meant for poorly defined advertising and outreach goals. Which is another illustration of why it's reasonable to fear the Trump administration's redefinition of Title X funding and its goals, especially when the HHS official in charge of distributing those funds, Valerie Huber, used to run an "abstinence-only" grift herself, which took money that was supposed to go toward sex education and used it to bore teenagers with a "just say no" message that is useless to the 95 percent of them who will have sex before marriage.
“When Texas shifted funding from Planned Parenthood health centers to anti-abortion counseling centers like the Heidi Group, the results were disastrous -- 45,000 women lost care," Dana Singiser, vice president of public policy at Planned Parenthood, said in a statement. "This type of public health crisis is exactly what the Trump-Pence administration is trying to impose on women across the country now.”
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