Missouri funding an anti-abortion group that works in other states

On a recent Saturday outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois, a woman wearing a reflective orange vest and body camera flagged down a car pulling into the facility.

“Hi, can I talk to you a second?” the woman, Sheri King, said to the driver, reaching for a pamphlet in a pocket of her vest with information about alternatives to abortion and birth control. “I’m Sheri.”

A Planned Parenthood volunteer bolted toward the car, urging the driver to keep moving.

“They’re not with the clinic,” the volunteer yelled.

Instead, King and a partner were with Coalition Life, a nonprofit anti-abortion group that is based in Missouri and raises most of its money there. Almost every minute the abortion clinic in Illinois is open, Coalition Life representatives are out front, aiming to intercept people seeking abortions and persuade them to change their minds.

Since abortion became illegal in Missouri two years ago, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Coalition Life has fine-tuned its strategy. Because there are no abortion clinics in Missouri, Coalition Life operates largely outside clinics in other states where the procedure is still legal. The group’s website says it operates at one location in Kansas and five in Illinois including in Fairview Heights, about 13 miles east of St. Louis.

On its website, Coalition Life has called itself “America’s largest professional sidewalk counseling organization.” The group’s revenue has surged in recent years, thanks in part to a lucrative Missouri tax credit for pregnancy resource centers, of which it is one. Following a massive expansion of the tax credit program by the state legislature in 2019, donors to Coalition Life and similar nonprofits can receive tax credits worth 70% of their donation amount, significantly boosting the groups’ fundraising efforts across Missouri.

The tax credit has led to a growing financial cost to Missouri taxpayers, with over $11.2 million in tax credits authorized in the past year alone. Before the change, the tax credit had been capped at $3.5 million a year. When combined with the $8.6 million the state directly allocates to pregnancy centers, Missouri has become a leader in per capita investment in anti-abortion centers.

While Missouri does not contribute the most overall to anti-abortion groups — Texas, with its much larger population, leads the nation with a $140 million outlay over two years — it stands out for the investment relative to its size. Still, it pales in comparison with this year’s nearly $52 billion budget.

The money raised through tax credits is intended to support services for clients facing unwanted or unplanned pregnancies. Those services include pregnancy testing, counseling, emotional and material support and other related services.

Coalition Life has adapted to the post-Roe landscape by paying people to work outside abortion clinics in other states. The group claims that it refers many of the women it convinces not to have abortions to its pregnancy center in Missouri, just outside St. Louis. There, it provides ultrasounds and counseling and continues to see mothers until their babies are born — sometimes longer.

Because this center is more expensive to operate, and most clients are Missouri residents, the group said most of the money raised in Missouri is spent within the state. There was no independent way to confirm the claim.

Fighting abortion in Missouri’s border states is not how some lawmakers said they envisioned the subsidies for pregnancy centers would be used. Vic Allred, a Republican former House member from the Kansas City area who voted for the tax credit expansion, said he never anticipated Missouri tax dollars going to fight abortion in other states.

Allred said the state should exercise some oversight over how the money is spent. The tax credit, he said, was intended to be “a pat on the back for not getting an abortion, that you’ll have this support, you’ll have these people helping you, you’ll have these supplies, you’ll ease that burden on the new mother.” He said it was not meant to help fund “a political organization.”

Under the program, for every $1,000 in donations to one of dozens of state-approved anti-abortion nonprofits, a state taxpayer’s bill drops by $700. Donors can reduce their out-of-pocket costs even more by deducting the remaining $300 from their income when they file state and federal taxes.

At a fundraiser at the St. Louis airport two years ago, Brian Westbrook, Coalition Life’s founder and executive director, explained how donors could use the tax credit to make much larger gifts to support the group’s work in states where abortion is legal, according to a recording of the event obtained by ProPublica.

“A gift of $1,000 tonight could cost you only $141,” he said. Then he aimed higher, asking that donors consider a donation of more than $71,000 so they can take the maximum tax credit of $50,000.

Missouri does not disclose the recipients of its pregnancy resource tax credits or the amounts donated to individual nonprofits. Westbrook said in an interview that the tax credits have been important to his group’s fundraising efforts. Coalition Life had $800,000 in revenue in 2019, when the legislature voted to expand the tax credit; by 2022, that amount had more than doubled, to $1.7 million.

At the fundraiser, Westbrook told donors that Coalition Life expected its annual budget to grow in three years to more than $8 million.

Over the past two years, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska and North Dakota have introduced tax credits for donations to pregnancy centers. Legislators in a handful of other states have considered similar programs.

Groups that raise money using Missouri’s tax credit must certify they help people struggling with unplanned or unwanted pregnancies; the state law does not specify that the work must be done within Missouri. A state spokesperson did not respond when asked if approaching people outside abortion clinics in other states qualified for participation in the program.

The law also does not appear to prohibit groups that participate in the tax credit program from using donations as part of a broader campaign against abortion. Coalition Life placed radio ads urging residents to “think twice” before signing a petition for a statewide vote to amend the Missouri Constitution to restore some abortion rights, claiming it would permit late-term and partial-birth abortions.

The effort nonetheless qualified for the ballot and goes before voters in November.

Melissa Barreca, a spokesperson for Coalition Life, said the ads were “an effort to educate the public and encourage them to learn, read and investigate these issues for themselves” and were consistent with the group’s mission.

After Missouri’s abortion ban took effect, Planned Parenthood began to refer patients to its Fairview Heights location, which opened in 2019. Westbrook said at the fundraiser that God called his group to shift its focus to Illinois. “That abortion facility is run by the exactly the same people who run the St. Louis — or, former St. Louis — abortion facility,” Westbrook told donors. Coalition Life then opened an office next door.

The organization also deploys paid workers outside clinics in the Chicago area, southern Illinois and Kansas. Westbrook has said he wants the group to expand into other states where abortion is legal; he and his wife and their seven children recently completed a 20-day tour of the East Coast.

Ingrid Burnett, a Democratic state legislator from Kansas City, voted against the tax credit expansion in 2019. She said the program was presented as providing support to mothers forced to carry babies to term who may need counseling as well as material aid to help them bring a child into the world.

“Seems to me that we’re crossing a line here, when we’re using this to send people across state lines to interfere with women who have made this decision who may or may not be from Missouri,” she said.

Abortion supporters said, too, that it was troubling that Missouri subsidizes anti-abortion groups while the state’s maternal mortality rate has been rising and the safety net, particularly in rural areas, is stretched thin.

“I can think of a million ways that they could spend funds to support Missourians, particularly women and families, and not one dollar would be going to this tax credit,” said Emily Wales, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which serves Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and western Missouri.

Barreca bristled at how Wales characterized Coalition Life’s presence outside abortion clinics.

“They are actually out there offering services to women,” she said in an email. “They are doing a job. They are not protesters. They are not picketers. Would the abortion providers prefer that women have no other options?”